HIORE: Leveraging High-order Interactions for Unified Entity Relation Extraction

Entity relation extraction consists of two sub-tasks: entity recognition and relation extraction. Existing methods either tackle these two tasks separately or unify them with word-by-word interactions. In this paper, we propose HIORE, a new method for unified entity relation extraction. The key insight is to leverage the high-order interactions, i.e., the complex association among word pairs, which contains richer information than the first-order word-by-word interactions. For this purpose, we first devise a W-shape DNN (WNet) to capture coarse-level high-order connections. Then, we build a heuristic high-order graph and further calibrate the representations with a graph neural network (GNN). Experiments on three benchmarks (ACE04, ACE05, SciERC) show that HIORE achieves the state-of-the-art performance on relation extraction and an improvement of 1.1~1.8 F1 points over the prior best unified model.

Road Genome: A Topology Reasoning Benchmark for Scene Understanding in Autonomous Driving

Understanding the complex traffic environment is crucial for self-driving vehicles. Existing benchmarks in autonomous driving mainly cast scene understanding as perception problems, e.g., perceiving lanelines with vanilla detection or segmentation methods. As such, we argue that the perception pipeline provides limited information for autonomous vehicles to drive in the right way, especially without the aid of high-definition (HD) map. For instance, following the wrong traffic signal at a complicated crossroad would lead to a catastrophic incident. By introducing Road Genome (OpenLane-V2), we intend to shift the community's attention and take a step further beyond perception - to the task of topology reasoning for scene structure. The goal of Road Genome is to understand the scene structure by investigating the relationship of perceived entities among traffic elements and lanes. Built on top of prevailing datasets, the newly minted benchmark comprises 2,000 sequences of multi-view images captured from diverse real-world scenarios. We annotate data with high-quality manual checks in the loop. Three subtasks compromise the gist of Road Genome, including the 3D lane detection inherited from OpenLane. We have/will host Challenges in the upcoming future at top-tiered venues.

Topology Reasoning for Driving Scenes

Understanding the road genome is essential to realize autonomous driving. This highly intelligent problem contains two aspects - the connection relationship of lanes, and the assignment relationship between lanes and traffic elements, where a comprehensive topology reasoning method is vacant. On one hand, previous map learning techniques struggle in deriving lane connectivity with segmentation or laneline paradigms; or prior lane topology-oriented approaches focus on centerline detection and neglect the interaction modeling. On the other hand, the traffic element to lane assignment problem is limited in the image domain, leaving how to construct the correspondence from two views an unexplored challenge. To address these issues, we present TopoNet, the first end-to-end framework capable of abstracting traffic knowledge beyond conventional perception tasks. To capture the driving scene topology, we introduce three key designs: (1) an embedding module to incorporate semantic knowledge from 2D elements into a unified feature space; (2) a curated scene graph neural network to model relationships and enable feature interaction inside the network; (3) instead of transmitting messages arbitrarily, a scene knowledge graph is devised to differentiate prior knowledge from various types of the road genome. We evaluate TopoNet on the challenging scene understanding benchmark, OpenLane-V2, where our approach outperforms all previous works by a great margin on all perceptual and topological metrics. The code would be released soon.

H2RBox-v2: Boosting HBox-supervised Oriented Object Detection via Symmetric Learning

With the increasing demand for oriented object detection e.g. in autonomous driving and remote sensing, the oriented annotation has become a labor-intensive work. To make full use of existing horizontally annotated datasets and reduce the annotation cost, a weakly-supervised detector H2RBox for learning the rotated box (RBox) from the horizontal box (HBox) has been proposed and received great attention. This paper presents a new version, H2RBox-v2, to further bridge the gap between HBox-supervised and RBox-supervised oriented object detection. While exploiting axisymmetry via flipping and rotating consistencies is available through our theoretical analysis, H2RBox-v2, using a weakly-supervised branch similar to H2RBox, is embedded with a novel self-supervised branch that learns orientations from the symmetry inherent in the image of objects. Complemented by modules to cope with peripheral issues, e.g. angular periodicity, a stable and effective solution is achieved. To our knowledge, H2RBox-v2 is the first symmetry-supervised paradigm for oriented object detection. Compared to H2RBox, our method is less susceptible to low annotation quality and insufficient training data, which in such cases is expected to give a competitive performance much closer to fully-supervised oriented object detectors. Specifically, the performance comparison between H2RBox-v2 and Rotated FCOS on DOTA-v1.0/1.5/2.0 is 72.31%/64.76%/50.33% vs. 72.44%/64.53%/51.77%, 89.66% vs. 88.99% on HRSC, and 42.27% vs. 41.25% on FAIR1M.

Geometric-aware Pretraining for Vision-centric 3D Object Detection

Multi-camera 3D object detection for autonomous driving is a challenging problem that has garnered notable attention from both academia and industry. An obstacle encountered in vision-based techniques involves the precise extraction of geometry-conscious features from RGB images. Recent approaches have utilized geometric-aware image backbones pretrained on depth-relevant tasks to acquire spatial information. However, these approaches overlook the critical aspect of view transformation, resulting in inadequate performance due to the misalignment of spatial knowledge between the image backbone and view transformation. To address this issue, we propose a novel geometric-aware pretraining framework called GAPretrain. Our approach incorporates spatial and structural cues to camera networks by employing the geometric-rich modality as guidance during the pretraining phase. The transference of modal-specific attributes across different modalities is non-trivial, but we bridge this gap by using a unified bird's-eye-view (BEV) representation and structural hints derived from LiDAR point clouds to facilitate the pretraining process. GAPretrain serves as a plug-and-play solution that can be flexibly applied to multiple state-of-the-art detectors. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization ability of the proposed method. We achieve 46.2 mAP and 55.5 NDS on the nuScenes val set using the BEVFormer method, with a gain of 2.7 and 2.1 points, respectively. We also conduct experiments on various image backbones and view transformations to validate the efficacy of our approach. Code will be released at https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/BEVPerception-Survey-Recipe.

Active Finetuning: Exploiting Annotation Budget in the Pretraining-Finetuning Paradigm

Given the large-scale data and the high annotation cost, pretraining-finetuning becomes a popular paradigm in multiple computer vision tasks. Previous research has covered both the unsupervised pretraining and supervised finetuning in this paradigm, while little attention is paid to exploiting the annotation budget for finetuning. To fill in this gap, we formally define this new active finetuning task focusing on the selection of samples for annotation in the pretraining-finetuning paradigm. We propose a novel method called ActiveFT for active finetuning task to select a subset of data distributing similarly with the entire unlabeled pool and maintaining enough diversity by optimizing a parametric model in the continuous space. We prove that the Earth Mover's distance between the distributions of the selected subset and the entire data pool is also reduced in this process. Extensive experiments show the leading performance and high efficiency of ActiveFT superior to baselines on both image classification and semantic segmentation. Our code is released at https://github.com/yichen928/ActiveFT.

EasyDGL: Encode, Train and Interpret for Continuous-time Dynamic Graph Learning

Dynamic graphs arise in various real-world applications, and it is often welcomed to model the dynamics directly in continuous time domain for its flexibility. This paper aims to design an easy-to-use pipeline (termed as EasyDGL which is also due to its implementation by DGL toolkit) composed of three key modules with both strong fitting ability and interpretability. Specifically the proposed pipeline which involves encoding, training and interpreting: i) a temporal point process (TPP) modulated attention architecture to endow the continuous-time resolution with the coupled spatiotemporal dynamics of the observed graph with edge-addition events; ii) a principled loss composed of task-agnostic TPP posterior maximization based on observed events on the graph, and a task-aware loss with a masking strategy over dynamic graph, where the covered tasks include dynamic link prediction, dynamic node classification and node traffic forecasting; iii) interpretation of the model outputs (e.g., representations and predictions) with scalable perturbation-based quantitative analysis in the graph Fourier domain, which could more comprehensively reflect the behavior of the learned model. Extensive experimental results on public benchmarks show the superior performance of our EasyDGL for time-conditioned predictive tasks, and in particular demonstrate that EasyDGL can effectively quantify the predictive power of frequency content that a model learn from the evolving graph data.

R-Tuning: Regularized Prompt Tuning in Open-Set Scenarios

In realistic open-set scenarios where labels of a part of testing data are totally unknown, current prompt methods on vision-language (VL) models always predict the unknown classes as the downstream training classes. The exhibited label bias causes difficulty in the open set recognition (OSR), by which an image should be correctly predicted as one of the known classes or the unknown one. To learn prompts in open-set scenarios, we propose the Regularized prompt Tuning (R-Tuning) to mitigate the label bias. It introduces open words from the WordNet to extend the range of words forming the prompt texts from only closed-set label words to more. Thus, prompts are tuned in a simulated open-set scenario. Besides, inspired by the observation that classifying directly on large datasets causes a much higher false positive rate than on small datasets, we propose the Combinatorial Tuning and Testing (CTT) strategy for improving performance. CTT decomposes R-Tuning on large datasets as multiple independent group-wise tuning on fewer classes, then makes comprehensive predictions by selecting the optimal sub-prompt. For fair comparisons, we construct new baselines for OSR based on VL models, especially for prompt methods. Our method achieves the best results on datasets with various scales. Extensive ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our method.

ARS-DETR: Aspect Ratio Sensitive Oriented Object Detection with Transformer

Existing oriented object detection methods commonly use metric AP$_{50}$ to measure the performance of the model. We argue that AP$_{50}$ is inherently unsuitable for oriented object detection due to its large tolerance in angle deviation. Therefore, we advocate using high-precision metric, e.g. AP$_{75}$, to measure the performance of models. In this paper, we propose an Aspect Ratio Sensitive Oriented Object Detector with Transformer, termed ARS-DETR, which exhibits a competitive performance in high-precision oriented object detection. Specifically, a new angle classification method, calling Aspect Ratio aware Circle Smooth Label (AR-CSL), is proposed to smooth the angle label in a more reasonable way and discard the hyperparameter that introduced by previous work (e.g. CSL). Then, a rotated deformable attention module is designed to rotate the sampling points with the corresponding angles and eliminate the misalignment between region features and sampling points. Moreover, a dynamic weight coefficient according to the aspect ratio is adopted to calculate the angle loss. Comprehensive experiments on several challenging datasets show that our method achieves competitive performance on the high-precision oriented object detection task.

Rethinking Visual Prompt Learning as Masked Visual Token Modeling

Prompt learning has achieved great success in efficiently exploiting large-scale pre-trained models in natural language processing (NLP). It reformulates the downstream tasks as the generative pre-training ones, thus narrowing down the gap between them and improving the performance stably. However, when transferring it to the vision area, current visual prompt learning methods are all designed on discriminative pre-trained models, and there is also a lack of careful design to unify the forms of pre-training and downstream tasks. To explore prompt learning on the generative pre-trained visual model as well as keeping the task consistency, we propose Visual Prompt learning as masked visual Token Modeling (VPTM) to transform the downstream visual classification into the pre-trained masked visual token prediction. In addition, we develop the prototypical verbalizer for mapping the predicted visual token with implicit semantics to explicit downstream labels. To our best knowledge, VPTM is the first visual prompt method on the generative pre-trained visual model, and the first to achieve consistency between pre-training and downstream visual classification by task reformulation. Experiments show that VPTM outperforms other visual prompt methods and achieves excellent efficiency. Moreover, the task consistency of VPTM contributes to the robustness against prompt location, prompt length and prototype dimension, and could be deployed uniformly.