Learning High-Precision Bounding Box for Rotated Object Detection via Kullback-Leibler Divergence

Existing rotated object detectors are mostly inherited from the horizontal detection paradigm, as the latter has evolved into a well-developed area. However, these detectors are difficult to perform prominently in high-precision detection due to the limitation of current regression loss design, especially for objects with large aspect ratios. Taking the perspective that horizontal detection is a special case for rotated object detection, in this paper, we are motivated to change the design of rotation regression loss from induction paradigm to deduction methodology, in terms of the relation between rotation and horizontal detection. We show that one essential challenge is how to modulate the coupled parameters in the rotation regression loss, as such the estimated parameters can influence to each other during the dynamic joint optimization, in an adaptive and synergetic way. Specifically, we first convert the rotated bounding box into a 2-D Gaussian distribution, and then calculate the Kullback-Leibler Divergence (KLD) between the Gaussian distributions as the regression loss. By analyzing the gradient of each parameter, we show that KLD (and its derivatives) can dynamically adjust the parameter gradients according to the characteristics of the object. It will adjust the importance (gradient weight) of the angle parameter according to the aspect ratio. This mechanism can be vital for high-precision detection as a slight angle error would cause a serious accuracy drop for large aspect ratios objects. More importantly, we have proved that KLD is scale invariant. We further show that the KLD loss can be degenerated into the popular $l_{n}$-norm loss for horizontal detection. Experimental results on seven datasets using different detectors show its consistent superiority, and codes are available at https://github.com/yangxue0827/RotationDetection.

Large-Scale Spatio-Temporal Person Re-identification: Algorithm and Benchmark

Person re-identification (re-ID) in the scenario with large spatial and temporal spans has not been fully explored. This is partially because that, existing benchmark datasets were mainly collected with limited spatial and temporal ranges, e.g., using videos recorded in a few days by cameras in a specific region of the campus. Such limited spatial and temporal ranges make it hard to simulate the difficulties of person re-ID in real scenarios. In this work, we contribute a novel Large-scale Spatio-Temporal (LaST) person re-ID dataset, including 10,860 identities with more than 224k images. Compared with existing datasets, LaST presents more challenging and high-diversity reID settings, and significantly larger spatial and temporal ranges. For instance, each person can appear in different cities or countries, and in various time slots from daytime to night, and in different seasons from spring to winter. To our best knowledge, LaST is a novel person re-ID dataset with the largest spatiotemporal ranges. Based on LaST, we verified its challenge by conducting a comprehensive performance evaluation of 14 re-ID algorithms. We further propose an easy-to-implement baseline that works well on such challenging re-ID setting. We also verified that models pre-trained on LaST can generalize well on existing datasets with short-term and cloth-changing scenarios. We expect LaST to inspire future works toward more realistic and challenging re-ID tasks. More information about the dataset is available at https://github.com/shuxjweb/last.git.

Analysis and Applications of Class-wise Robustness in Adversarial Training

Adversarial training is one of the most effective approaches to improve model robustness against adversarial examples. However, previous works mainly focus on the overall robustness of the model, and the in-depth analysis on the role of each class involved in adversarial training is still missing. In this paper, we propose to analyze the class-wise robustness in adversarial training. First, we provide a detailed diagnosis of adversarial training on six benchmark datasets, i.e., MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN, STL-10 and ImageNet. Surprisingly, we find that there are remarkable robustness discrepancies among classes, leading to unbalance/unfair class-wise robustness in the robust models. Furthermore, we keep investigating the relations between classes and find that the unbalanced class-wise robustness is pretty consistent among different attack and defense methods. Moreover, we observe that the stronger attack methods in adversarial learning achieve performance improvement mainly from a more successful attack on the vulnerable classes (i.e., classes with less robustness). Inspired by these interesting findings, we design a simple but effective attack method based on the traditional PGD attack, named Temperature-PGD attack, which proposes to enlarge the robustness disparity among classes with a temperature factor on the confidence distribution of each image. Experiments demonstrate our method can achieve a higher attack rate than the PGD attack. Furthermore, from the defense perspective, we also make some modifications in the training and inference phases to improve the robustness of the most vulnerable class, so as to mitigate the large difference in class-wise robustness. We believe our work can contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of adversarial training as well as rethinking the class-wise properties in robust models.

Exploring the Diversity and Invariance in Yourself for Visual Pre-Training Task

Recently, self-supervised learning methods have achieved remarkable success in visual pre-training task. By simply pulling the different augmented views of each image together or other novel mechanisms, they can learn much unsupervised knowledge and significantly improve the transfer performance of pre-training models. However, these works still cannot avoid the representation collapse problem, i.e., they only focus on limited regions or the extracted features on totally different regions inside each image are nearly the same. Generally, this problem makes the pre-training models cannot sufficiently describe the multi-grained information inside images, which further limits the upper bound of their transfer performance. To alleviate this issue, this paper introduces a simple but effective mechanism, called Exploring the Diversity and Invariance in Yourself E-DIY. By simply pushing the most different regions inside each augmented view away, E-DIY can preserve the diversity of extracted region-level features. By pulling the most similar regions from different augmented views of the same image together, E-DIY can ensure the robustness of region-level features. Benefited from the above diversity and invariance exploring mechanism, E-DIY maximally extracts the multi-grained visual information inside each image. Extensive experiments on downstream tasks demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach, e.g., there are 2.1% improvements compared with the strong baseline BYOL on COCO while fine-tuning Mask R-CNN with the R50-C4 backbone and 1X learning schedule.

MSG-Transformer: Exchanging Local Spatial Information by Manipulating Messenger Tokens

Transformers have offered a new methodology of designing neural networks for visual recognition. Compared to convolutional networks, Transformers enjoy the ability of referring to global features at each stage, yet the attention module brings higher computational overhead that obstructs the application of Transformers to process high-resolution visual data. This paper aims to alleviate the conflict between efficiency and flexibility, for which we propose a specialized token for each region that serves as a messenger (MSG). Hence, by manipulating these MSG tokens, one can flexibly exchange visual information across regions and the computational complexity is reduced. We then integrate the MSG token into a multi-scale architecture named MSG-Transformer. In standard image classification and object detection, MSG-Transformer achieves competitive performance and the inference on both GPU and CPU is accelerated. The code will be available at https://github.com/hustvl/MSG-Transformer.

What Is Considered Complete for Visual Recognition?

This is an opinion paper. We hope to deliver a key message that current visual recognition systems are far from complete, i.e., recognizing everything that human can recognize, yet it is very unlikely that the gap can be bridged by continuously increasing human annotations. Based on the observation, we advocate for a new type of pre-training task named learning-by-compression. The computational models (e.g., a deep network) are optimized to represent the visual data using compact features, and the features preserve the ability to recover the original data. Semantic annotations, when available, play the role of weak supervision. An important yet challenging issue is the evaluation of image recovery, where we suggest some design principles and future research directions. We hope our proposal can inspire the community to pursue the compression-recovery tradeoff rather than the accuracy-complexity tradeoff.

Towards Compact CNNs via Collaborative Compression

Channel pruning and tensor decomposition have received extensive attention in convolutional neural network compression. However, these two techniques are traditionally deployed in an isolated manner, leading to significant accuracy drop when pursuing high compression rates. In this paper, we propose a Collaborative Compression (CC) scheme, which joints channel pruning and tensor decomposition to compress CNN models by simultaneously learning the model sparsity and low-rankness. Specifically, we first investigate the compression sensitivity of each layer in the network, and then propose a Global Compression Rate Optimization that transforms the decision problem of compression rate into an optimization problem. After that, we propose multi-step heuristic compression to remove redundant compression units step-by-step, which fully considers the effect of the remaining compression space (i.e., unremoved compression units). Our method demonstrates superior performance gains over previous ones on various datasets and backbone architectures. For example, we achieve 52.9% FLOPs reduction by removing 48.4% parameters on ResNet-50 with only a Top-1 accuracy drop of 0.56% on ImageNet 2012.

A Fourier-based Framework for Domain Generalization

Modern deep neural networks suffer from performance degradation when evaluated on testing data under different distributions from training data. Domain generalization aims at tackling this problem by learning transferable knowledge from multiple source domains in order to generalize to unseen target domains. This paper introduces a novel Fourier-based perspective for domain generalization. The main assumption is that the Fourier phase information contains high-level semantics and is not easily affected by domain shifts. To force the model to capture phase information, we develop a novel Fourier-based data augmentation strategy called amplitude mix which linearly interpolates between the amplitude spectrums of two images. A dual-formed consistency loss called co-teacher regularization is further introduced between the predictions induced from original and augmented images. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks have demonstrated that the proposed method is able to achieve state-of-the-arts performance for domain generalization.