NWPU-MOC: A Benchmark for Fine-grained Multi-category Object Counting in Aerial Images

Object counting is a hot topic in computer vision, which aims to estimate the number of objects in a given image. However, most methods only count objects of a single category for an image, which cannot be applied to scenes that need to count objects with multiple categories simultaneously, especially in aerial scenes. To this end, this paper introduces a Multi-category Object Counting (MOC) task to estimate the numbers of different objects (cars, buildings, ships, etc.) in an aerial image. Considering the absence of a dataset for this task, a large-scale Dataset (NWPU-MOC) is collected, consisting of 3,416 scenes with a resolution of 1024 $\times$ 1024 pixels, and well-annotated using 14 fine-grained object categories. Besides, each scene contains RGB and Near Infrared (NIR) images, of which the NIR spectrum can provide richer characterization information compared with only the RGB spectrum. Based on NWPU-MOC, the paper presents a multi-spectrum, multi-category object counting framework, which employs a dual-attention module to fuse the features of RGB and NIR and subsequently regress multi-channel density maps corresponding to each object category. In addition, to modeling the dependency between different channels in the density map with each object category, a spatial contrast loss is designed as a penalty for overlapping predictions at the same spatial position. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with some mainstream counting algorithms. The dataset, code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/lyongo/NWPU-MOC.

SamLP: A Customized Segment Anything Model for License Plate Detection

With the emergence of foundation model, this novel paradigm of deep learning has encouraged many powerful achievements in natural language processing and computer vision. There are many advantages of foundation model, such as excellent feature extraction power, mighty generalization ability, great few-shot and zero-shot learning capacity, etc. which are beneficial to vision tasks. As the unique identity of vehicle, different countries and regions have diverse license plate (LP) styles and appearances, and even different types of vehicles have different LPs. However, recent deep learning based license plate detectors are mainly trained on specific datasets, and these limited datasets constrain the effectiveness and robustness of LP detectors. To alleviate the negative impact of limited data, an attempt to exploit the advantages of foundation model is implement in this paper. We customize a vision foundation model, i.e. Segment Anything Model (SAM), for LP detection task and propose the first LP detector based on vision foundation model, named SamLP. Specifically, we design a Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning strategy to inject extra parameters into SAM and transfer SAM into LP detection task. And then, we further propose a promptable fine-tuning step to provide SamLP with prompatable segmentation capacity. The experiments show that our proposed SamLP achieves promising detection performance compared to other LP detectors. Meanwhile, the proposed SamLP has great few-shot and zero-shot learning ability, which shows the potential of transferring vision foundation model. The code is available at https://github.com/Dinghaoxuan/SamLP

Test-time Adaptive Vision-and-Language Navigation

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) has witnessed significant advancements in recent years, largely attributed to meticulously curated datasets and proficiently trained models. Nevertheless, when tested in diverse environments, the trained models inevitably encounter significant shifts in data distribution, highlighting that relying solely on pre-trained and fixed navigation models is insufficient. To enhance models' generalization ability, test-time adaptation (TTA) demonstrates significant potential in the computer vision field by leveraging unlabeled test samples for model updates. However, simply applying existing TTA methods to the VLN task cannot well handle the adaptability-stability dilemma of VLN models, i.e., frequent updates can result in drastic changes in model parameters, while occasional updates can make the models ill-equipped to handle dynamically changing environments. Therefore, we propose a Fast-Slow Test-Time Adaptation (FSTTA) approach for VLN by performing decomposition-accumulation analysis for both gradients and parameters in a unified framework. Specifically, in the fast update phase, gradients generated during the recent multi-step navigation process are decomposed into components with varying levels of consistency. Then, these components are adaptively accumulated to pinpoint a concordant direction for fast model adaptation. In the slow update phase, historically recorded parameters are gathered, and a similar decomposition-accumulation analysis is conducted to revert the model to a stable state. Extensive experiments show that our method obtains impressive performance gains on four popular benchmarks.

Unified Multi-modal Unsupervised Representation Learning for Skeleton-based Action Understanding

Unsupervised pre-training has shown great success in skeleton-based action understanding recently. Existing works typically train separate modality-specific models, then integrate the multi-modal information for action understanding by a late-fusion strategy. Although these approaches have achieved significant performance, they suffer from the complex yet redundant multi-stream model designs, each of which is also limited to the fixed input skeleton modality. To alleviate these issues, in this paper, we propose a Unified Multimodal Unsupervised Representation Learning framework, called UmURL, which exploits an efficient early-fusion strategy to jointly encode the multi-modal features in a single-stream manner. Specifically, instead of designing separate modality-specific optimization processes for uni-modal unsupervised learning, we feed different modality inputs into the same stream with an early-fusion strategy to learn their multi-modal features for reducing model complexity. To ensure that the fused multi-modal features do not exhibit modality bias, i.e., being dominated by a certain modality input, we further propose both intra- and inter-modal consistency learning to guarantee that the multi-modal features contain the complete semantics of each modal via feature decomposition and distinct alignment. In this manner, our framework is able to learn the unified representations of uni-modal or multi-modal skeleton input, which is flexible to different kinds of modality input for robust action understanding in practical cases. Extensive experiments conducted on three large-scale datasets, i.e., NTU-60, NTU-120, and PKU-MMD II, demonstrate that UmURL is highly efficient, possessing the approximate complexity with the uni-modal methods, while achieving new state-of-the-art performance across various downstream task scenarios in skeleton-based action representation learning.

Learning Transferable Conceptual Prototypes for Interpretable Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Despite the great progress of unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) with the deep neural networks, current UDA models are opaque and cannot provide promising explanations, limiting their applications in the scenarios that require safe and controllable model decisions. At present, a surge of work focuses on designing deep interpretable methods with adequate data annotations and only a few methods consider the distributional shift problem. Most existing interpretable UDA methods are post-hoc ones, which cannot facilitate the model learning process for performance enhancement. In this paper, we propose an inherently interpretable method, named Transferable Conceptual Prototype Learning (TCPL), which could simultaneously interpret and improve the processes of knowledge transfer and decision-making in UDA. To achieve this goal, we design a hierarchically prototypical module that transfers categorical basic concepts from the source domain to the target domain and learns domain-shared prototypes for explaining the underlying reasoning process. With the learned transferable prototypes, a self-predictive consistent pseudo-label strategy that fuses confidence, predictions, and prototype information, is designed for selecting suitable target samples for pseudo annotations and gradually narrowing down the domain gap. Comprehensive experiments show that the proposed method can not only provide effective and intuitive explanations but also outperform previous state-of-the-arts.

Combating Data Imbalances in Federated Semi-supervised Learning with Dual Regulators

Federated learning has become a popular method to learn from decentralized heterogeneous data. Federated semi-supervised learning (FSSL) emerges to train models from a small fraction of labeled data due to label scarcity on decentralized clients. Existing FSSL methods assume independent and identically distributed (IID) labeled data across clients and consistent class distribution between labeled and unlabeled data within a client. This work studies a more practical and challenging scenario of FSSL, where data distribution is different not only across clients but also within a client between labeled and unlabeled data. To address this challenge, we propose a novel FSSL framework with dual regulators, FedDure.} FedDure lifts the previous assumption with a coarse-grained regulator (C-reg) and a fine-grained regulator (F-reg): C-reg regularizes the updating of the local model by tracking the learning effect on labeled data distribution; F-reg learns an adaptive weighting scheme tailored for unlabeled instances in each client. We further formulate the client model training as bi-level optimization that adaptively optimizes the model in the client with two regulators. Theoretically, we show the convergence guarantee of the dual regulators. Empirically, we demonstrate that FedDure is superior to the existing methods across a wide range of settings, notably by more than 11% on CIFAR-10 and CINIC-10 datasets.

Multimodal Imbalance-Aware Gradient Modulation for Weakly-supervised Audio-Visual Video Parsing

Weakly-supervised audio-visual video parsing (WS-AVVP) aims to localize the temporal extents of audio, visual and audio-visual event instances as well as identify the corresponding event categories with only video-level category labels for training. Most previous methods pay much attention to refining the supervision for each modality or extracting fruitful cross-modality information for more reliable feature learning. None of them have noticed the imbalanced feature learning between different modalities in the task. In this paper, to balance the feature learning processes of different modalities, a dynamic gradient modulation (DGM) mechanism is explored, where a novel and effective metric function is designed to measure the imbalanced feature learning between audio and visual modalities. Furthermore, principle analysis indicates that the multimodal confusing calculation will hamper the precise measurement of multimodal imbalanced feature learning, which further weakens the effectiveness of our DGM mechanism. To cope with this issue, a modality-separated decision unit (MSDU) is designed for more precise measurement of imbalanced feature learning between audio and visual modalities. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on public benchmarks and the corresponding experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Imbalanced Aircraft Data Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection in temporal data from sensors under aviation scenarios is a practical but challenging task: 1) long temporal data is difficult to extract contextual information with temporal correlation; 2) the anomalous data are rare in time series, causing normal/abnormal imbalance in anomaly detection, making the detector classification degenerate or even fail. To remedy the aforementioned problems, we propose a Graphical Temporal Data Analysis (GTDA) framework. It consists three modules, named Series-to-Image (S2I), Cluster-based Resampling Approach using Euclidean Distance (CRD) and Variance-Based Loss (VBL). Specifically, for better extracts global information in temporal data from sensors, S2I converts the data to curve images to demonstrate abnormalities in data changes. CRD and VBL balance the classification to mitigate the unequal distribution of classes. CRD extracts minority samples with similar features to majority samples by clustering and over-samples them. And VBL fine-tunes the decision boundary by balancing the fitting degree of the network to each class. Ablation experiments on the Flights dataset indicate the effectiveness of CRD and VBL on precision and recall, respectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate the synergistic advantages of CRD and VBL on F1-score on Flights and three other temporal datasets.

Counting Like Human: Anthropoid Crowd Counting on Modeling the Similarity of Objects

The mainstream crowd counting methods regress density map and integrate it to obtain counting results. Since the density representation to one head accords to its adjacent distribution, it embeds the same category objects with variant values, while human beings counting models the invariant features namely similarity to objects. Inspired by this, we propose a rational and anthropoid crowd counting framework. To begin with, we leverage counting scalar as supervision signal, which provides global and implicit guidance to similar matters. Then, the large kernel CNN is utilized to imitate the paradigm of human beings which models invariant knowledge firstly and slides to compare similarity. Later, re-parameterization on pre-trained paralleled parameters is presented to cater to the inner-class variance on similarity comparison. Finally, the Random Scaling patches Yield (RSY) is proposed to facilitate similarity modeling on long distance dependencies. Extensive experiments on five challenging benchmarks in crowd counting show the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art.