SAR2EO: A High-resolution Image Translation Framework with Denoising Enhancement

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) to electro-optical (EO) image translation is a fundamental task in remote sensing that can enrich the dataset by fusing information from different sources. Recently, many methods have been proposed to tackle this task, but they are still difficult to complete the conversion from low-resolution images to high-resolution images. Thus, we propose a framework, SAR2EO, aiming at addressing this challenge. Firstly, to generate high-quality EO images, we adopt the coarse-to-fine generator, multi-scale discriminators, and improved adversarial loss in the pix2pixHD model to increase the synthesis quality. Secondly, we introduce a denoising module to remove the noise in SAR images, which helps to suppress the noise while preserving the structural information of the images. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we conduct experiments on the dataset of the Multi-modal Aerial View Imagery Challenge (MAVIC), which consists of large-scale SAR and EO image pairs. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework, and we win the first place in the MAVIC held in CVPR PBVS 2023.

Robust Generalization against Photon-Limited Corruptions via Worst-Case Sharpness Minimization

Robust generalization aims to tackle the most challenging data distributions which are rare in the training set and contain severe noises, i.e., photon-limited corruptions. Common solutions such as distributionally robust optimization (DRO) focus on the worst-case empirical risk to ensure low training error on the uncommon noisy distributions. However, due to the over-parameterized model being optimized on scarce worst-case data, DRO fails to produce a smooth loss landscape, thus struggling on generalizing well to the test set. Therefore, instead of focusing on the worst-case risk minimization, we propose SharpDRO by penalizing the sharpness of the worst-case distribution, which measures the loss changes around the neighbor of learning parameters. Through worst-case sharpness minimization, the proposed method successfully produces a flat loss curve on the corrupted distributions, thus achieving robust generalization. Moreover, by considering whether the distribution annotation is available, we apply SharpDRO to two problem settings and design a worst-case selection process for robust generalization. Theoretically, we show that SharpDRO has a great convergence guarantee. Experimentally, we simulate photon-limited corruptions using CIFAR10/100 and ImageNet30 datasets and show that SharpDRO exhibits a strong generalization ability against severe corruptions and exceeds well-known baseline methods with large performance gains.

Local Region Perception and Relationship Learning Combined with Feature Fusion for Facial Action Unit Detection

Human affective behavior analysis plays a vital role in human-computer interaction (HCI) systems. In this paper, we introduce our submission to the CVPR 2023 Competition on Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW). We propose a single-stage trained AU detection framework. Specifically, in order to effectively extract facial local region features related to AU detection, we use a local region perception module to effectively extract features of different AUs. Meanwhile, we use a graph neural network-based relational learning module to capture the relationship between AUs. In addition, considering the role of the overall feature of the target face on AU detection, we also use the feature fusion module to fuse the feature information extracted by the backbone network and the AU feature information extracted by the relationship learning module. We also adopted some sampling methods, data augmentation techniques and post-processing strategies to further improve the performance of the model.

Exploring Large-scale Unlabeled Faces to Enhance Facial Expression Recognition

Facial Expression Recognition (FER) is an important task in computer vision and has wide applications in human-computer interaction, intelligent security, emotion analysis, and other fields. However, the limited size of FER datasets limits the generalization ability of expression recognition models, resulting in ineffective model performance. To address this problem, we propose a semi-supervised learning framework that utilizes unlabeled face data to train expression recognition models effectively. Our method uses a dynamic threshold module (\textbf{DTM}) that can adaptively adjust the confidence threshold to fully utilize the face recognition (FR) data to generate pseudo-labels, thus improving the model's ability to model facial expressions. In the ABAW5 EXPR task, our method achieved excellent results on the official validation set.

A Dual Branch Network for Emotional Reaction Intensity Estimation

Emotional Reaction Intensity(ERI) estimation is an important task in multimodal scenarios, and has fundamental applications in medicine, safe driving and other fields. In this paper, we propose a solution to the ERI challenge of the fifth Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild(ABAW), a dual-branch based multi-output regression model. The spatial attention is used to better extract visual features, and the Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients technology extracts acoustic features, and a method named modality dropout is added to fusion multimodal features. Our method achieves excellent results on the official validation set.

Prompting Large Language Models with Answer Heuristics for Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering

Knowledge-based visual question answering (VQA) requires external knowledge beyond the image to answer the question. Early studies retrieve required knowledge from explicit knowledge bases (KBs), which often introduces irrelevant information to the question, hence restricting the performance of their models. Recent works have sought to use a large language model (i.e., GPT-3) as an implicit knowledge engine to acquire the necessary knowledge for answering. Despite the encouraging results achieved by these methods, we argue that they have not fully activated the capacity of GPT-3 as the provided input information is insufficient. In this paper, we present Prophet -- a conceptually simple framework designed to prompt GPT-3 with answer heuristics for knowledge-based VQA. Specifically, we first train a vanilla VQA model on a specific knowledge-based VQA dataset without external knowledge. After that, we extract two types of complementary answer heuristics from the model: answer candidates and answer-aware examples. Finally, the two types of answer heuristics are encoded into the prompts to enable GPT-3 to better comprehend the task thus enhancing its capacity. Prophet significantly outperforms all existing state-of-the-art methods on two challenging knowledge-based VQA datasets, OK-VQA and A-OKVQA, delivering 61.1% and 55.7% accuracies on their testing sets, respectively.

GLOW: Global Layout Aware Attacks on Object Detection

Adversarial attacks aim to perturb images such that a predictor outputs incorrect results. Due to the limited research in structured attacks, imposing consistency checks on natural multi-object scenes is a promising yet practical defense against conventional adversarial attacks. More desired attacks, to this end, should be able to fool defenses with such consistency checks. Therefore, we present the first approach GLOW that copes with various attack requests by generating global layout-aware adversarial attacks, in which both categorical and geometric layout constraints are explicitly established. Specifically, we focus on object detection task and given a victim image, GLOW first localizes victim objects according to target labels. And then it generates multiple attack plans, together with their context-consistency scores. Our proposed GLOW, on the one hand, is capable of handling various types of requests, including single or multiple victim objects, with or without specified victim objects. On the other hand, it produces a consistency score for each attack plan, reflecting the overall contextual consistency that both semantic category and global scene layout are considered. In experiment, we design multiple types of attack requests and validate our ideas on MS COCO and Pascal. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that we can achieve about 30$\%$ average relative improvement compared to state-of-the-art methods in conventional single object attack request; Moreover, our method outperforms SOTAs significantly on more generic attack requests by about 20$\%$ in average; Finally, our method produces superior performance under challenging zero-query black-box setting, or 20$\%$ better than SOTAs. Our code, model and attack requests would be made available.