Knowledge-Guided Multi-Label Few-Shot Learning for General Image Recognition

Recognizing multiple labels of an image is a practical yet challenging task, and remarkable progress has been achieved by searching for semantic regions and exploiting label dependencies. However, current works utilize RNN/LSTM to implicitly capture sequential region/label dependencies, which cannot fully explore mutual interactions among the semantic regions/labels and do not explicitly integrate label co-occurrences. In addition, these works require large amounts of training samples for each category, and they are unable to generalize to novel categories with limited samples. To address these issues, we propose a knowledge-guided graph routing (KGGR) framework, which unifies prior knowledge of statistical label correlations with deep neural networks. The framework exploits prior knowledge to guide adaptive information propagation among different categories to facilitate multi-label analysis and reduce the dependency of training samples. Specifically, it first builds a structured knowledge graph to correlate different labels based on statistical label co-occurrence. Then, it introduces the label semantics to guide learning semantic-specific features to initialize the graph, and it exploits a graph propagation network to explore graph node interactions, enabling learning contextualized image feature representations. Moreover, we initialize each graph node with the classifier weights for the corresponding label and apply another propagation network to transfer node messages through the graph. In this way, it can facilitate exploiting the information of correlated labels to help train better classifiers. We conduct extensive experiments on the traditional multi-label image recognition (MLR) and multi-label few-shot learning (ML-FSL) tasks and show that our KGGR framework outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods by sizable margins on the public benchmarks.

Collaborative Training between Region Proposal Localization and Classification for Domain Adaptive Object Detection

Object detectors are usually trained with large amount of labeled data, which is expensive and labor-intensive. Pre-trained detectors applied to unlabeled dataset always suffer from the difference of dataset distribution, also called domain shift. Domain adaptation for object detection tries to adapt the detector from labeled datasets to unlabeled ones for better performance. In this paper, we are the first to reveal that the region proposal network (RPN) and region proposal classifier~(RPC) in the endemic two-stage detectors (e.g., Faster RCNN) demonstrate significantly different transferability when facing large domain gap. The region classifier shows preferable performance but is limited without RPN's high-quality proposals while simple alignment in the backbone network is not effective enough for RPN adaptation. We delve into the consistency and the difference of RPN and RPC, treat them individually and leverage high-confidence output of one as mutual guidance to train the other. Moreover, the samples with low-confidence are used for discrepancy calculation between RPN and RPC and minimax optimization. Extensive experimental results on various scenarios have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed method in both domain-adaptive region proposal generation and object detection. Code is available at https://github.com/GanlongZhao/CST_DA_detection.

Reinforcement Learning for Weakly Supervised Temporal Grounding of Natural Language in Untrimmed Videos

Temporal grounding of natural language in untrimmed videos is a fundamental yet challenging multimedia task facilitating cross-media visual content retrieval. We focus on the weakly supervised setting of this task that merely accesses to coarse video-level language description annotation without temporal boundary, which is more consistent with reality as such weak labels are more readily available in practice. In this paper, we propose a \emph{Boundary Adaptive Refinement} (BAR) framework that resorts to reinforcement learning (RL) to guide the process of progressively refining the temporal boundary. To the best of our knowledge, we offer the first attempt to extend RL to temporal localization task with weak supervision. As it is non-trivial to obtain a straightforward reward function in the absence of pairwise granular boundary-query annotations, a cross-modal alignment evaluator is crafted to measure the alignment degree of segment-query pair to provide tailor-designed rewards. This refinement scheme completely abandons traditional sliding window based solution pattern and contributes to acquiring more efficient, boundary-flexible and content-aware grounding results. Extensive experiments on two public benchmarks Charades-STA and ActivityNet demonstrate that BAR outperforms the state-of-the-art weakly-supervised method and even beats some competitive fully-supervised ones.

Online Alternate Generator against Adversarial Attacks

The field of computer vision has witnessed phenomenal progress in recent years partially due to the development of deep convolutional neural networks. However, deep learning models are notoriously sensitive to adversarial examples which are synthesized by adding quasi-perceptible noises on real images. Some existing defense methods require to re-train attacked target networks and augment the train set via known adversarial attacks, which is inefficient and might be unpromising with unknown attack types. To overcome the above issues, we propose a portable defense method, online alternate generator, which does not need to access or modify the parameters of the target networks. The proposed method works by online synthesizing another image from scratch for an input image, instead of removing or destroying adversarial noises. To avoid pretrained parameters exploited by attackers, we alternately update the generator and the synthesized image at the inference stage. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed defensive scheme and method outperforms a series of state-of-the-art defending models against gray-box adversarial attacks.

Semantics-aware Adaptive Knowledge Distillation for Sensor-to-Vision Action Recognition

Existing vision-based action recognition is susceptible to occlusion and appearance variations, while wearable sensors can alleviate these challenges by capturing human motion with one-dimensional time-series signals (e.g. acceleration, gyroscope and orientation). For the same action, the knowledge learned from vision sensors (videos or images) and wearable sensors, may be related and complementary. However, there exists significantly large modality difference between action data captured by wearable-sensor and vision-sensor in data dimension, data distribution and inherent information content. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, named Semantics-aware Adaptive Knowledge Distillation Networks (SAKDN), to enhance action recognition in vision-sensor modality (videos) by adaptively transferring and distilling the knowledge from multiple wearable sensors. The SAKDN uses multiple wearable-sensors as teacher modalities and uses RGB videos as student modality. Specifically, we transform one-dimensional time-series signals of wearable sensors to two-dimensional images by designing a gramian angular field based virtual image generation model. Then, we build a novel Similarity-Preserving Adaptive Multi-modal Fusion Module (SPAMFM) to adaptively fuse intermediate representation knowledge from different teacher networks. To fully exploit and transfer the knowledge of multiple well-trained teacher networks to the student network, we propose a novel Graph-guided Semantically Discriminative Mapping (GSDM) loss, which utilizes graph-guided ablation analysis to produce a good visual explanation highlighting the important regions across modalities and concurrently preserving the interrelations of original data. Experimental results on Berkeley-MHAD, UTD-MHAD and MMAct datasets well demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed SAKDN.

Look into Facial Expression Domain Adaptation: Adversarial Graph Learning and A Fair Evaluation Benchmark

To address the problem of data inconsistencies among different facial expression recognition (FER) datasets, many cross-domain FER methods (CD-FERs) have been extensively devised in recent years. Although each declares to achieve superior performance, fair comparisons are lacking due to the inconsistent choices of the source/target datasets and feature extractors. In this work, we first analyze the performance effect caused by these inconsistent choices, and then re-implement some well-performing CD-FER and recently published domain adaptation algorithms. We ensure that all these algorithms adopt the same source datasets and feature extractors for fair CD-FER evaluations. We find that most of the current leading algorithms use adversarial learning to learn holistic domain-invariant features to mitigate domain shifts. However, these algorithms ignore local features, which are more transferable across different datasets and carry more detailed content for fine-grained adaptation. To address these issues, we integrate graph representation propagation with adversarial learning for cross-domain holistic-local feature co-adaptation by developing a novel adversarial graph representation adaptation (AGRA) framework. Specifically, it first builds two graphs to correlate holistic and local regions within each domain and across different domains, respectively. Then, it extracts holistic-local features from the input image and uses learnable per-class statistical distributions to initialize the corresponding graph nodes. Finally, two stacked graph convolution networks (GCNs) are adopted to propagate holistic-local features within each domain to explore their interaction and across different domains for holistic-local feature co-adaptation. We conduct extensive and fair evaluations on several popular benchmarks and show that the proposed AGRA framework outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.

Unsupervised Multi-view Clustering by Squeezing Hybrid Knowledge from Cross View and Each View

Multi-view clustering methods have been a focus in recent years because of their superiority in clustering performance. However, typical traditional multi-view clustering algorithms still have shortcomings in some aspects, such as removal of redundant information, utilization of various views and fusion of multi-view features. In view of these problems, this paper proposes a new multi-view clustering method, low-rank subspace multi-view clustering based on adaptive graph regularization. We construct two new data matrix decomposition models into a unified optimization model. In this framework, we address the significance of the common knowledge shared by the cross view and the unique knowledge of each view by presenting new low-rank and sparse constraints on the sparse subspace matrix. To ensure that we achieve effective sparse representation and clustering performance on the original data matrix, adaptive graph regularization and unsupervised clustering constraints are also incorporated in the proposed model to preserve the internal structural features of the data. Finally, the proposed method is compared with several state-of-the-art algorithms. Experimental results for five widely used multi-view benchmarks show that our proposed algorithm surpasses other state-of-the-art methods by a clear margin.

Component Divide-and-Conquer for Real-World Image Super-Resolution

In this paper, we present a large-scale Diverse Real-world image Super-Resolution dataset, i.e., DRealSR, as well as a divide-and-conquer Super-Resolution (SR) network, exploring the utility of guiding SR model with low-level image components. DRealSR establishes a new SR benchmark with diverse real-world degradation processes, mitigating the limitations of conventional simulated image degradation. In general, the targets of SR vary with image regions with different low-level image components, e.g., smoothness preserving for flat regions, sharpening for edges, and detail enhancing for textures. Learning an SR model with conventional pixel-wise loss usually is easily dominated by flat regions and edges, and fails to infer realistic details of complex textures. We propose a Component Divide-and-Conquer (CDC) model and a Gradient-Weighted (GW) loss for SR. Our CDC parses an image with three components, employs three Component-Attentive Blocks (CABs) to learn attentive masks and intermediate SR predictions with an intermediate supervision learning strategy, and trains an SR model following a divide-and-conquer learning principle. Our GW loss also provides a feasible way to balance the difficulties of image components for SR. Extensive experiments validate the superior performance of our CDC and the challenging aspects of our DRealSR dataset related to diverse real-world scenarios. Our dataset and codes are publicly available at https://github.com/xiezw5/Component-Divide-and-Conquer-for-Real-World-Image-Super-Resolution

Adversarial Graph Representation Adaptation for Cross-Domain Facial Expression Recognition

Data inconsistency and bias are inevitable among different facial expression recognition (FER) datasets due to subjective annotating process and different collecting conditions. Recent works resort to adversarial mechanisms that learn domain-invariant features to mitigate domain shift. However, most of these works focus on holistic feature adaptation, and they ignore local features that are more transferable across different datasets. Moreover, local features carry more detailed and discriminative content for expression recognition, and thus integrating local features may enable fine-grained adaptation. In this work, we propose a novel Adversarial Graph Representation Adaptation (AGRA) framework that unifies graph representation propagation with adversarial learning for cross-domain holistic-local feature co-adaptation. To achieve this, we first build a graph to correlate holistic and local regions within each domain and another graph to correlate these regions across different domains. Then, we learn the per-class statistical distribution of each domain and extract holistic-local features from the input image to initialize the corresponding graph nodes. Finally, we introduce two stacked graph convolution networks to propagate holistic-local feature within each domain to explore their interaction and across different domains for holistic-local feature co-adaptation. In this way, the AGRA framework can adaptively learn fine-grained domain-invariant features and thus facilitate cross-domain expression recognition. We conduct extensive and fair experiments on several popular benchmarks and show that the proposed AGRA framework achieves superior performance over previous state-of-the-art methods.

Fine-Grained Image Captioning with Global-Local Discriminative Objective

Significant progress has been made in recent years in image captioning, an active topic in the fields of vision and language. However, existing methods tend to yield overly general captions and consist of some of the most frequent words/phrases, resulting in inaccurate and indistinguishable descriptions (see Figure 1). This is primarily due to (i) the conservative characteristic of traditional training objectives that drives the model to generate correct but hardly discriminative captions for similar images and (ii) the uneven word distribution of the ground-truth captions, which encourages generating highly frequent words/phrases while suppressing the less frequent but more concrete ones. In this work, we propose a novel global-local discriminative objective that is formulated on top of a reference model to facilitate generating fine-grained descriptive captions. Specifically, from a global perspective, we design a novel global discriminative constraint that pulls the generated sentence to better discern the corresponding image from all others in the entire dataset. From the local perspective, a local discriminative constraint is proposed to increase attention such that it emphasizes the less frequent but more concrete words/phrases, thus facilitating the generation of captions that better describe the visual details of the given images. We evaluate the proposed method on the widely used MS-COCO dataset, where it outperforms the baseline methods by a sizable margin and achieves competitive performance over existing leading approaches. We also conduct self-retrieval experiments to demonstrate the discriminability of the proposed method.