Lifelong Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Person Re-identification with Coordinated Anti-forgetting and Adaptation

Unsupervised domain adaptive person re-identification (ReID) has been extensively investigated to mitigate the adverse effects of domain gaps. Those works assume the target domain data can be accessible all at once. However, for the real-world streaming data, this hinders the timely adaptation to changing data statistics and sufficient exploitation of increasing samples. In this paper, to address more practical scenarios, we propose a new task, Lifelong Unsupervised Domain Adaptive (LUDA) person ReID. This is challenging because it requires the model to continuously adapt to unlabeled data of the target environments while alleviating catastrophic forgetting for such a fine-grained person retrieval task. We design an effective scheme for this task, dubbed CLUDA-ReID, where the anti-forgetting is harmoniously coordinated with the adaptation. Specifically, a meta-based Coordinated Data Replay strategy is proposed to replay old data and update the network with a coordinated optimization direction for both adaptation and memorization. Moreover, we propose Relational Consistency Learning for old knowledge distillation/inheritance in line with the objective of retrieval-based tasks. We set up two evaluation settings to simulate the practical application scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our CLUDA-ReID for both scenarios with stationary target streams and scenarios with dynamic target streams.

SelectAugment: Hierarchical Deterministic Sample Selection for Data Augmentation

Data augmentation (DA) has been widely investigated to facilitate model optimization in many tasks. However, in most cases, data augmentation is randomly performed for each training sample with a certain probability, which might incur content destruction and visual ambiguities. To eliminate this, in this paper, we propose an effective approach, dubbed SelectAugment, to select samples to be augmented in a deterministic and online manner based on the sample contents and the network training status. Specifically, in each batch, we first determine the augmentation ratio, and then decide whether to augment each training sample under this ratio. We model this process as a two-step Markov decision process and adopt Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) to learn the augmentation policy. In this way, the negative effects of the randomness in selecting samples to augment can be effectively alleviated and the effectiveness of DA is improved. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed SelectAugment can be adapted upon numerous commonly used DA methods, e.g., Mixup, Cutmix, AutoAugment, etc, and improve their performance on multiple benchmark datasets of image classification and fine-grained image recognition.

MMPTRACK: Large-scale Densely Annotated Multi-camera Multiple People Tracking Benchmark

Multi-camera tracking systems are gaining popularity in applications that demand high-quality tracking results, such as frictionless checkout because monocular multi-object tracking (MOT) systems often fail in cluttered and crowded environments due to occlusion. Multiple highly overlapped cameras can significantly alleviate the problem by recovering partial 3D information. However, the cost of creating a high-quality multi-camera tracking dataset with diverse camera settings and backgrounds has limited the dataset scale in this domain. In this paper, we provide a large-scale densely-labeled multi-camera tracking dataset in five different environments with the help of an auto-annotation system. The system uses overlapped and calibrated depth and RGB cameras to build a high-performance 3D tracker that automatically generates the 3D tracking results. The 3D tracking results are projected to each RGB camera view using camera parameters to create 2D tracking results. Then, we manually check and correct the 3D tracking results to ensure the label quality, which is much cheaper than fully manual annotation. We have conducted extensive experiments using two real-time multi-camera trackers and a person re-identification (ReID) model with different settings. This dataset provides a more reliable benchmark of multi-camera, multi-object tracking systems in cluttered and crowded environments. Also, our results demonstrate that adapting the trackers and ReID models on this dataset significantly improves their performance. Our dataset will be publicly released upon the acceptance of this work.

Confounder Identification-free Causal Visual Feature Learning

Confounders in deep learning are in general detrimental to model's generalization where they infiltrate feature representations. Therefore, learning causal features that are free of interference from confounders is important. Most previous causal learning based approaches employ back-door criterion to mitigate the adverse effect of certain specific confounder, which require the explicit identification of confounder. However, in real scenarios, confounders are typically diverse and difficult to be identified. In this paper, we propose a novel Confounder Identification-free Causal Visual Feature Learning (CICF) method, which obviates the need for identifying confounders. CICF models the interventions among different samples based on front-door criterion, and then approximates the global-scope intervening effect upon the instance-level interventions from the perspective of optimization. In this way, we aim to find a reliable optimization direction, which avoids the intervening effects of confounders, to learn causal features. Furthermore, we uncover the relation between CICF and the popular meta-learning strategy MAML, and provide an interpretation of why MAML works from the theoretical perspective of causal learning for the first time. Thanks to the effective learning of causal features, our CICF enables models to have superior generalization capability. Extensive experiments on domain generalization benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our CICF, which achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

Versatile Learned Video Compression

Learned video compression methods have demonstrated great promise in catching up with traditional video codecs in their rate-distortion (R-D) performance. However, existing learned video compression schemes are limited by the binding of the prediction mode and the fixed network framework. They are unable to support various inter prediction modes and thus inapplicable for various scenarios. In this paper, to break this limitation, we propose a versatile learned video compression (VLVC) framework that uses one model to support all possible prediction modes. Specifically, to realize versatile compression, we first build a motion compensation module that applies multiple 3D motion vector fields (i.e., voxel flows) for weighted trilinear warping in spatial-temporal space. The voxel flows convey the information of temporal reference position that helps to decouple inter prediction modes away from framework designing. Secondly, in case of multiple-reference-frame prediction, we apply a flow prediction module to predict accurate motion trajectories with a unified polynomial function. We show that the flow prediction module can largely reduce the transmission cost of voxel flows. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed VLVC not only supports versatile compression in various settings but also achieves comparable R-D performance with the latest VVC standard in terms of MS-SSIM.

Pose-Guided Feature Learning with Knowledge Distillation for Occluded Person Re-Identification

Occluded person re-identification (ReID) aims to match person images with occlusion. It is fundamentally challenging because of the serious occlusion which aggravates the misalignment problem between images. At the cost of incorporating a pose estimator, many works introduce pose information to alleviate the misalignment in both training and testing. To achieve high accuracy while preserving low inference complexity, we propose a network named Pose-Guided Feature Learning with Knowledge Distillation (PGFL-KD), where the pose information is exploited to regularize the learning of semantics aligned features but is discarded in testing. PGFL-KD consists of a main branch (MB), and two pose-guided branches, \ieno, a foreground-enhanced branch (FEB), and a body part semantics aligned branch (SAB). The FEB intends to emphasise the features of visible body parts while excluding the interference of obstructions and background (\ieno, foreground feature alignment). The SAB encourages different channel groups to focus on different body parts to have body part semantics aligned representation. To get rid of the dependency on pose information when testing, we regularize the MB to learn the merits of the FEB and SAB through knowledge distillation and interaction-based training. Extensive experiments on occluded, partial, and holistic ReID tasks show the effectiveness of our proposed network.

Dual Aspect Self-Attention based on Transformer for Remaining Useful Life Prediction

Remaining useful life prediction (RUL) is one of the key technologies of condition-based maintenance, which is important to maintain the reliability and safety of industrial equipments. While deep learning has achieved great success in RUL prediction, existing methods have difficulties in processing long sequences and extracting information from the sensor and time step aspects. In this paper, we propose Dual Aspect Self-attention based on Transformer (DAST), a novel deep RUL prediction method. DAST consists of two encoders, which work in parallel to simultaneously extract features of different sensors and time steps. Solely based on self-attention, the DAST encoders are more effective in processing long data sequences, and are capable of adaptively learning to focus on more important parts of input. Moreover, the parallel feature extraction design avoids mutual influence of information from two aspects. Experimental results on two real turbofan engine datasets show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Soft then Hard: Rethinking the Quantization in Neural Image Compression

Quantization is one of the core components in lossy image compression. For neural image compression, end-to-end optimization requires differentiable approximations of quantization, which can generally be grouped into three categories: additive uniform noise, straight-through estimator and soft-to-hard annealing. Training with additive uniform noise approximates the quantization error variationally but suffers from the train-test mismatch. The other two methods do not encounter this mismatch but, as shown in this paper, hurt the rate-distortion performance since the latent representation ability is weakened. We thus propose a novel soft-then-hard quantization strategy for neural image compression that first learns an expressive latent space softly, then solves the train-test mismatch with hard quantization. In addition, beyond the fixed integer quantization, we apply scaled additive uniform noise to adaptively control the quantization granularity by deriving a new variational upper bound on actual rate. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed methods are easy to adopt, stable to train, and highly effective especially on complex compression models.