Unified Transformer Tracker for Object Tracking

As an important area in computer vision, object tracking has formed two separate communities that respectively study Single Object Tracking (SOT) and Multiple Object Tracking (MOT). However, current methods in one tracking scenario are not easily adapted to the other due to the divergent training datasets and tracking objects of both tasks. Although UniTrack \cite{wang2021different} demonstrates that a shared appearance model with multiple heads can be used to tackle individual tracking tasks, it fails to exploit the large-scale tracking datasets for training and performs poorly on single object tracking. In this work, we present the Unified Transformer Tracker (UTT) to address tracking problems in different scenarios with one paradigm. A track transformer is developed in our UTT to track the target in both SOT and MOT. The correlation between the target and tracking frame features is exploited to localize the target. We demonstrate that both SOT and MOT tasks can be solved within this framework. The model can be simultaneously end-to-end trained by alternatively optimizing the SOT and MOT objectives on the datasets of individual tasks. Extensive experiments are conducted on several benchmarks with a unified model trained on SOT and MOT datasets. Code will be available at https://github.com/Flowerfan/Trackron.

Compositional Temporal Grounding with Structured Variational Cross-Graph Correspondence Learning

Temporal grounding in videos aims to localize one target video segment that semantically corresponds to a given query sentence. Thanks to the semantic diversity of natural language descriptions, temporal grounding allows activity grounding beyond pre-defined classes and has received increasing attention in recent years. The semantic diversity is rooted in the principle of compositionality in linguistics, where novel semantics can be systematically described by combining known words in novel ways (compositional generalization). However, current temporal grounding datasets do not specifically test for the compositional generalizability. To systematically measure the compositional generalizability of temporal grounding models, we introduce a new Compositional Temporal Grounding task and construct two new dataset splits, i.e., Charades-CG and ActivityNet-CG. Evaluating the state-of-the-art methods on our new dataset splits, we empirically find that they fail to generalize to queries with novel combinations of seen words. To tackle this challenge, we propose a variational cross-graph reasoning framework that explicitly decomposes video and language into multiple structured hierarchies and learns fine-grained semantic correspondence among them. Experiments illustrate the superior compositional generalizability of our approach. The repository of this work is at https://github.com/YYJMJC/ Compositional-Temporal-Grounding.

Automated Progressive Learning for Efficient Training of Vision Transformers

Recent advances in vision Transformers (ViTs) have come with a voracious appetite for computing power, high-lighting the urgent need to develop efficient training methods for ViTs. Progressive learning, a training scheme where the model capacity grows progressively during training, has started showing its ability in efficient training. In this paper, we take a practical step towards efficient training of ViTs by customizing and automating progressive learning. First, we develop a strong manual baseline for progressive learning of ViTs, by introducing momentum growth (MoGrow) to bridge the gap brought by model growth. Then, we propose automated progressive learning (AutoProg), an efficient training scheme that aims to achieve lossless acceleration by automatically increasing the training overload on-the-fly; this is achieved by adaptively deciding whether, where and how much should the model grow during progressive learning. Specifically, we first relax the optimization of the growth schedule to sub-network architecture optimization problem, then propose one-shot estimation of the sub-network performance via an elastic supernet. The searching overhead is reduced to minimal by recycling the parameters of the supernet. Extensive experiments of efficient training on ImageNet with two representative ViT models, DeiT and VOLO, demonstrate that AutoProg can accelerate ViTs training by up to 85.1% with no performance drop. Code: https://github.com/changlin31/AutoProg

Associating Objects with Scalable Transformers for Video Object Segmentation

This paper investigates how to realize better and more efficient embedding learning to tackle the semi-supervised video object segmentation under challenging multi-object scenarios. The state-of-the-art methods learn to decode features with a single positive object and thus have to match and segment each target separately under multi-object scenarios, consuming multiple times computation resources. To solve the problem, we propose an Associating Objects with Transformers (AOT) approach to match and decode multiple objects jointly and collaboratively. In detail, AOT employs an identification mechanism to associate multiple targets into the same high-dimensional embedding space. Thus, we can simultaneously process multiple objects' matching and segmentation decoding as efficiently as processing a single object. To sufficiently model multi-object association, a Long Short-Term Transformer (LSTT) is devised to construct hierarchical matching and propagation. Based on AOT, we further propose a more flexible and robust framework, Associating Objects with Scalable Transformers (AOST), in which a scalable version of LSTT is designed to enable run-time adaptation of accuracy-efficiency trade-offs. Besides, AOST introduces a better layer-wise manner to couple identification and vision embeddings. We conduct extensive experiments on multi-object and single-object benchmarks to examine AOT series frameworks. Compared to the state-of-the-art competitors, our methods can maintain times of run-time efficiency with superior performance. Notably, we achieve new state-of-the-art performance on three popular benchmarks, i.e., YouTube-VOS (86.5%), DAVIS 2017 Val/Test (87.0%/84.7%), and DAVIS 2016 (93.0%). Project page: https://github.com/z-x-yang/AOT.

Visual Abductive Reasoning

Abductive reasoning seeks the likeliest possible explanation for partial observations. Although abduction is frequently employed in human daily reasoning, it is rarely explored in computer vision literature. In this paper, we propose a new task and dataset, Visual Abductive Reasoning (VAR), for examining abductive reasoning ability of machine intelligence in everyday visual situations. Given an incomplete set of visual events, AI systems are required to not only describe what is observed, but also infer the hypothesis that can best explain the visual premise. Based on our large-scale VAR dataset, we devise a strong baseline model, Reasoner (causal-and-cascaded reasoning Transformer). First, to capture the causal structure of the observations, a contextualized directional position embedding strategy is adopted in the encoder, that yields discriminative representations for the premise and hypothesis. Then, multiple decoders are cascaded to generate and progressively refine the premise and hypothesis sentences. The prediction scores of the sentences are used to guide cross-sentence information flow in the cascaded reasoning procedure. Our VAR benchmarking results show that Reasoner surpasses many famous video-language models, while still being far behind human performance. This work is expected to foster future efforts in the reasoning-beyond-observation paradigm.

Local-Global Context Aware Transformer for Language-Guided Video Segmentation

We explore the task of language-guided video segmentation (LVS). Previous algorithms mostly adopt 3D CNNs to learn video representation, struggling to capture long-term context and easily suffering from visual-linguistic misalignment. In light of this, we present Locater (local-global context aware Transformer), which augments the Transformer architecture with a finite memory so as to query the entire video with the language expression in an efficient manner. The memory is designed to involve two components -- one for persistently preserving global video content, and one for dynamically gathering local temporal context and segmentation history. Based on the memorized local-global context and the particular content of each frame, Locater holistically and flexibly comprehends the expression as an adaptive query vector for each frame. The vector is used to query the corresponding frame for mask generation. The memory also allows Locater to process videos with linear time complexity and constant size memory, while Transformer-style self-attention computation scales quadratically with sequence length. To thoroughly examine the visual grounding capability of LVS models, we contribute a new LVS dataset, A2D-S+, which is built upon A2D-S dataset but poses increased challenges in disambiguating among similar objects. Experiments on three LVS datasets and our A2D-S+ show that Locater outperforms previous state-of-the-arts. Further, our Locater based solution achieved the 1st place in the Referring Video Object Segmentation Track of the 3rd Large-scale Video Object Segmentation Challenge. Our code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/leonnnop/Locater

Bridging the Source-to-target Gap for Cross-domain Person Re-Identification with Intermediate Domains

Cross-domain person re-identification (re-ID), such as unsupervised domain adaptive (UDA) re-ID, aims to transfer the identity-discriminative knowledge from the source to the target domain. Existing methods commonly consider the source and target domains are isolated from each other, i.e., no intermediate status is modeled between both domains. Directly transferring the knowledge between two isolated domains can be very difficult, especially when the domain gap is large. From a novel perspective, we assume these two domains are not completely isolated, but can be connected through intermediate domains. Instead of directly aligning the source and target domains against each other, we propose to align the source and target domains against their intermediate domains for a smooth knowledge transfer. To discover and utilize these intermediate domains, we propose an Intermediate Domain Module (IDM) and a Mirrors Generation Module (MGM). IDM has two functions: 1) it generates multiple intermediate domains by mixing the hidden-layer features from source and target domains and 2) it dynamically reduces the domain gap between the source / target domain features and the intermediate domain features. While IDM achieves good domain alignment, it introduces a side effect, i.e., the mix-up operation may mix the identities into a new identity and lose the original identities. To compensate this, MGM is introduced by mapping the features into the IDM-generated intermediate domains without changing their original identity. It allows to focus on minimizing domain variations to promote the alignment between the source / target domain and intermediate domains, which reinforces IDM into IDM++. We extensively evaluate our method under both the UDA and domain generalization (DG) scenarios and observe that IDM++ yields consistent performance improvement for cross-domain re-ID, achieving new state of the art.

Active Learning for Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation via Spatial-Structural Diversity Reasoning

The expensive annotation cost is notoriously known as a main constraint for the development of the point cloud semantic segmentation technique. In this paper, we propose a novel active learning-based method to tackle this problem. Dubbed SSDR-AL, our method groups the original point clouds into superpoints and selects the most informative and representative ones for label acquisition. We achieve the selection mechanism via a graph reasoning network that considers both the spatial and structural diversity of the superpoints. To deploy SSDR-AL in a more practical scenario, we design a noise aware iterative labeling scheme to confront the "noisy annotation" problem introduced by previous dominant labeling methods in superpoints. Extensive experiments on two point cloud benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of SSDR-AL in the semantic segmentation task. Particularly, SSDR-AL significantly outperforms the baseline method when the labeled sets are small, where SSDR-AL requires only $5.7\%$ and $1.9\%$ annotation costs to achieve the performance of $90\%$ fully supervised learning on S3DIS and Semantic3D datasets, respectively.

Results and findings of the 2021 Image Similarity Challenge

The 2021 Image Similarity Challenge introduced a dataset to serve as a new benchmark to evaluate recent image copy detection methods. There were 200 participants to the competition. This paper presents a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the top submissions. It appears that the most difficult image transformations involve either severe image crops or hiding into unrelated images, combined with local pixel perturbations. The key algorithmic elements in the winning submissions are: training on strong augmentations, self-supervised learning, score normalization, explicit overlay detection, and global descriptor matching followed by pairwise image comparison.

COVID-19 Detection Using CT Image Based On YOLOv5 Network

Computer aided diagnosis (CAD) increases diagnosis efficiency, helping doctors providing a quick and confident diagnosis, it has played an important role in the treatment of COVID19. In our task, we solve the problem about abnormality detection and classification. The dataset provided by Kaggle platform and we choose YOLOv5 as our model. We introduce some methods on objective detection in the related work section, the objection detection can be divided into two streams: onestage and two stage. The representational model are Faster RCNN and YOLO series. Then we describe the YOLOv5 model in the detail. Compared Experiments and results are shown in section IV. We choose mean average precision (mAP) as our experiments' metrics, and the higher (mean) mAP is, the better result the model will gain. mAP@0.5 of our YOLOv5s is 0.623 which is 0.157 and 0.101 higher than Faster RCNN and EfficientDet respectively.