Dynamic Hybrid Relation Network for Cross-Domain Context-Dependent Semantic Parsing

Semantic parsing has long been a fundamental problem in natural language processing. Recently, cross-domain context-dependent semantic parsing has become a new focus of research. Central to the problem is the challenge of leveraging contextual information of both natural language utterance and database schemas in the interaction history. In this paper, we present a dynamic graph framework that is capable of effectively modelling contextual utterances, tokens, database schemas, and their complicated interaction as the conversation proceeds. The framework employs a dynamic memory decay mechanism that incorporates inductive bias to integrate enriched contextual relation representation, which is further enhanced with a powerful reranking model. At the time of writing, we demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms all existing models by large margins, achieving new state-of-the-art performance on two large-scale benchmarks, the SParC and CoSQL datasets. Specifically, the model attains a 55.8% question-match and 30.8% interaction-match accuracy on SParC, and a 46.8% question-match and 17.0% interaction-match accuracy on CoSQL.

SPL-MLL: Selecting Predictable Landmarks for Multi-Label Learning

Although significant progress achieved, multi-label classification is still challenging due to the complexity of correlations among different labels. Furthermore, modeling the relationships between input and some (dull) classes further increases the difficulty of accurately predicting all possible labels. In this work, we propose to select a small subset of labels as landmarks which are easy to predict according to input (predictable) and can well recover the other possible labels (representative). Different from existing methods which separate the landmark selection and landmark prediction in the 2-step manner, the proposed algorithm, termed Selecting Predictable Landmarks for Multi-Label Learning (SPL-MLL), jointly conducts landmark selection, landmark prediction, and label recovery in a unified framework, to ensure both the representativeness and predictableness for selected landmarks. We employ the Alternating Direction Method (ADM) to solve our problem. Empirical studies on real-world datasets show that our method achieves superior classification performance over other state-of-the-art methods.

Spatial Attention Pyramid Network for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised domain adaptation is critical in various computer vision tasks, such as object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation, which aims to alleviate performance degradation caused by domain-shift. Most of previous methods rely on a single-mode distribution of source and target domains to align them with adversarial learning, leading to inferior results in various scenarios. To that end, in this paper, we design a new spatial attention pyramid network for unsupervised domain adaptation. Specifically, we first build the spatial pyramid representation to capture context information of objects at different scales. Guided by the task-specific information, we combine the dense global structure representation and local texture patterns at each spatial location effectively using the spatial attention mechanism. In this way, the network is enforced to focus on the discriminative regions with context information for domain adaption. We conduct extensive experiments on various challenging datasets for unsupervised domain adaptation on object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation, which demonstrates that our method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Our source code is available at code_path.

Rethinking Object Detection in Retail Stores

The convention standard for object detection uses a bounding box to represent each individual object instance. However, it is not practical in the industry-relevant applications in the context of warehouses due to severe occlusions among groups of instances of the same categories. In this paper, we propose a new task, ie, simultaneously object localization and counting, abbreviated as Locount, which requires algorithms to localize groups of objects of interest with the number of instances. However, there does not exist a dataset or benchmark designed for such a task. To this end, we collect a large-scale object localization and counting dataset with rich annotations in retail stores, which consists of 50,394 images with more than 1.9 million object instances in 140 categories. Together with this dataset, we provide a new evaluation protocol and divide the training and testing subsets to fairly evaluate the performance of algorithms for Locount, developing a new benchmark for the Locount task. Moreover, we present a cascaded localization and counting network as a strong baseline, which gradually classifies and regresses the bounding boxes of objects with the predicted numbers of instances enclosed in the bounding boxes, trained in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments are conducted on the proposed dataset to demonstrate its significance and the analysis discussions on failure cases are provided to indicate future directions. Dataset is available at https://isrc.iscas.ac.cn/gitlab/research/locount-dataset.

Multi-Drone based Single Object Tracking with Agent Sharing Network

Drone equipped with cameras can dynamically track the target in the air from a broader view compared with static cameras or moving sensors over the ground. However, it is still challenging to accurately track the target using a single drone due to several factors such as appearance variations and severe occlusions. In this paper, we collect a new Multi-Drone single Object Tracking (MDOT) dataset that consists of 92 groups of video clips with 113,918 high resolution frames taken by two drones and 63 groups of video clips with 145,875 high resolution frames taken by three drones. Besides, two evaluation metrics are specially designed for multi-drone single object tracking, i.e. automatic fusion score (AFS) and ideal fusion score (IFS). Moreover, an agent sharing network (ASNet) is proposed by self-supervised template sharing and view-aware fusion of the target from multiple drones, which can improve the tracking accuracy significantly compared with single drone tracking. Extensive experiments on MDOT show that our ASNet significantly outperforms recent state-of-the-art trackers.

Drone Based RGBT Vehicle Detection and Counting: A Challenge

Camera-equipped drones can capture targets on the ground from a wider field of view than static cameras or moving sensors over the ground. In this paper we present a large-scale vehicle detection and counting benchmark, named DroneVehicle, aiming at advancing visual analysis tasks on the drone platform. The images in the benchmark were captured over various urban areas, which include different types of urban roads, residential areas, parking lots, highways, etc., from day to night. Specifically, DroneVehicle consists of 15,532 pairs of images, i.e., RGB images and infrared images with rich annotations, including oriented object bounding boxes, object categories, etc. With intensive amount of effort, our benchmark has 441,642 annotated instances in 31,064 images. As a large-scale dataset with both RGB and thermal infrared (RGBT) images, the benchmark enables extensive evaluation and investigation of visual analysis algorithms on the drone platform. In particular, we design two popular tasks with the benchmark, including object detection and object counting. All these tasks are extremely challenging in the proposed dataset due to factors such as illumination, occlusion, and scale variations. We hope the benchmark largely boost the research and development in visual analysis on drone platforms. The DroneVehicle dataset can be download from https://github.com/VisDrone/DroneVehicle.

Dual Multi-head Co-attention for Multi-choice Reading Comprehension

Multi-choice Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) requires model to decide the correct answer from a set of answer options when given a passage and a question. Thus in addition to a powerful pre-trained Language Model as encoder, multi-choice MRC especially relies on a matching network design which is supposed to effectively capture the relationship among the triplet of passage, question and answers. While the latest pre-trained Language Models have shown powerful enough even without the support from a matching network, and the latest matching network has been complicated enough, we thus propose a novel going-back-to-the-basic solution which straightforwardly models the MRC relationship as attention mechanism inside network. The proposed DUal Multi-head Co-Attention (DUMA) has been shown simple but effective and is capable of generally promoting pre-trained Language Models. Our proposed method is evaluated on two benchmark multi-choice MRC tasks, DREAM and RACE, showing that in terms of strong Language Models, DUMA may still boost the model to reach new state-of-the-art performance.

Vision Meets Drones: Past, Present and Future

Drones, or general UAVs, equipped with cameras have been fast deployed with a wide range of applications, including agriculture, aerial photography, fast delivery, and surveillance. Consequently, automatic understanding of visual data collected from drones becomes highly demanding, bringing computer vision and drones more and more closely. To promote and track the developments of object detection and tracking algorithms, we have organized two challenge workshops in conjunction with European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2018, and IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2019, attracting more than 100 teams around the world. We provide a large-scale drone captured dataset, VisDrone, which includes four tracks, i.e., (1) image object detection, (2) video object detection, (3) single object tracking, and (4) multi-object tracking. This paper first presents a thorough review of object detection and tracking datasets and benchmarks, and discuss the challenges of collecting large-scale drone-based object detection and tracking datasets with fully manual annotations. After that, we describe our VisDrone dataset, which is captured over various urban/suburban areas of $14$ different cities across China from North to South. Being the largest such dataset ever published, VisDrone enables extensive evaluation and investigation of visual analysis algorithms on the drone platform. We provide a detailed analysis of the current state of the field of large-scale object detection and tracking on drones, and conclude the challenge as well as propose future directions and improvements. We expect the benchmark largely boost the research and development in video analysis on drone platforms. All the datasets and experimental results can be downloaded from the website: https://github.com/VisDrone/VisDrone-Dataset.

Drone-based Joint Density Map Estimation, Localization and Tracking with Space-Time Multi-Scale Attention Network

This paper proposes a space-time multi-scale attention network (STANet) to solve density map estimation, localization and tracking in dense crowds of video clips captured by drones with arbitrary crowd density, perspective, and flight altitude. Our STANet method aggregates multi-scale feature maps in sequential frames to exploit the temporal coherency, and then predict the density maps, localize the targets, and associate them in crowds simultaneously. A coarse-to-fine process is designed to gradually apply the attention module on the aggregated multi-scale feature maps to enforce the network to exploit the discriminative space-time features for better performance. The whole network is trained in an end-to-end manner with the multi-task loss, formed by three terms, i.e., the density map loss, localization loss and association loss. The non-maximal suppression followed by the min-cost flow framework is used to generate the trajectories of targets' in scenarios. Since existing crowd counting datasets merely focus on crowd counting in static cameras rather than density map estimation, counting and tracking in crowds on drones, we have collected a new large-scale drone-based dataset, DroneCrowd, formed by 112 video clips with 33,600 high resolution frames (i.e., 1920x1080) captured in 70 different scenarios. With intensive amount of effort, our dataset provides 20,800 people trajectories with 4.8 million head annotations and several video-level attributes in sequences. Extensive experiments are conducted on two challenging public datasets, i.e., Shanghaitech and UCF-QNRF, and our DroneCrowd, to demonstrate that STANet achieves favorable performance against the state-of-the-arts. The datasets and codes can be found at https://github.com/VisDrone.

ECA-Net: Efficient Channel Attention for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Channel attention has recently demonstrated to offer great potential in improving the performance of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, most existing methods dedicate to developing more sophisticated attention modules to achieve better performance, inevitably increasing the computational burden. To overcome the paradox of performance and complexity trade-off, this paper makes an attempt to investigate an extremely lightweight attention module for boosting the performance of deep CNNs. In particular, we propose an Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) module, which only involves $k (k < 9)$ parameters but brings clear performance gain. By revisiting the channel attention module in SENet, we empirically show avoiding dimensionality reduction and appropriate cross-channel interaction are important to learn effective channel attention. Therefore, we propose a local cross-channel interaction strategy without dimension reduction, which can be efficiently implemented by a fast 1D convolution. Furthermore, we develop a function of channel dimension to adaptively determine kernel size of 1D convolution, which stands for coverage of local cross-channel interaction. Our ECA module can be flexibly incorporated into existing CNN architectures, and the resulting CNNs are named by ECA-Net. We extensively evaluate the proposed ECA-Net on image classification, object detection and instance segmentation with backbones of ResNets and MobileNetV2. The experimental results show our ECA-Net is more efficient while performing favorably against its counterparts. The source code and models can be available at https://github.com/BangguWu/ECANet.