Adapting Stepsizes by Momentumized Gradients Improves Optimization and Generalization

Adaptive gradient methods, such as \textsc{Adam}, have achieved tremendous success in machine learning. Scaling gradients by square roots of the running averages of squared past gradients, such methods are able to attain rapid training of modern deep neural networks. Nevertheless, they are observed to generalize worse than stochastic gradient descent (\textsc{SGD}) and tend to be trapped in local minima at an early stage during training. Intriguingly, we discover that substituting the gradient in the preconditioner term with the momentumized version in \textsc{Adam} can well solve the issues. The intuition is that gradient with momentum contains more accurate directional information and therefore its second moment estimation is a better choice for scaling than raw gradient's. Thereby we propose \textsc{AdaMomentum} as a new optimizer reaching the goal of training faster while generalizing better. We further develop a theory to back up the improvement in optimization and generalization and provide convergence guarantee under both convex and nonconvex settings. Extensive experiments on various models and tasks demonstrate that \textsc{AdaMomentum} exhibits comparable performance to \textsc{SGD} on vision tasks, and achieves state-of-the-art results consistently on other tasks including language processing.

Towards Distraction-Robust Active Visual Tracking

In active visual tracking, it is notoriously difficult when distracting objects appear, as distractors often mislead the tracker by occluding the target or bringing a confusing appearance. To address this issue, we propose a mixed cooperative-competitive multi-agent game, where a target and multiple distractors form a collaborative team to play against a tracker and make it fail to follow. Through learning in our game, diverse distracting behaviors of the distractors naturally emerge, thereby exposing the tracker's weakness, which helps enhance the distraction-robustness of the tracker. For effective learning, we then present a bunch of practical methods, including a reward function for distractors, a cross-modal teacher-student learning strategy, and a recurrent attention mechanism for the tracker. The experimental results show that our tracker performs desired distraction-robust active visual tracking and can be well generalized to unseen environments. We also show that the multi-agent game can be used to adversarially test the robustness of trackers.

Towards Unified Surgical Skill Assessment

Surgical skills have a great influence on surgical safety and patients' well-being. Traditional assessment of surgical skills involves strenuous manual efforts, which lacks efficiency and repeatability. Therefore, we attempt to automatically predict how well the surgery is performed using the surgical video. In this paper, a unified multi-path framework for automatic surgical skill assessment is proposed, which takes care of multiple composing aspects of surgical skills, including surgical tool usage, intraoperative event pattern, and other skill proxies. The dependency relationships among these different aspects are specially modeled by a path dependency module in the framework. We conduct extensive experiments on the JIGSAWS dataset of simulated surgical tasks, and a new clinical dataset of real laparoscopic surgeries. The proposed framework achieves promising results on both datasets, with the state-of-the-art on the simulated dataset advanced from 0.71 Spearman's correlation to 0.80. It is also shown that combining multiple skill aspects yields better performance than relying on a single aspect.

Act Like a Radiologist: Towards Reliable Multi-view Correspondence Reasoning for Mammogram Mass Detection

Mammogram mass detection is crucial for diagnosing and preventing the breast cancers in clinical practice. The complementary effect of multi-view mammogram images provides valuable information about the breast anatomical prior structure and is of great significance in digital mammography interpretation. However, unlike radiologists who can utilize the natural reasoning ability to identify masses based on multiple mammographic views, how to endow the existing object detection models with the capability of multi-view reasoning is vital for decision-making in clinical diagnosis but remains the boundary to explore. In this paper, we propose an Anatomy-aware Graph convolutional Network (AGN), which is tailored for mammogram mass detection and endows existing detection methods with multi-view reasoning ability. The proposed AGN consists of three steps. Firstly, we introduce a Bipartite Graph convolutional Network (BGN) to model the intrinsic geometric and semantic relations of ipsilateral views. Secondly, considering that the visual asymmetry of bilateral views is widely adopted in clinical practice to assist the diagnosis of breast lesions, we propose an Inception Graph convolutional Network (IGN) to model the structural similarities of bilateral views. Finally, based on the constructed graphs, the multi-view information is propagated through nodes methodically, which equips the features learned from the examined view with multi-view reasoning ability. Experiments on two standard benchmarks reveal that AGN significantly exceeds the state-of-the-art performance. Visualization results show that AGN provides interpretable visual cues for clinical diagnosis.

Rethinking of Radar's Role: A Camera-Radar Dataset and Systematic Annotator via Coordinate Alignment

Radar has long been a common sensor on autonomous vehicles for obstacle ranging and speed estimation. However, as a robust sensor to all-weather conditions, radar's capability has not been well-exploited, compared with camera or LiDAR. Instead of just serving as a supplementary sensor, radar's rich information hidden in the radio frequencies can potentially provide useful clues to achieve more complicated tasks, like object classification and detection. In this paper, we propose a new dataset, named CRUW, with a systematic annotator and performance evaluation system to address the radar object detection (ROD) task, which aims to classify and localize the objects in 3D purely from radar's radio frequency (RF) images. To the best of our knowledge, CRUW is the first public large-scale dataset with a systematic annotation and evaluation system, which involves camera RGB images and radar RF images, collected in various driving scenarios.

Split and Connect: A Universal Tracklet Booster for Multi-Object Tracking

Multi-object tracking (MOT) is an essential task in the computer vision field. With the fast development of deep learning technology in recent years, MOT has achieved great improvement. However, some challenges still remain, such as sensitiveness to occlusion, instability under different lighting conditions, non-robustness to deformable objects, etc. To address such common challenges in most of the existing trackers, in this paper, a tracklet booster algorithm is proposed, which can be built upon any other tracker. The motivation is simple and straightforward: split tracklets on potential ID-switch positions and then connect multiple tracklets into one if they are from the same object. In other words, the tracklet booster consists of two parts, i.e., Splitter and Connector. First, an architecture with stacked temporal dilated convolution blocks is employed for the splitting position prediction via label smoothing strategy with adaptive Gaussian kernels. Then, a multi-head self-attention based encoder is exploited for the tracklet embedding, which is further used to connect tracklets into larger groups. We conduct sufficient experiments on MOT17 and MOT20 benchmark datasets, which demonstrates promising results. Combined with the proposed tracklet booster, existing trackers usually can achieve large improvements on the IDF1 score, which shows the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Multi-Target Multi-Camera Tracking of Vehicles using Metadata-Aided Re-ID and Trajectory-Based Camera Link Model

In this paper, we propose a novel framework for multi-target multi-camera tracking (MTMCT) of vehicles based on metadata-aided re-identification (MA-ReID) and the trajectory-based camera link model (TCLM). Given a video sequence and the corresponding frame-by-frame vehicle detections, we first address the isolated tracklets issue from single camera tracking (SCT) by the proposed traffic-aware single-camera tracking (TSCT). Then, after automatically constructing the TCLM, we solve MTMCT by the MA-ReID. The TCLM is generated from camera topological configuration to obtain the spatial and temporal information to improve the performance of MTMCT by reducing the candidate search of ReID. We also use the temporal attention model to create more discriminative embeddings of trajectories from each camera to achieve robust distance measures for vehicle ReID. Moreover, we train a metadata classifier for MTMCT to obtain the metadata feature, which is concatenated with the temporal attention based embeddings. Finally, the TCLM and hierarchical clustering are jointly applied for global ID assignment. The proposed method is evaluated on the CityFlow dataset, achieving IDF1 76.77%, which outperforms the state-of-the-art MTMCT methods.

Causal Hidden Markov Model for Time Series Disease Forecasting

We propose a causal hidden Markov model to achieve robust prediction of irreversible disease at an early stage, which is safety-critical and vital for medical treatment in early stages. Specifically, we introduce the hidden variables which propagate to generate medical data at each time step. To avoid learning spurious correlation (e.g., confounding bias), we explicitly separate these hidden variables into three parts: a) the disease (clinical)-related part; b) the disease (non-clinical)-related part; c) others, with only a),b) causally related to the disease however c) may contain spurious correlations (with the disease) inherited from the data provided. With personal attributes and the disease label respectively provided as side information and supervision, we prove that these disease-related hidden variables can be disentangled from others, implying the avoidance of spurious correlation for generalization to medical data from other (out-of-) distributions. Guaranteed by this result, we propose a sequential variational auto-encoder with a reformulated objective function. We apply our model to the early prediction of peripapillary atrophy and achieve promising results on out-of-distribution test data. Further, the ablation study empirically shows the effectiveness of each component in our method. And the visualization shows the accurate identification of lesion regions from others.

Context Modeling in 3D Human Pose Estimation: A Unified Perspective

Estimating 3D human pose from a single image suffers from severe ambiguity since multiple 3D joint configurations may have the same 2D projection. The state-of-the-art methods often rely on context modeling methods such as pictorial structure model (PSM) or graph neural network (GNN) to reduce ambiguity. However, there is no study that rigorously compares them side by side. So we first present a general formula for context modeling in which both PSM and GNN are its special cases. By comparing the two methods, we found that the end-to-end training scheme in GNN and the limb length constraints in PSM are two complementary factors to improve results. To combine their advantages, we propose ContextPose based on attention mechanism that allows enforcing soft limb length constraints in a deep network. The approach effectively reduces the chance of getting absurd 3D pose estimates with incorrect limb lengths and achieves state-of-the-art results on two benchmark datasets. More importantly, the introduction of limb length constraints into deep networks enables the approach to achieve much better generalization performance.

RODNet: A Real-Time Radar Object Detection Network Cross-Supervised by Camera-Radar Fused Object 3D Localization

Various autonomous or assisted driving strategies have been facilitated through the accurate and reliable perception of the environment around a vehicle. Among the commonly used sensors, radar has usually been considered as a robust and cost-effective solution even in adverse driving scenarios, e.g., weak/strong lighting or bad weather. Instead of considering to fuse the unreliable information from all available sensors, perception from pure radar data becomes a valuable alternative that is worth exploring. In this paper, we propose a deep radar object detection network, named RODNet, which is cross-supervised by a camera-radar fused algorithm without laborious annotation efforts, to effectively detect objects from the radio frequency (RF) images in real-time. First, the raw signals captured by millimeter-wave radars are transformed to RF images in range-azimuth coordinates. Second, our proposed RODNet takes a sequence of RF images as the input to predict the likelihood of objects in the radar field of view (FoV). Two customized modules are also added to handle multi-chirp information and object relative motion. Instead of using human-labeled ground truth for training, the proposed RODNet is cross-supervised by a novel 3D localization of detected objects using a camera-radar fusion (CRF) strategy in the training stage. Finally, we propose a method to evaluate the object detection performance of the RODNet. Due to no existing public dataset available for our task, we create a new dataset, named CRUW, which contains synchronized RGB and RF image sequences in various driving scenarios. With intensive experiments, our proposed cross-supervised RODNet achieves 86% average precision and 88% average recall of object detection performance, which shows the robustness to noisy scenarios in various driving conditions.