Zen-NAS: A Zero-Shot NAS for High-Performance Deep Image Recognition

A key component in Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is an accuracy predictor which asserts the accuracy of a queried architecture. To build a high quality accuracy predictor, conventional NAS algorithms rely on training a mass of architectures or a big supernet. This step often consumes hundreds to thousands of GPU days, dominating the total search cost. To address this issue, we propose to replace the accuracy predictor with a novel model-complexity index named Zen-score. Instead of predicting model accuracy, Zen-score directly asserts the model complexity of a network without training its parameters. This is inspired by recent advances in deep learning theories which show that model complexity of a network positively correlates to its accuracy on the target dataset. The computation of Zen-score only takes a few forward inferences through a randomly initialized network using random Gaussian input. It is applicable to any Vanilla Convolutional Neural Networks (VCN-networks) or compatible variants, covering a majority of networks popular in real-world applications. When combining Zen-score with Evolutionary Algorithm, we obtain a novel Zero-Shot NAS algorithm named Zen-NAS. We conduct extensive experiments on CIFAR10/CIFAR100 and ImageNet. In summary, Zen-NAS is able to design high performance architectures in less than half GPU day (12 GPU hours). The resultant networks, named ZenNets, achieve up to $83.0\%$ top-1 accuracy on ImageNet. Comparing to EfficientNets-B3/B5 of the same or better accuracies, ZenNets are up to $5.6$ times faster on NVIDIA V100, $11$ times faster on NVIDIA T4, $2.6$ times faster on Google Pixel2 and uses $50\%$ less FLOPs. Our source code and pre-trained models are released on https://github.com/idstcv/ZenNAS.

Trear: Transformer-based RGB-D Egocentric Action Recognition

In this paper, we propose a \textbf{Tr}ansformer-based RGB-D \textbf{e}gocentric \textbf{a}ction \textbf{r}ecognition framework, called Trear. It consists of two modules, inter-frame attention encoder and mutual-attentional fusion block. Instead of using optical flow or recurrent units, we adopt self-attention mechanism to model the temporal structure of the data from different modalities. Input frames are cropped randomly to mitigate the effect of the data redundancy. Features from each modality are interacted through the proposed fusion block and combined through a simple yet effective fusion operation to produce a joint RGB-D representation. Empirical experiments on two large egocentric RGB-D datasets, THU-READ and FPHA, and one small dataset, WCVS, have shown that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art results by a large margin.

Transformer Guided Geometry Model for Flow-Based Unsupervised Visual Odometry

Existing unsupervised visual odometry (VO) methods either match pairwise images or integrate the temporal information using recurrent neural networks over a long sequence of images. They are either not accurate, time-consuming in training or error accumulative. In this paper, we propose a method consisting of two camera pose estimators that deal with the information from pairwise images and a short sequence of images respectively. For image sequences, a Transformer-like structure is adopted to build a geometry model over a local temporal window, referred to as Transformer-based Auxiliary Pose Estimator (TAPE). Meanwhile, a Flow-to-Flow Pose Estimator (F2FPE) is proposed to exploit the relationship between pairwise images. The two estimators are constrained through a simple yet effective consistency loss in training. Empirical evaluation has shown that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised learning-based methods by a large margin and performs comparably to supervised and traditional ones on the KITTI and Malaga dataset.

SAR-NAS: Skeleton-based Action Recognition via Neural Architecture Searching

This paper presents a study of automatic design of neural network architectures for skeleton-based action recognition. Specifically, we encode a skeleton-based action instance into a tensor and carefully define a set of operations to build two types of network cells: normal cells and reduction cells. The recently developed DARTS (Differentiable Architecture Search) is adopted to search for an effective network architecture that is built upon the two types of cells. All operations are 2D based in order to reduce the overall computation and search space. Experiments on the challenging NTU RGB+D and Kinectics datasets have verified that most of the networks developed to date for skeleton-based action recognition are likely not compact and efficient. The proposed method provides an approach to search for such a compact network that is able to achieve comparative or even better performance than the state-of-the-art methods.

Searching Multi-Rate and Multi-Modal Temporal Enhanced Networks for Gesture Recognition

Gesture recognition has attracted considerable attention owing to its great potential in applications. Although the great progress has been made recently in multi-modal learning methods, existing methods still lack effective integration to fully explore synergies among spatio-temporal modalities effectively for gesture recognition. The problems are partially due to the fact that the existing manually designed network architectures have low efficiency in the joint learning of multi-modalities. In this paper, we propose the first neural architecture search (NAS)-based method for RGB-D gesture recognition. The proposed method includes two key components: 1) enhanced temporal representation via the proposed 3D Central Difference Convolution (3D-CDC) family, which is able to capture rich temporal context via aggregating temporal difference information; and 2) optimized backbones for multi-sampling-rate branches and lateral connections among varied modalities. The resultant multi-modal multi-rate network provides a new perspective to understand the relationship between RGB and depth modalities and their temporal dynamics. Comprehensive experiments are performed on three benchmark datasets (IsoGD, NvGesture, and EgoGesture), demonstrating the state-of-the-art performance in both single- and multi-modality settings.The code is available at https://github.com/ZitongYu/3DCDC-NAS

RobustTAD: Robust Time Series Anomaly Detection via Decomposition and Convolutional Neural Networks

The monitoring and management of numerous and diverse time series data at Alibaba Group calls for an effective and scalable time series anomaly detection service. In this paper, we propose RobustTAD, a Robust Time series Anomaly Detection framework by integrating robust seasonal-trend decomposition and convolutional neural network for time series data. The seasonal-trend decomposition can effectively handle complicated patterns in time series, and meanwhile significantly simplifies the architecture of the neural network, which is an encoder-decoder architecture with skip connections. This architecture can effectively capture the multi-scale information from time series, which is very useful in anomaly detection. Due to the limited labeled data in time series anomaly detection, we systematically investigate data augmentation methods in both time and frequency domains. We also introduce label-based weight and value-based weight in the loss function by utilizing the unbalanced nature of the time series anomaly detection problem. Compared with the widely used forecasting-based anomaly detection algorithms, decomposition-based algorithms, traditional statistical algorithms, as well as recent neural network based algorithms, RobustTAD performs significantly better on public benchmark datasets. It is deployed as a public online service and widely adopted in different business scenarios at Alibaba Group.

RGB-D-based Human Motion Recognition with Deep Learning: A Survey

Human motion recognition is one of the most important branches of human-centered research activities. In recent years, motion recognition based on RGB-D data has attracted much attention. Along with the development in artificial intelligence, deep learning techniques have gained remarkable success in computer vision. In particular, convolutional neural networks (CNN) have achieved great success for image-based tasks, and recurrent neural networks (RNN) are renowned for sequence-based problems. Specifically, deep learning methods based on the CNN and RNN architectures have been adopted for motion recognition using RGB-D data. In this paper, a detailed overview of recent advances in RGB-D-based motion recognition is presented. The reviewed methods are broadly categorized into four groups, depending on the modality adopted for recognition: RGB-based, depth-based, skeleton-based and RGB+D-based. As a survey focused on the application of deep learning to RGB-D-based motion recognition, we explicitly discuss the advantages and limitations of existing techniques. Particularly, we highlighted the methods of encoding spatial-temporal-structural information inherent in video sequence, and discuss potential directions for future research.

Depth Pooling Based Large-scale 3D Action Recognition with Convolutional Neural Networks

This paper proposes three simple, compact yet effective representations of depth sequences, referred to respectively as Dynamic Depth Images (DDI), Dynamic Depth Normal Images (DDNI) and Dynamic Depth Motion Normal Images (DDMNI), for both isolated and continuous action recognition. These dynamic images are constructed from a segmented sequence of depth maps using hierarchical bidirectional rank pooling to effectively capture the spatial-temporal information. Specifically, DDI exploits the dynamics of postures over time and DDNI and DDMNI exploit the 3D structural information captured by depth maps. Upon the proposed representations, a ConvNet based method is developed for action recognition. The image-based representations enable us to fine-tune the existing Convolutional Neural Network (ConvNet) models trained on image data without training a large number of parameters from scratch. The proposed method achieved the state-of-art results on three large datasets, namely, the Large-scale Continuous Gesture Recognition Dataset (means Jaccard index 0.4109), the Large-scale Isolated Gesture Recognition Dataset (59.21%), and the NTU RGB+D Dataset (87.08% cross-subject and 84.22% cross-view) even though only the depth modality was used.

Cooperative Training of Deep Aggregation Networks for RGB-D Action Recognition

A novel deep neural network training paradigm that exploits the conjoint information in multiple heterogeneous sources is proposed. Specifically, in a RGB-D based action recognition task, it cooperatively trains a single convolutional neural network (named c-ConvNet) on both RGB visual features and depth features, and deeply aggregates the two kinds of features for action recognition. Differently from the conventional ConvNet that learns the deep separable features for homogeneous modality-based classification with only one softmax loss function, the c-ConvNet enhances the discriminative power of the deeply learned features and weakens the undesired modality discrepancy by jointly optimizing a ranking loss and a softmax loss for both homogeneous and heterogeneous modalities. The ranking loss consists of intra-modality and cross-modality triplet losses, and it reduces both the intra-modality and cross-modality feature variations. Furthermore, the correlations between RGB and depth data are embedded in the c-ConvNet, and can be retrieved by either of the modalities and contribute to the recognition in the case even only one of the modalities is available. The proposed method was extensively evaluated on two large RGB-D action recognition datasets, ChaLearn LAP IsoGD and NTU RGB+D datasets, and one small dataset, SYSU 3D HOI, and achieved state-of-the-art results.

Online Action Recognition based on Incremental Learning of Weighted Covariance Descriptors

Different from traditional action recognition based on video segments, online action recognition aims to recognize actions from unsegmented streams of data in a continuous manner. One way for online recognition is based on the evidence accumulation over time to make predictions from stream videos. This paper presents a fast yet effective method to recognize actions from stream of noisy skeleton data, and a novel weighted covariance descriptor is adopted to accumulate evidence. In particular, a fast incremental updating method for the weighted covariance descriptor is developed for accumulation of temporal information and online prediction. The weighted covariance descriptor takes the following principles into consideration: past frames have less contribution for recognition and recent and informative frames such as key frames contribute more to the recognition. The online recognition is achieved using a simple nearest neighbor search against a set of offline trained action models. Experimental results on MSC-12 Kinect Gesture dataset and our newly constructed online action recognition dataset have demonstrated the efficacy of the proposed method.