SpineOne: A One-Stage Detection Framework for Degenerative Discs and Vertebrae

Spinal degeneration plagues many elders, office workers, and even the younger generations. Effective pharmic or surgical interventions can help relieve degenerative spine conditions. However, the traditional diagnosis procedure is often too laborious. Clinical experts need to detect discs and vertebrae from spinal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or computed tomography (CT) images as a preliminary step to perform pathological diagnosis or preoperative evaluation. Machine learning systems have been developed to aid this procedure generally following a two-stage methodology: first perform anatomical localization, then pathological classification. Towards more efficient and accurate diagnosis, we propose a one-stage detection framework termed SpineOne to simultaneously localize and classify degenerative discs and vertebrae from MRI slices. SpineOne is built upon the following three key techniques: 1) a new design of the keypoint heatmap to facilitate simultaneous keypoint localization and classification; 2) the use of attention modules to better differentiate the representations between discs and vertebrae; and 3) a novel gradient-guided objective association mechanism to associate multiple learning objectives at the later training stage. Empirical results on the Spinal Disease Intelligent Diagnosis Tianchi Competition (SDID-TC) dataset of 550 exams demonstrate that our approach surpasses existing methods by a large margin.

Alpha-IoU: A Family of Power Intersection over Union Losses for Bounding Box Regression

Bounding box (bbox) regression is a fundamental task in computer vision. So far, the most commonly used loss functions for bbox regression are the Intersection over Union (IoU) loss and its variants. In this paper, we generalize existing IoU-based losses to a new family of power IoU losses that have a power IoU term and an additional power regularization term with a single power parameter $\alpha$. We call this new family of losses the $\alpha$-IoU losses and analyze properties such as order preservingness and loss/gradient reweighting. Experiments on multiple object detection benchmarks and models demonstrate that $\alpha$-IoU losses, 1) can surpass existing IoU-based losses by a noticeable performance margin; 2) offer detectors more flexibility in achieving different levels of bbox regression accuracy by modulating $\alpha$; and 3) are more robust to small datasets and noisy bboxes.

Density-Based Clustering with Kernel Diffusion

Finding a suitable density function is essential for density-based clustering algorithms such as DBSCAN and DPC. A naive density corresponding to the indicator function of a unit $d$-dimensional Euclidean ball is commonly used in these algorithms. Such density suffers from capturing local features in complex datasets. To tackle this issue, we propose a new kernel diffusion density function, which is adaptive to data of varying local distributional characteristics and smoothness. Furthermore, we develop a surrogate that can be efficiently computed in linear time and space and prove that it is asymptotically equivalent to the kernel diffusion density function. Extensive empirical experiments on benchmark and large-scale face image datasets show that the proposed approach not only achieves a significant improvement over classic density-based clustering algorithms but also outperforms the state-of-the-art face clustering methods by a large margin.

Improving 3D Object Detection with Channel-wise Transformer

Though 3D object detection from point clouds has achieved rapid progress in recent years, the lack of flexible and high-performance proposal refinement remains a great hurdle for existing state-of-the-art two-stage detectors. Previous works on refining 3D proposals have relied on human-designed components such as keypoints sampling, set abstraction and multi-scale feature fusion to produce powerful 3D object representations. Such methods, however, have limited ability to capture rich contextual dependencies among points. In this paper, we leverage the high-quality region proposal network and a Channel-wise Transformer architecture to constitute our two-stage 3D object detection framework (CT3D) with minimal hand-crafted design. The proposed CT3D simultaneously performs proposal-aware embedding and channel-wise context aggregation for the point features within each proposal. Specifically, CT3D uses proposal's keypoints for spatial contextual modelling and learns attention propagation in the encoding module, mapping the proposal to point embeddings. Next, a new channel-wise decoding module enriches the query-key interaction via channel-wise re-weighting to effectively merge multi-level contexts, which contributes to more accurate object predictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our CT3D method has superior performance and excellent scalability. Remarkably, CT3D achieves the AP of 81.77% in the moderate car category on the KITTI test 3D detection benchmark, outperforms state-of-the-art 3D detectors.

Transporting Causal Mechanisms for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Existing Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) literature adopts the covariate shift and conditional shift assumptions, which essentially encourage models to learn common features across domains. However, due to the lack of supervision in the target domain, they suffer from the semantic loss: the feature will inevitably lose non-discriminative semantics in source domain, which is however discriminative in target domain. We use a causal view -- transportability theory -- to identify that such loss is in fact a confounding effect, which can only be removed by causal intervention. However, the theoretical solution provided by transportability is far from practical for UDA, because it requires the stratification and representation of the unobserved confounder that is the cause of the domain gap. To this end, we propose a practical solution: Transporting Causal Mechanisms (TCM), to identify the confounder stratum and representations by using the domain-invariant disentangled causal mechanisms, which are discovered in an unsupervised fashion. Our TCM is both theoretically and empirically grounded. Extensive experiments show that TCM achieves state-of-the-art performance on three challenging UDA benchmarks: ImageCLEF-DA, Office-Home, and VisDA-2017. Codes are available in Appendix.

Aug3D-RPN: Improving Monocular 3D Object Detection by Synthetic Images with Virtual Depth

Current geometry-based monocular 3D object detection models can efficiently detect objects by leveraging perspective geometry, but their performance is limited due to the absence of accurate depth information. Though this issue can be alleviated in a depth-based model where a depth estimation module is plugged to predict depth information before 3D box reasoning, the introduction of such module dramatically reduces the detection speed. Instead of training a costly depth estimator, we propose a rendering module to augment the training data by synthesizing images with virtual-depths. The rendering module takes as input the RGB image and its corresponding sparse depth image, outputs a variety of photo-realistic synthetic images, from which the detection model can learn more discriminative features to adapt to the depth changes of the objects. Besides, we introduce an auxiliary module to improve the detection model by jointly optimizing it through a depth estimation task. Both modules are working in the training time and no extra computation will be introduced to the detection model. Experiments show that by working with our proposed modules, a geometry-based model can represent the leading accuracy on the KITTI 3D detection benchmark.

Revisiting Knowledge Distillation: An Inheritance and Exploration Framework

Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a popular technique to transfer knowledge from a teacher model or ensemble to a student model. Its success is generally attributed to the privileged information on similarities/consistency between the class distributions or intermediate feature representations of the teacher model and the student model. However, directly pushing the student model to mimic the probabilities/features of the teacher model to a large extent limits the student model in learning undiscovered knowledge/features. In this paper, we propose a novel inheritance and exploration knowledge distillation framework (IE-KD), in which a student model is split into two parts - inheritance and exploration. The inheritance part is learned with a similarity loss to transfer the existing learned knowledge from the teacher model to the student model, while the exploration part is encouraged to learn representations different from the inherited ones with a dis-similarity loss. Our IE-KD framework is generic and can be easily combined with existing distillation or mutual learning methods for training deep neural networks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that these two parts can jointly push the student model to learn more diversified and effective representations, and our IE-KD can be a general technique to improve the student network to achieve SOTA performance. Furthermore, by applying our IE-KD to the training of two networks, the performance of both can be improved w.r.t. deep mutual learning. The code and models of IE-KD will be make publicly available at https://github.com/yellowtownhz/IE-KD.

Criterion-based Heterogeneous Collaborative Filtering for Multi-behavior Implicit Recommendation

With the increasing scale and diversification of interaction behaviors in E-commerce, more and more researchers pay attention to multi-behavior recommender systems that utilize interaction data of other auxiliary behaviors such as view and cart. To address these challenges in heterogeneous scenarios, non-sampling methods have shown superiority over negative sampling methods. However, two observations are usually ignored in existing state-of-the-art non-sampling methods based on binary regression: (1) users have different preference strengths for different items, so they cannot be measured simply by binary implicit data; (2) the dependency across multiple behaviors varies for different users and items. To tackle the above issue, we propose a novel non-sampling learning framework named \underline{C}riterion-guided \underline{H}eterogeneous \underline{C}ollaborative \underline{F}iltering (CHCF). CHCF introduces both upper and lower bounds to indicate selection criteria, which will guide user preference learning. Besides, CHCF integrates criterion learning and user preference learning into a unified framework, which can be trained jointly for the interaction prediction on target behavior. We further theoretically demonstrate that the optimization of Collaborative Metric Learning can be approximately achieved by CHCF learning framework in a non-sampling form effectively. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets show that CHCF outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in heterogeneous scenarios.

Cloth-Changing Person Re-identification from A Single Image with Gait Prediction and Regularization

Cloth-Changing person re-identification (CC-ReID) aims at matching the same person across different locations over a long-duration, e.g., over days, and therefore inevitably meets challenge of changing clothing. In this paper, we focus on handling well the CC-ReID problem under a more challenging setting, i.e., just from a single image, which enables high-efficiency and latency-free pedestrian identify for real-time surveillance applications. Specifically, we introduce Gait recognition as an auxiliary task to drive the Image ReID model to learn cloth-agnostic representations by leveraging personal unique and cloth-independent gait information, we name this framework as GI-ReID. GI-ReID adopts a two-stream architecture that consists of a image ReID-Stream and an auxiliary gait recognition stream (Gait-Stream). The Gait-Stream, that is discarded in the inference for high computational efficiency, acts as a regulator to encourage the ReID-Stream to capture cloth-invariant biometric motion features during the training. To get temporal continuous motion cues from a single image, we design a Gait Sequence Prediction (GSP) module for Gait-Stream to enrich gait information. Finally, a high-level semantics consistency over two streams is enforced for effective knowledge regularization. Experiments on multiple image-based Cloth-Changing ReID benchmarks, e.g., LTCC, PRCC, Real28, and VC-Clothes, demonstrate that GI-ReID performs favorably against the state-of-the-arts. Codes are available at https://github.com/jinx-USTC/GI-ReID.