BEST: BERT Pre-Training for Sign Language Recognition with Coupling Tokenization

In this work, we are dedicated to leveraging the BERT pre-training success and modeling the domain-specific statistics to fertilize the sign language recognition~(SLR) model. Considering the dominance of hand and body in sign language expression, we organize them as pose triplet units and feed them into the Transformer backbone in a frame-wise manner. Pre-training is performed via reconstructing the masked triplet unit from the corrupted input sequence, which learns the hierarchical correlation context cues among internal and external triplet units. Notably, different from the highly semantic word token in BERT, the pose unit is a low-level signal originally located in continuous space, which prevents the direct adoption of the BERT cross-entropy objective. To this end, we bridge this semantic gap via coupling tokenization of the triplet unit. It adaptively extracts the discrete pseudo label from the pose triplet unit, which represents the semantic gesture/body state. After pre-training, we fine-tune the pre-trained encoder on the downstream SLR task, jointly with the newly added task-specific layer. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, achieving new state-of-the-art performance on all four benchmarks with a notable gain.

Recurrent Contour-based Instance Segmentation with Progressive Learning

Contour-based instance segmentation has been actively studied, thanks to its flexibility and elegance in processing visual objects within complex backgrounds. In this work, we propose a novel deep network architecture, i.e., PolySnake, for contour-based instance segmentation. Motivated by the classic Snake algorithm, the proposed PolySnake achieves superior and robust segmentation performance with an iterative and progressive contour refinement strategy. Technically, PolySnake introduces a recurrent update operator to estimate the object contour iteratively. It maintains a single estimate of the contour that is progressively deformed toward the object boundary. At each iteration, PolySnake builds a semantic-rich representation for the current contour and feeds it to the recurrent operator for further contour adjustment. Through the iterative refinements, the contour finally progressively converges to a stable status that tightly encloses the object instance. Moreover, with a compact design of the recurrent architecture, we ensure the running efficiency under multiple iterations. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the merits of our method, and the results demonstrate that the proposed PolySnake outperforms the existing contour-based instance segmentation methods on several prevalent instance segmentation benchmarks. The codes and models are available at https://github.com/fh2019ustc/PolySnake.

Hand-Object Interaction Image Generation

In this work, we are dedicated to a new task, i.e., hand-object interaction image generation, which aims to conditionally generate the hand-object image under the given hand, object and their interaction status. This task is challenging and research-worthy in many potential application scenarios, such as AR/VR games and online shopping, etc. To address this problem, we propose a novel HOGAN framework, which utilizes the expressive model-aware hand-object representation and leverages its inherent topology to build the unified surface space. In this space, we explicitly consider the complex self- and mutual occlusion during interaction. During final image synthesis, we consider different characteristics of hand and object and generate the target image in a split-and-combine manner. For evaluation, we build a comprehensive protocol to access both the fidelity and structure preservation of the generated image. Extensive experiments on two large-scale datasets, i.e., HO3Dv3 and DexYCB, demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our framework both quantitatively and qualitatively. The project page is available at https://play-with-hoi-generation.github.io/.

CLIP2GAN: Towards Bridging Text with the Latent Space of GANs

In this work, we are dedicated to text-guided image generation and propose a novel framework, i.e., CLIP2GAN, by leveraging CLIP model and StyleGAN. The key idea of our CLIP2GAN is to bridge the output feature embedding space of CLIP and the input latent space of StyleGAN, which is realized by introducing a mapping network. In the training stage, we encode an image with CLIP and map the output feature to a latent code, which is further used to reconstruct the image. In this way, the mapping network is optimized in a self-supervised learning way. In the inference stage, since CLIP can embed both image and text into a shared feature embedding space, we replace CLIP image encoder in the training architecture with CLIP text encoder, while keeping the following mapping network as well as StyleGAN model. As a result, we can flexibly input a text description to generate an image. Moreover, by simply adding mapped text features of an attribute to a mapped CLIP image feature, we can effectively edit the attribute to the image. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed CLIP2GAN compared to previous methods.

SinDiffusion: Learning a Diffusion Model from a Single Natural Image

We present SinDiffusion, leveraging denoising diffusion models to capture internal distribution of patches from a single natural image. SinDiffusion significantly improves the quality and diversity of generated samples compared with existing GAN-based approaches. It is based on two core designs. First, SinDiffusion is trained with a single model at a single scale instead of multiple models with progressive growing of scales which serves as the default setting in prior work. This avoids the accumulation of errors, which cause characteristic artifacts in generated results. Second, we identify that a patch-level receptive field of the diffusion network is crucial and effective for capturing the image's patch statistics, therefore we redesign the network structure of the diffusion model. Coupling these two designs enables us to generate photorealistic and diverse images from a single image. Furthermore, SinDiffusion can be applied to various applications, i.e., text-guided image generation, and image outpainting, due to the inherent capability of diffusion models. Extensive experiments on a wide range of images demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method for modeling the patch distribution.

DanZero: Mastering GuanDan Game with Reinforcement Learning

Card game AI has always been a hot topic in the research of artificial intelligence. In recent years, complex card games such as Mahjong, DouDizhu and Texas Hold'em have been solved and the corresponding AI programs have reached the level of human experts. In this paper, we are devoted to developing an AI program for a more complex card game, GuanDan, whose rules are similar to DouDizhu but much more complicated. To be specific, the characteristics of large state and action space, long length of one episode and the unsure number of players in the GuanDan pose great challenges for the development of the AI program. To address these issues, we propose the first AI program DanZero for GuanDan using reinforcement learning technique. Specifically, we utilize a distributed framework to train our AI system. In the actor processes, we carefully design the state features and agents generate samples by self-play. In the learner process, the model is updated by Deep Monte-Carlo Method. After training for 30 days using 160 CPUs and 1 GPU, we get our DanZero bot. We compare it with 8 baseline AI programs which are based on heuristic rules and the results reveal the outstanding performance of DanZero. We also test DanZero with human players and demonstrate its human-level performance.

UDoc-GAN: Unpaired Document Illumination Correction with Background Light Prior

Document images captured by mobile devices are usually degraded by uncontrollable illumination, which hampers the clarity of document content. Recently, a series of research efforts have been devoted to correcting the uneven document illumination. However, existing methods rarely consider the use of ambient light information, and usually rely on paired samples including degraded and the corrected ground-truth images which are not always accessible. To this end, we propose UDoc-GAN, the first framework to address the problem of document illumination correction under the unpaired setting. Specifically, we first predict the ambient light features of the document. Then, according to the characteristics of different level of ambient lights, we re-formulate the cycle consistency constraint to learn the underlying relationship between normal and abnormal illumination domains. To prove the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct extensive experiments on DocProj dataset under the unpaired setting. Compared with the state-of-the-art approaches, our method demonstrates promising performance in terms of character error rate (CER) and edit distance (ED), together with better qualitative results for textual detail preservation. The source code is now publicly available at https://github.com/harrytea/UDoc-GAN.

Geometric Representation Learning for Document Image Rectification

In document image rectification, there exist rich geometric constraints between the distorted image and the ground truth one. However, such geometric constraints are largely ignored in existing advanced solutions, which limits the rectification performance. To this end, we present DocGeoNet for document image rectification by introducing explicit geometric representation. Technically, two typical attributes of the document image are involved in the proposed geometric representation learning, i.e., 3D shape and textlines. Our motivation arises from the insight that 3D shape provides global unwarping cues for rectifying a distorted document image while overlooking the local structure. On the other hand, textlines complementarily provide explicit geometric constraints for local patterns. The learned geometric representation effectively bridges the distorted image and the ground truth one. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our framework and demonstrate the superiority of our DocGeoNet over state-of-the-art methods on both the DocUNet Benchmark dataset and our proposed DIR300 test set. The code is available at https://github.com/fh2019ustc/DocGeoNet.

CMD: Self-supervised 3D Action Representation Learning with Cross-modal Mutual Distillation

In 3D action recognition, there exists rich complementary information between skeleton modalities. Nevertheless, how to model and utilize this information remains a challenging problem for self-supervised 3D action representation learning. In this work, we formulate the cross-modal interaction as a bidirectional knowledge distillation problem. Different from classic distillation solutions that transfer the knowledge of a fixed and pre-trained teacher to the student, in this work, the knowledge is continuously updated and bidirectionally distilled between modalities. To this end, we propose a new Cross-modal Mutual Distillation (CMD) framework with the following designs. On the one hand, the neighboring similarity distribution is introduced to model the knowledge learned in each modality, where the relational information is naturally suitable for the contrastive frameworks. On the other hand, asymmetrical configurations are used for teacher and student to stabilize the distillation process and to transfer high-confidence information between modalities. By derivation, we find that the cross-modal positive mining in previous works can be regarded as a degenerated version of our CMD. We perform extensive experiments on NTU RGB+D 60, NTU RGB+D 120, and PKU-MMD II datasets. Our approach outperforms existing self-supervised methods and sets a series of new records. The code is available at: https://github.com/maoyunyao/CMD

Low-Light Video Enhancement with Synthetic Event Guidance

Low-light video enhancement (LLVE) is an important yet challenging task with many applications such as photographing and autonomous driving. Unlike single image low-light enhancement, most LLVE methods utilize temporal information from adjacent frames to restore the color and remove the noise of the target frame. However, these algorithms, based on the framework of multi-frame alignment and enhancement, may produce multi-frame fusion artifacts when encountering extreme low light or fast motion. In this paper, inspired by the low latency and high dynamic range of events, we use synthetic events from multiple frames to guide the enhancement and restoration of low-light videos. Our method contains three stages: 1) event synthesis and enhancement, 2) event and image fusion, and 3) low-light enhancement. In this framework, we design two novel modules (event-image fusion transform and event-guided dual branch) for the second and third stages, respectively. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing low-light video or single image enhancement approaches on both synthetic and real LLVE datasets.