Convolutional Fine-Grained Classification with Self-Supervised Target Relation Regularization

Fine-grained visual classification can be addressed by deep representation learning under supervision of manually pre-defined targets (e.g., one-hot or the Hadamard codes). Such target coding schemes are less flexible to model inter-class correlation and are sensitive to sparse and imbalanced data distribution as well. In light of this, this paper introduces a novel target coding scheme -- dynamic target relation graphs (DTRG), which, as an auxiliary feature regularization, is a self-generated structural output to be mapped from input images. Specifically, online computation of class-level feature centers is designed to generate cross-category distance in the representation space, which can thus be depicted by a dynamic graph in a non-parametric manner. Explicitly minimizing intra-class feature variations anchored on those class-level centers can encourage learning of discriminative features. Moreover, owing to exploiting inter-class dependency, the proposed target graphs can alleviate data sparsity and imbalanceness in representation learning. Inspired by recent success of the mixup style data augmentation, this paper introduces randomness into soft construction of dynamic target relation graphs to further explore relation diversity of target classes. Experimental results can demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a number of diverse benchmarks of multiple visual classification tasks, especially achieving the state-of-the-art performance on popular fine-grained object benchmarks and superior robustness against sparse and imbalanced data. Source codes are made publicly available at https://github.com/AkonLau/DTRG.

Category-Level 6D Object Pose and Size Estimation using Self-Supervised Deep Prior Deformation Networks

It is difficult to precisely annotate object instances and their semantics in 3D space, and as such, synthetic data are extensively used for these tasks, e.g., category-level 6D object pose and size estimation. However, the easy annotations in synthetic domains bring the downside effect of synthetic-to-real (Sim2Real) domain gap. In this work, we aim to address this issue in the task setting of Sim2Real, unsupervised domain adaptation for category-level 6D object pose and size estimation. We propose a method that is built upon a novel Deep Prior Deformation Network, shortened as DPDN. DPDN learns to deform features of categorical shape priors to match those of object observations, and is thus able to establish deep correspondence in the feature space for direct regression of object poses and sizes. To reduce the Sim2Real domain gap, we formulate a novel self-supervised objective upon DPDN via consistency learning; more specifically, we apply two rigid transformations to each object observation in parallel, and feed them into DPDN respectively to yield dual sets of predictions; on top of the parallel learning, an inter-consistency term is employed to keep cross consistency between dual predictions for improving the sensitivity of DPDN to pose changes, while individual intra-consistency ones are used to enforce self-adaptation within each learning itself. We train DPDN on both training sets of the synthetic CAMERA25 and real-world REAL275 datasets; our results outperform the existing methods on REAL275 test set under both the unsupervised and supervised settings. Ablation studies also verify the efficacy of our designs. Our code is released publicly at https://github.com/JiehongLin/Self-DPDN.

Style Interleaved Learning for Generalizable Person Re-identification

Domain generalization (DG) for person re-identification (ReID) is a challenging problem, as there is no access to target domain data permitted during the training process. Most existing DG ReID methods employ the same features for the updating of the feature extractor and classifier parameters. This common practice causes the model to overfit to existing feature styles in the source domain, resulting in sub-optimal generalization ability on target domains even if meta-learning is used. To solve this problem, we propose a novel style interleaved learning framework. Unlike conventional learning strategies, interleaved learning incorporates two forward propagations and one backward propagation for each iteration. We employ the features of interleaved styles to update the feature extractor and classifiers using different forward propagations, which helps the model avoid overfitting to certain domain styles. In order to fully explore the advantages of style interleaved learning, we further propose a novel feature stylization approach to diversify feature styles. This approach not only mixes the feature styles of multiple training samples, but also samples new and meaningful feature styles from batch-level style distribution. Extensive experimental results show that our model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on large-scale benchmarks for DG ReID, yielding clear advantages in computational efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/WentaoTan/Interleaved-Learning.

Masked Surfel Prediction for Self-Supervised Point Cloud Learning

Masked auto-encoding is a popular and effective self-supervised learning approach to point cloud learning. However, most of the existing methods reconstruct only the masked points and overlook the local geometry information, which is also important to understand the point cloud data. In this work, we make the first attempt, to the best of our knowledge, to consider the local geometry information explicitly into the masked auto-encoding, and propose a novel Masked Surfel Prediction (MaskSurf) method. Specifically, given the input point cloud masked at a high ratio, we learn a transformer-based encoder-decoder network to estimate the underlying masked surfels by simultaneously predicting the surfel positions (i.e., points) and per-surfel orientations (i.e., normals). The predictions of points and normals are supervised by the Chamfer Distance and a newly introduced Position-Indexed Normal Distance in a set-to-set manner. Our MaskSurf is validated on six downstream tasks under three fine-tuning strategies. In particular, MaskSurf outperforms its closest competitor, Point-MAE, by 1.2\% on the real-world dataset of ScanObjectNN under the OBJ-BG setting, justifying the advantages of masked surfel prediction over masked point cloud reconstruction. Codes will be available at https://github.com/YBZh/MaskSurf.

Revisiting Realistic Test-Time Training: Sequential Inference and Adaptation by Anchored Clustering

Deploying models on target domain data subject to distribution shift requires adaptation. Test-time training (TTT) emerges as a solution to this adaptation under a realistic scenario where access to full source domain data is not available and instant inference on target domain is required. Despite many efforts into TTT, there is a confusion over the experimental settings, thus leading to unfair comparisons. In this work, we first revisit TTT assumptions and categorize TTT protocols by two key factors. Among the multiple protocols, we adopt a realistic sequential test-time training (sTTT) protocol, under which we further develop a test-time anchored clustering (TTAC) approach to enable stronger test-time feature learning. TTAC discovers clusters in both source and target domain and match the target clusters to the source ones to improve generalization. Pseudo label filtering and iterative updating are developed to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of anchored clustering. We demonstrate that under all TTT protocols TTAC consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on five TTT datasets. We hope this work will provide a fair benchmarking of TTT methods and future research should be compared within respective protocols. A demo code is available at https://github.com/Gorilla-Lab-SCUT/TTAC.

Exploring Diversity-based Active Learning for 3D Object Detection in Autonomous Driving

3D object detection has recently received much attention due to its great potential in autonomous vehicle (AV). The success of deep learning based object detectors relies on the availability of large-scale annotated datasets, which is time-consuming and expensive to compile, especially for 3D bounding box annotation. In this work, we investigate diversity-based active learning (AL) as a potential solution to alleviate the annotation burden. Given limited annotation budget, only the most informative frames and objects are automatically selected for human to annotate. Technically, we take the advantage of the multimodal information provided in an AV dataset, and propose a novel acquisition function that enforces spatial and temporal diversity in the selected samples. We benchmark the proposed method against other AL strategies under realistic annotation cost measurement, where the realistic costs for annotating a frame and a 3D bounding box are both taken into consideration. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on the nuScenes dataset and show that it outperforms existing AL strategies significantly.

BiCo-Net: Regress Globally, Match Locally for Robust 6D Pose Estimation

The challenges of learning a robust 6D pose function lie in 1) severe occlusion and 2) systematic noises in depth images. Inspired by the success of point-pair features, the goal of this paper is to recover the 6D pose of an object instance segmented from RGB-D images by locally matching pairs of oriented points between the model and camera space. To this end, we propose a novel Bi-directional Correspondence Mapping Network (BiCo-Net) to first generate point clouds guided by a typical pose regression, which can thus incorporate pose-sensitive information to optimize generation of local coordinates and their normal vectors. As pose predictions via geometric computation only rely on one single pair of local oriented points, our BiCo-Net can achieve robustness against sparse and occluded point clouds. An ensemble of redundant pose predictions from locally matching and direct pose regression further refines final pose output against noisy observations. Experimental results on three popularly benchmarking datasets can verify that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance, especially for the more challenging severe occluded scenes. Source codes are available at https://github.com/Gorilla-Lab-SCUT/BiCo-Net.

Weakly Supervised 3D Point Cloud Segmentation via Multi-Prototype Learning

Addressing the annotation challenge in 3D Point Cloud segmentation has inspired research into weakly supervised learning. Existing approaches mainly focus on exploiting manifold and pseudo-labeling to make use of large unlabeled data points. A fundamental challenge here lies in the large intra-class variations of local geometric structure, resulting in subclasses within a semantic class. In this work, we leverage this intuition and opt for maintaining an individual classifier for each subclass. Technically, we design a multi-prototype classifier, each prototype serves as the classifier weights for one subclass. To enable effective updating of multi-prototype classifier weights, we propose two constraints respectively for updating the prototypes w.r.t. all point features and for encouraging the learning of diverse prototypes. Experiments on weakly supervised 3D point cloud segmentation tasks validate the efficacy of proposed method in particular at low-label regime. Our hypothesis is also verified given the consistent discovery of semantic subclasses at no cost of additional annotations.

Surface Reconstruction from Point Clouds: A Survey and a Benchmark

Reconstruction of a continuous surface of two-dimensional manifold from its raw, discrete point cloud observation is a long-standing problem. The problem is technically ill-posed, and becomes more difficult considering that various sensing imperfections would appear in the point clouds obtained by practical depth scanning. In literature, a rich set of methods has been proposed, and reviews of existing methods are also provided. However, existing reviews are short of thorough investigations on a common benchmark. The present paper aims to review and benchmark existing methods in the new era of deep learning surface reconstruction. To this end, we contribute a large-scale benchmarking dataset consisting of both synthetic and real-scanned data; the benchmark includes object- and scene-level surfaces and takes into account various sensing imperfections that are commonly encountered in practical depth scanning. We conduct thorough empirical studies by comparing existing methods on the constructed benchmark, and pay special attention on robustness of existing methods against various scanning imperfections; we also study how different methods generalize in terms of reconstructing complex surface shapes. Our studies help identify the best conditions under which different methods work, and suggest some empirical findings. For example, while deep learning methods are increasingly popular, our systematic studies suggest that, surprisingly, a few classical methods perform even better in terms of both robustness and generalization; our studies also suggest that the practical challenges of misalignment of point sets from multi-view scanning, missing of surface points, and point outliers remain unsolved by all the existing surface reconstruction methods. We expect that the benchmark and our studies would be valuable both for practitioners and as a guidance for new innovations in future research.

Open-Set Semi-Supervised Learning for 3D Point Cloud Understanding

Semantic understanding of 3D point cloud relies on learning models with massively annotated data, which, in many cases, are expensive or difficult to collect. This has led to an emerging research interest in semi-supervised learning (SSL) for 3D point cloud. It is commonly assumed in SSL that the unlabeled data are drawn from the same distribution as that of the labeled ones; This assumption, however, rarely holds true in realistic environments. Blindly using out-of-distribution (OOD) unlabeled data could harm SSL performance. In this work, we propose to selectively utilize unlabeled data through sample weighting, so that only conducive unlabeled data would be prioritized. To estimate the weights, we adopt a bi-level optimization framework which iteratively optimizes a metaobjective on a held-out validation set and a task-objective on a training set. Faced with the instability of efficient bi-level optimizers, we further propose three regularization techniques to enhance the training stability. Extensive experiments on 3D point cloud classification and segmentation tasks verify the effectiveness of our proposed method. We also demonstrate the feasibility of a more efficient training strategy.