GridFormer: Residual Dense Transformer with Grid Structure for Image Restoration in Adverse Weather Conditions

Image restoration in adverse weather conditions is a difficult task in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a novel transformer-based framework called GridFormer which serves as a backbone for image restoration under adverse weather conditions. GridFormer is designed in a grid structure using a residual dense transformer block, and it introduces two core designs. First, it uses an enhanced attention mechanism in the transformer layer. The mechanism includes stages of the sampler and compact self-attention to improve efficiency, and a local enhancement stage to strengthen local information. Second, we introduce a residual dense transformer block (RDTB) as the final GridFormer layer. This design further improves the network's ability to learn effective features from both preceding and current local features. The GridFormer framework achieves state-of-the-art results on five diverse image restoration tasks in adverse weather conditions, including image deraining, dehazing, deraining & dehazing, desnowing, and multi-weather restoration. The source code and pre-trained models will be released.

iEdit: Localised Text-guided Image Editing with Weak Supervision

Diffusion models (DMs) can generate realistic images with text guidance using large-scale datasets. However, they demonstrate limited controllability in the output space of the generated images. We propose a novel learning method for text-guided image editing, namely \texttt{iEdit}, that generates images conditioned on a source image and a textual edit prompt. As a fully-annotated dataset with target images does not exist, previous approaches perform subject-specific fine-tuning at test time or adopt contrastive learning without a target image, leading to issues on preserving the fidelity of the source image. We propose to automatically construct a dataset derived from LAION-5B, containing pseudo-target images with their descriptive edit prompts given input image-caption pairs. This dataset gives us the flexibility of introducing a weakly-supervised loss function to generate the pseudo-target image from the latent noise of the source image conditioned on the edit prompt. To encourage localised editing and preserve or modify spatial structures in the image, we propose a loss function that uses segmentation masks to guide the editing during training and optionally at inference. Our model is trained on the constructed dataset with 200K samples and constrained GPU resources. It shows favourable results against its counterparts in terms of image fidelity, CLIP alignment score and qualitatively for editing both generated and real images.

MAPConNet: Self-supervised 3D Pose Transfer with Mesh and Point Contrastive Learning

3D pose transfer is a challenging generation task that aims to transfer the pose of a source geometry onto a target geometry with the target identity preserved. Many prior methods require keypoint annotations to find correspondence between the source and target. Current pose transfer methods allow end-to-end correspondence learning but require the desired final output as ground truth for supervision. Unsupervised methods have been proposed for graph convolutional models but they require ground truth correspondence between the source and target inputs. We present a novel self-supervised framework for 3D pose transfer which can be trained in unsupervised, semi-supervised, or fully supervised settings without any correspondence labels. We introduce two contrastive learning constraints in the latent space: a mesh-level loss for disentangling global patterns including pose and identity, and a point-level loss for discriminating local semantics. We demonstrate quantitatively and qualitatively that our method achieves state-of-the-art results in supervised 3D pose transfer, with comparable results in unsupervised and semi-supervised settings. Our method is also generalisable to unseen human and animal data with complex topologies.

PoseMatcher: One-shot 6D Object Pose Estimation by Deep Feature Matching

Estimating the pose of an unseen object is the goal of the challenging one-shot pose estimation task. Previous methods have heavily relied on feature matching with great success. However, these methods are often inefficient and limited by their reliance on pre-trained models that have not be designed specifically for pose estimation. In this paper we propose PoseMatcher, an accurate model free one-shot object pose estimator that overcomes these limitations. We create a new training pipeline for object to image matching based on a three-view system: a query with a positive and negative templates. This simple yet effective approach emulates test time scenarios by cheaply constructing an approximation of the full object point cloud during training. To enable PoseMatcher to attend to distinct input modalities, an image and a pointcloud, we introduce IO-Layer, a new attention layer that efficiently accommodates self and cross attention between the inputs. Moreover, we propose a pruning strategy where we iteratively remove redundant regions of the target object to further reduce the complexity and noise of the network while maintaining accuracy. Finally we redesign commonly used pose refinement strategies, zoom and 2D offset refinements, and adapt them to the one-shot paradigm. We outperform all prior one-shot pose estimation methods on the Linemod and YCB-V datasets as well achieve results rivaling recent instance-level methods. The source code and models are available at https://github.com/PedroCastro/PoseMatcher.

Unsupervised Contour Tracking of Live Cells by Mechanical and Cycle Consistency Losses

Analyzing the dynamic changes of cellular morphology is important for understanding the various functions and characteristics of live cells, including stem cells and metastatic cancer cells. To this end, we need to track all points on the highly deformable cellular contour in every frame of live cell video. Local shapes and textures on the contour are not evident, and their motions are complex, often with expansion and contraction of local contour features. The prior arts for optical flow or deep point set tracking are unsuited due to the fluidity of cells, and previous deep contour tracking does not consider point correspondence. We propose the first deep learning-based tracking of cellular (or more generally viscoelastic materials) contours with point correspondence by fusing dense representation between two contours with cross attention. Since it is impractical to manually label dense tracking points on the contour, unsupervised learning comprised of the mechanical and cyclical consistency losses is proposed to train our contour tracker. The mechanical loss forcing the points to move perpendicular to the contour effectively helps out. For quantitative evaluation, we labeled sparse tracking points along the contour of live cells from two live cell datasets taken with phase contrast and confocal fluorescence microscopes. Our contour tracker quantitatively outperforms compared methods and produces qualitatively more favorable results. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/JunbongJang/contour-tracking/

Im2Hands: Learning Attentive Implicit Representation of Interacting Two-Hand Shapes

We present Implicit Two Hands (Im2Hands), the first neural implicit representation of two interacting hands. Unlike existing methods on two-hand reconstruction that rely on a parametric hand model and/or low-resolution meshes, Im2Hands can produce fine-grained geometry of two hands with high hand-to-hand and hand-to-image coherency. To handle the shape complexity and interaction context between two hands, Im2Hands models the occupancy volume of two hands - conditioned on an RGB image and coarse 3D keypoints - by two novel attention-based modules responsible for (1) initial occupancy estimation and (2) context-aware occupancy refinement, respectively. Im2Hands first learns per-hand neural articulated occupancy in the canonical space designed for each hand using query-image attention. It then refines the initial two-hand occupancy in the posed space to enhance the coherency between the two hand shapes using query-anchor attention. In addition, we introduce an optional keypoint refinement module to enable robust two-hand shape estimation from predicted hand keypoints in a single-image reconstruction scenario. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of Im2Hands on two-hand reconstruction in comparison to related methods, where ours achieves state-of-the-art results. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/jyunlee/Im2Hands.

MoBYv2AL: Self-supervised Active Learning for Image Classification

Active learning(AL) has recently gained popularity for deep learning(DL) models. This is due to efficient and informative sampling, especially when the learner requires large-scale labelled datasets. Commonly, the sampling and training happen in stages while more batches are added. One main bottleneck in this strategy is the narrow representation learned by the model that affects the overall AL selection. We present MoBYv2AL, a novel self-supervised active learning framework for image classification. Our contribution lies in lifting MoBY, one of the most successful self-supervised learning algorithms, to the AL pipeline. Thus, we add the downstream task-aware objective function and optimize it jointly with contrastive loss. Further, we derive a data-distribution selection function from labelling the new examples. Finally, we test and study our pipeline robustness and performance for image classification tasks. We successfully achieved state-of-the-art results when compared to recent AL methods. Code available: https://github.com/razvancaramalau/MoBYv2AL

Semi-Supervised Object Detection with Object-wise Contrastive Learning and Regression Uncertainty

Semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) aims to boost detection performance by leveraging extra unlabeled data. The teacher-student framework has been shown to be promising for SSOD, in which a teacher network generates pseudo-labels for unlabeled data to assist the training of a student network. Since the pseudo-labels are noisy, filtering the pseudo-labels is crucial to exploit the potential of such framework. Unlike existing suboptimal methods, we propose a two-step pseudo-label filtering for the classification and regression heads in a teacher-student framework. For the classification head, OCL (Object-wise Contrastive Learning) regularizes the object representation learning that utilizes unlabeled data to improve pseudo-label filtering by enhancing the discriminativeness of the classification score. This is designed to pull together objects in the same class and push away objects from different classes. For the regression head, we further propose RUPL (Regression-Uncertainty-guided Pseudo-Labeling) to learn the aleatoric uncertainty of object localization for label filtering. By jointly filtering the pseudo-labels for the classification and regression heads, the student network receives better guidance from the teacher network for object detection task. Experimental results on Pascal VOC and MS-COCO datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method with competitive performance compared to existing methods.

Pop-Out Motion: 3D-Aware Image Deformation via Learning the Shape Laplacian

We propose a framework that can deform an object in a 2D image as it exists in 3D space. Most existing methods for 3D-aware image manipulation are limited to (1) only changing the global scene information or depth, or (2) manipulating an object of specific categories. In this paper, we present a 3D-aware image deformation method with minimal restrictions on shape category and deformation type. While our framework leverages 2D-to-3D reconstruction, we argue that reconstruction is not sufficient for realistic deformations due to the vulnerability to topological errors. Thus, we propose to take a supervised learning-based approach to predict the shape Laplacian of the underlying volume of a 3D reconstruction represented as a point cloud. Given the deformation energy calculated using the predicted shape Laplacian and user-defined deformation handles (e.g., keypoints), we obtain bounded biharmonic weights to model plausible handle-based image deformation. In the experiments, we present our results of deforming 2D character and clothed human images. We also quantitatively show that our approach can produce more accurate deformation weights compared to alternative methods (i.e., mesh reconstruction and point cloud Laplacian methods).

Modular Adaptive Policy Selection for Multi-Task Imitation Learning through Task Division

Deep imitation learning requires many expert demonstrations, which can be hard to obtain, especially when many tasks are involved. However, different tasks often share similarities, so learning them jointly can greatly benefit them and alleviate the need for many demonstrations. But, joint multi-task learning often suffers from negative transfer, sharing information that should be task-specific. In this work, we introduce a method to perform multi-task imitation while allowing for task-specific features. This is done by using proto-policies as modules to divide the tasks into simple sub-behaviours that can be shared. The proto-policies operate in parallel and are adaptively chosen by a selector mechanism that is jointly trained with the modules. Experiments on different sets of tasks show that our method improves upon the accuracy of single agents, task-conditioned and multi-headed multi-task agents, as well as state-of-the-art meta learning agents. We also demonstrate its ability to autonomously divide the tasks into both shared and task-specific sub-behaviours.