An Adversarial Perturbation Oriented Domain Adaptation Approach for Semantic Segmentation

We focus on Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) for the task of semantic segmentation. Recently, adversarial alignment has been widely adopted to match the marginal distribution of feature representations across two domains globally. However, this strategy fails in adapting the representations of the tail classes or small objects for semantic segmentation since the alignment objective is dominated by head categories or large objects. In contrast to adversarial alignment, we propose to explicitly train a domain-invariant classifier by generating and defensing against pointwise feature space adversarial perturbations. Specifically, we firstly perturb the intermediate feature maps with several attack objectives (i.e., discriminator and classifier) on each individual position for both domains, and then the classifier is trained to be invariant to the perturbations. By perturbing each position individually, our model treats each location evenly regardless of the category or object size and thus circumvents the aforementioned issue. Moreover, the domain gap in feature space is reduced by extrapolating source and target perturbed features towards each other with attack on the domain discriminator. Our approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance on two challenging domain adaptation tasks for semantic segmentation: GTA5 -> Cityscapes and SYNTHIA -> Cityscapes.

Blockwisely Supervised Neural Architecture Search with Knowledge Distillation

Neural Architecture Search (NAS), aiming at automatically designing network architectures by machines, is hoped and expected to bring about a new revolution in machine learning. Despite these high expectation, the effectiveness and efficiency of existing NAS solutions are unclear, with some recent works going so far as to suggest that many existing NAS solutions are no better than random architecture selection. The inefficiency of NAS solutions may be attributed to inaccurate architecture evaluation. Specifically, to speed up NAS, recent works have proposed under-training different candidate architectures in a large search space concurrently by using shared network parameters; however, this has resulted in incorrect architecture ratings and furthered the ineffectiveness of NAS. In this work, we propose to modularize the large search space of NAS into blocks to ensure that the potential candidate architectures are fully trained; this reduces the representation shift caused by the shared parameters and leads to the correct rating of the candidates. Thanks to the block-wise search, we can also evaluate all of the candidate architectures within a block. Moreover, we find that the knowledge of a network model lies not only in the network parameters but also in the network architecture. Therefore, we propose to distill the neural architecture (DNA) knowledge from a teacher model as the supervision to guide our block-wise architecture search, which significantly improves the effectiveness of NAS. Remarkably, the capacity of our searched architecture has exceeded the teacher model, demonstrating the practicability and scalability of our method. Finally, our method achieves a state-of-the-art 78.4\% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet in a mobile setting, which is about a 2.1\% gain over EfficientNet-B0. All of our searched models along with the evaluation code are available online.

Knowledge Graph Transfer Network for Few-Shot Recognition

Few-shot learning aims to learn novel categories from very few samples given some base categories with sufficient training samples. The main challenge of this task is the novel categories are prone to dominated by color, texture, shape of the object or background context (namely specificity), which are distinct for the given few training samples but not common for the corresponding categories (see Figure 1). Fortunately, we find that transferring information of the correlated based categories can help learn the novel concepts and thus avoid the novel concept being dominated by the specificity. Besides, incorporating semantic correlations among different categories can effectively regularize this information transfer. In this work, we represent the semantic correlations in the form of structured knowledge graph and integrate this graph into deep neural networks to promote few-shot learning by a novel Knowledge Graph Transfer Network (KGTN). Specifically, by initializing each node with the classifier weight of the corresponding category, a propagation mechanism is learned to adaptively propagate node message through the graph to explore node interaction and transfer classifier information of the base categories to those of the novel ones. Extensive experiments on the ImageNet dataset show significant performance improvement compared with current leading competitors. Furthermore, we construct an ImageNet-6K dataset that covers larger scale categories, i.e, 6,000 categories, and experiments on this dataset further demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model.

Generalizing Energy-based Generative ConvNets from Particle Evolution Perspective

Compared with Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), the Energy-Based generative Model (EBM) possesses two appealing properties: i) it can be directly optimized without requiring an auxiliary network during the learning and synthesizing; ii) it can better approximate underlying distribution of the observed data by learning explicitly potential functions. This paper studies a branch of EBMs, i.e., the energy-based Generative ConvNet (GCN), which minimizes its energy function defined by a bottom-up ConvNet. From the perspective of particle physics, we solve the problem of unstable energy dissipation that might damage the quality of the synthesized samples during the maximum likelihood learning. Specifically, we establish a connection between FRAME model [1] and dynamic physics process and provide a generalized formulation of FRAME in discrete flow with a certain metric measure from particle perspective. To address KL-vanishing issue, we generalize the reformulated GCN from the KL discrete flow with KL divergence measure to a Jordan-Kinderleher-Otto (JKO) discrete flow with Wasserastein distance metric and derive a Wasserastein GCN (w-GCN). To further minimize the learning bias and improve the model generalization, we present a Generalized GCN (GGCN). GGCN introduces a hidden space mapping strategy and employs a normal distribution as hidden space for the reference distribution. Besides, it applies a matching trainable non-linear upsampling function for further generalization. Considering the limitation of the efficiency problem in MCMC based learning of EBMs, an amortized learning are also proposed to improve the learning efficiency. Quantitative and qualitative experiments are conducted on several widely-used face and natural image datasets. Our experimental results surpass those of the existing models in both model stability and the quality of generated samples.

Layout-Graph Reasoning for Fashion Landmark Detection

Detecting dense landmarks for diverse clothes, as a fundamental technique for clothes analysis, has attracted increasing research attention due to its huge application potential. However, due to the lack of modeling underlying semantic layout constraints among landmarks, prior works often detect ambiguous and structure-inconsistent landmarks of multiple overlapped clothes in one person. In this paper, we propose to seamlessly enforce structural layout relationships among landmarks on the intermediate representations via multiple stacked layout-graph reasoning layers. We define the layout-graph as a hierarchical structure including a root node, body-part nodes (e.g. upper body, lower body), coarse clothes-part nodes (e.g. collar, sleeve) and leaf landmark nodes (e.g. left-collar, right-collar). Each Layout-Graph Reasoning(LGR) layer aims to map feature representations into structural graph nodes via a Map-to-Node module, performs reasoning over structural graph nodes to achieve global layout coherency via a layout-graph reasoning module, and then maps graph nodes back to enhance feature representations via a Node-to-Map module. The layout-graph reasoning module integrates a graph clustering operation to generate representations of intermediate nodes (bottom-up inference) and then a graph deconvolution operation (top-down inference) over the whole graph. Extensive experiments on two public fashion landmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model. Furthermore, to advance the fine-grained fashion landmark research for supporting more comprehensive clothes generation and attribute recognition, we contribute the first Fine-grained Fashion Landmark Dataset (FFLD) containing 200k images annotated with at most 32 key-points for 13 clothes types.

Meta R-CNN : Towards General Solver for Instance-level Low-shot Learning

Resembling the rapid learning capability of human, low-shot learning empowers vision systems to understand new concepts by training with few samples. Leading approaches derived from meta-learning on images with a single visual object. Obfuscated by a complex background and multiple objects in one image, they are hard to promote the research of low-shot object detection/segmentation. In this work, we present a flexible and general methodology to achieve these tasks. Our work extends Faster /Mask R-CNN by proposing meta-learning over RoI (Region-of-Interest) features instead of a full image feature. This simple spirit disentangles multi-object information merged with the background, without bells and whistles, enabling Faster /Mask R-CNN turn into a meta-learner to achieve the tasks. Specifically, we introduce a Predictor-head Remodeling Network (PRN) that shares its main backbone with Faster /Mask R-CNN. PRN receives images containing low-shot objects with their bounding boxes or masks to infer their class attentive vectors. The vectors take channel-wise soft-attention on RoI features, remodeling those R-CNN predictor heads to detect or segment the objects that are consistent with the classes these vectors represent. In our experiments, Meta R-CNN yields the state of the art in low-shot object detection and improves low-shot object segmentation by Mask R-CNN.

Explainable High-order Visual Question Reasoning: A New Benchmark and Knowledge-routed Network

Explanation and high-order reasoning capabilities are crucial for real-world visual question answering with diverse levels of inference complexity (e.g., what is the dog that is near the girl playing with?) and important for users to understand and diagnose the trustworthiness of the system. Current VQA benchmarks on natural images with only an accuracy metric end up pushing the models to exploit the dataset biases and cannot provide any interpretable justification, which severally hinders advances in high-level question answering. In this work, we propose a new HVQR benchmark for evaluating explainable and high-order visual question reasoning ability with three distinguishable merits: 1) the questions often contain one or two relationship triplets, which requires the model to have the ability of multistep reasoning to predict plausible answers; 2) we provide an explicit evaluation on a multistep reasoning process that is constructed with image scene graphs and commonsense knowledge bases; and 3) each relationship triplet in a large-scale knowledge base only appears once among all questions, which poses challenges for existing networks that often attempt to overfit the knowledge base that already appears in the training set and enforces the models to handle unseen questions and knowledge fact usage. We also propose a new knowledge-routed modular network (KM-net) that incorporates the multistep reasoning process over a large knowledge base into visual question reasoning. An extensive dataset analysis and comparisons with existing models on the HVQR benchmark show that our benchmark provides explainable evaluations, comprehensive reasoning requirements and realistic challenges of VQA systems, as well as our KM-net's superiority in terms of accuracy and explanation ability.

ACFM: A Dynamic Spatial-Temporal Network for Traffic Prediction

As a crucial component in intelligent transportation systems, crowd flow prediction has recently attracted widespread research interest in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) with the increasing availability of large-scale traffic mobility data. Its key challenge lies in how to integrate diverse factors (such as temporal laws and spatial dependencies) to infer the evolution trend of crowd flow. To address this problem, we propose a unified neural network called Attentive Crowd Flow Machine (ACFM), which can effectively learn the spatial-temporal feature representations of crowd flow with an attention mechanism. In particular, our ACFM is composed of two progressive ConvLSTM units connected with a convolutional layer. Specifically, the first LSTM unit takes normal crowd flow features as input and generates a hidden state at each time-step, which is further fed into the connected convolutional layer for spatial attention map inference. The second LSTM unit aims at learning the dynamic spatial-temporal representations from the attentionally weighted crowd flow features. Further, we develop two deep frameworks based on ACFM to predict citywide short-term/long-term crowd flow by adaptively incorporating the sequential and periodic data as well as other external influences. Extensive experiments on two standard benchmarks well demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method for crowd flow prediction. Moreover, to verify the generalization of our method, we also apply the customized framework to forecast the passenger pickup/dropoff demands and show its superior performance in this traffic prediction task.

Fashion Retrieval via Graph Reasoning Networks on a Similarity Pyramid

Matching clothing images from customers and online shopping stores has rich applications in E-commerce. Existing algorithms encoded an image as a global feature vector and performed retrieval with the global representation. However, discriminative local information on clothes are submerged in this global representation, resulting in sub-optimal performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel Graph Reasoning Network (GRNet) on a Similarity Pyramid, which learns similarities between a query and a gallery cloth by using both global and local representations in multiple scales. The similarity pyramid is represented by a Graph of similarity, where nodes represent similarities between clothing components at different scales, and the final matching score is obtained by message passing along edges. In GRNet, graph reasoning is solved by training a graph convolutional network, enabling to align salient clothing components to improve clothing retrieval. To facilitate future researches, we introduce a new benchmark FindFashion, containing rich annotations of bounding boxes, views, occlusions, and cropping. Extensive experiments show that GRNet obtains new state-of-the-art results on two challenging benchmarks, e.g., pushing the top-1, top-20, and top-50 accuracies on DeepFashion to 26%, 64%, and 75% (i.e., 4%, 10%, and 10% absolute improvements), outperforming competitors with large margins. On FindFashion, GRNet achieves considerable improvements on all empirical settings.

Crowd Counting with Deep Structured Scale Integration Network

Automatic estimation of the number of people in unconstrained crowded scenes is a challenging task and one major difficulty stems from the huge scale variation of people. In this paper, we propose a novel Deep Structured Scale Integration Network (DSSINet) for crowd counting, which addresses the scale variation of people by using structured feature representation learning and hierarchically structured loss function optimization. Unlike conventional methods which directly fuse multiple features with weighted average or concatenation, we first introduce a Structured Feature Enhancement Module based on conditional random fields (CRFs) to refine multiscale features mutually with a message passing mechanism. In this module, each scale-specific feature is considered as a continuous random variable and passes complementary information to refine the features at other scales. Second, we utilize a Dilated Multiscale Structural Similarity loss to enforce our DSSINet to learn the local correlation of people's scales within regions of various size, thus yielding high-quality density maps. Extensive experiments on four challenging benchmarks well demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Specifically, our DSSINet achieves improvements of 9.5% error reduction on Shanghaitech dataset and 24.9% on UCF-QNRF dataset against the state-of-the-art methods.