Magic ELF: Image Deraining Meets Association Learning and Transformer

Convolutional neural network (CNN) and Transformer have achieved great success in multimedia applications. However, little effort has been made to effectively and efficiently harmonize these two architectures to satisfy image deraining. This paper aims to unify these two architectures to take advantage of their learning merits for image deraining. In particular, the local connectivity and translation equivariance of CNN and the global aggregation ability of self-attention (SA) in Transformer are fully exploited for specific local context and global structure representations. Based on the observation that rain distribution reveals the degradation location and degree, we introduce degradation prior to help background recovery and accordingly present the association refinement deraining scheme. A novel multi-input attention module (MAM) is proposed to associate rain perturbation removal and background recovery. Moreover, we equip our model with effective depth-wise separable convolutions to learn the specific feature representations and trade off computational complexity. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method (dubbed as ELF) outperforms the state-of-the-art approach (MPRNet) by 0.25 dB on average, but only accounts for 11.7\% and 42.1\% of its computational cost and parameters. The source code is available at https://github.com/kuijiang94/Magic-ELF.

Real-time End-to-End Video Text Spotter with Contrastive Representation Learning

Video text spotting(VTS) is the task that requires simultaneously detecting, tracking and recognizing text in the video. Existing video text spotting methods typically develop sophisticated pipelines and multiple models, which is not friend for real-time applications. Here we propose a real-time end-to-end video text spotter with Contrastive Representation learning (CoText). Our contributions are three-fold: 1) CoText simultaneously address the three tasks (e.g., text detection, tracking, recognition) in a real-time end-to-end trainable framework. 2) With contrastive learning, CoText models long-range dependencies and learning temporal information across multiple frames. 3) A simple, lightweight architecture is designed for effective and accurate performance, including GPU-parallel detection post-processing, CTC-based recognition head with Masked RoI. Extensive experiments show the superiority of our method. Especially, CoText achieves an video text spotting IDF1 of 72.0% at 41.0 FPS on ICDAR2015video, with 10.5% and 32.0 FPS improvement the previous best method. The code can be found at github.com/weijiawu/CoText.

Deepfake Face Traceability with Disentangling Reversing Network

Deepfake face not only violates the privacy of personal identity, but also confuses the public and causes huge social harm. The current deepfake detection only stays at the level of distinguishing true and false, and cannot trace the original genuine face corresponding to the fake face, that is, it does not have the ability to trace the source of evidence. The deepfake countermeasure technology for judicial forensics urgently calls for deepfake traceability. This paper pioneers an interesting question about face deepfake, active forensics that "know it and how it happened". Given that deepfake faces do not completely discard the features of original faces, especially facial expressions and poses, we argue that original faces can be approximately speculated from their deepfake counterparts. Correspondingly, we design a disentangling reversing network that decouples latent space features of deepfake faces under the supervision of fake-original face pair samples to infer original faces in reverse.

Diagnosing Ensemble Few-Shot Classifiers

The base learners and labeled samples (shots) in an ensemble few-shot classifier greatly affect the model performance. When the performance is not satisfactory, it is usually difficult to understand the underlying causes and make improvements. To tackle this issue, we propose a visual analysis method, FSLDiagnotor. Given a set of base learners and a collection of samples with a few shots, we consider two problems: 1) finding a subset of base learners that well predict the sample collections; and 2) replacing the low-quality shots with more representative ones to adequately represent the sample collections. We formulate both problems as sparse subset selection and develop two selection algorithms to recommend appropriate learners and shots, respectively. A matrix visualization and a scatterplot are combined to explain the recommended learners and shots in context and facilitate users in adjusting them. Based on the adjustment, the algorithm updates the recommendation results for another round of improvement. Two case studies are conducted to demonstrate that FSLDiagnotor helps build a few-shot classifier efficiently and increases the accuracy by 12% and 21%, respectively.

ITTR: Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation with Transformers

Unpaired image-to-image translation is to translate an image from a source domain to a target domain without paired training data. By utilizing CNN in extracting local semantics, various techniques have been developed to improve the translation performance. However, CNN-based generators lack the ability to capture long-range dependency to well exploit global semantics. Recently, Vision Transformers have been widely investigated for recognition tasks. Though appealing, it is inappropriate to simply transfer a recognition-based vision transformer to image-to-image translation due to the generation difficulty and the computation limitation. In this paper, we propose an effective and efficient architecture for unpaired Image-to-Image Translation with Transformers (ITTR). It has two main designs: 1) hybrid perception block (HPB) for token mixing from different receptive fields to utilize global semantics; 2) dual pruned self-attention (DPSA) to sharply reduce the computational complexity. Our ITTR outperforms the state-of-the-arts for unpaired image-to-image translation on six benchmark datasets.

Domain Generalization via Shuffled Style Assembly for Face Anti-Spoofing

With diverse presentation attacks emerging continually, generalizable face anti-spoofing (FAS) has drawn growing attention. Most existing methods implement domain generalization (DG) on the complete representations. However, different image statistics may have unique properties for the FAS tasks. In this work, we separate the complete representation into content and style ones. A novel Shuffled Style Assembly Network (SSAN) is proposed to extract and reassemble different content and style features for a stylized feature space. Then, to obtain a generalized representation, a contrastive learning strategy is developed to emphasize liveness-related style information while suppress the domain-specific one. Finally, the representations of the correct assemblies are used to distinguish between living and spoofing during the inferring. On the other hand, despite the decent performance, there still exists a gap between academia and industry, due to the difference in data quantity and distribution. Thus, a new large-scale benchmark for FAS is built up to further evaluate the performance of algorithms in reality. Both qualitative and quantitative results on existing and proposed benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods. The codes will be available at https://github.com/wangzhuo2019/SSAN.

Text Smoothing: Enhance Various Data Augmentation Methods on Text Classification Tasks

Before entering the neural network, a token is generally converted to the corresponding one-hot representation, which is a discrete distribution of the vocabulary. Smoothed representation is the probability of candidate tokens obtained from a pre-trained masked language model, which can be seen as a more informative substitution to the one-hot representation. We propose an efficient data augmentation method, termed text smoothing, by converting a sentence from its one-hot representation to a controllable smoothed representation. We evaluate text smoothing on different benchmarks in a low-resource regime. Experimental results show that text smoothing outperforms various mainstream data augmentation methods by a substantial margin. Moreover, text smoothing can be combined with those data augmentation methods to achieve better performance.

Contrastive Learning of Semantic and Visual Representations for Text Tracking

Semantic representation is of great benefit to the video text tracking(VTT) task that requires simultaneously classifying, detecting, and tracking texts in the video. Most existing approaches tackle this task by appearance similarity in continuous frames, while ignoring the abundant semantic features. In this paper, we explore to robustly track video text with contrastive learning of semantic and visual representations. Correspondingly, we present an end-to-end video text tracker with Semantic and Visual Representations(SVRep), which detects and tracks texts by exploiting the visual and semantic relationships between different texts in a video sequence. Besides, with a light-weight architecture, SVRep achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining competitive inference speed. Specifically, with a backbone of ResNet-18, SVRep achieves an ${\rm ID_{F1}}$ of $\textbf{65.9\%}$, running at $\textbf{16.7}$ FPS, on the ICDAR2015(video) dataset with $\textbf{8.6\%}$ improvement than the previous state-of-the-art methods.