Quantifying a model's predictive uncertainty is essential for safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving. We consider quantifying such uncertainty for multi-object detection. In particular, we leverage conformal prediction to obtain uncertainty intervals with guaranteed coverage for object bounding boxes. One challenge in doing so is that bounding box predictions are conditioned on the object's class label. Thus, we develop a novel two-step conformal approach that propagates uncertainty in predicted class labels into the uncertainty intervals for the bounding boxes. This broadens the validity of our conformal coverage guarantees to include incorrectly classified objects, ensuring their usefulness when maximal safety assurances are required. Moreover, we investigate novel ensemble and quantile regression formulations to ensure the bounding box intervals are adaptive to object size, leading to a more balanced coverage across sizes. Validating our two-step approach on real-world datasets for 2D bounding box localization, we find that desired coverage levels are satisfied with actionably tight predictive uncertainty intervals.
Learning robust and scalable visual representations from massive multi-view video data remains a challenge in computer vision and autonomous driving. Existing pre-training methods either rely on expensive supervised learning with 3D annotations, limiting the scalability, or focus on single-frame or monocular inputs, neglecting the temporal information. We propose MIM4D, a novel pre-training paradigm based on dual masked image modeling (MIM). MIM4D leverages both spatial and temporal relations by training on masked multi-view video inputs. It constructs pseudo-3D features using continuous scene flow and projects them onto 2D plane for supervision. To address the lack of dense 3D supervision, MIM4D reconstruct pixels by employing 3D volumetric differentiable rendering to learn geometric representations. We demonstrate that MIM4D achieves state-of-the-art performance on the nuScenes dataset for visual representation learning in autonomous driving. It significantly improves existing methods on multiple downstream tasks, including BEV segmentation (8.7% IoU), 3D object detection (3.5% mAP), and HD map construction (1.4% mAP). Our work offers a new choice for learning representation at scale in autonomous driving. Code and models are released at https://github.com/hustvl/MIM4D
In recent years, there have been frequent incidents of foreign objects intruding into railway and Airport runways. These objects can include pedestrians, vehicles, animals, and debris. This paper introduces an improved YOLOv5 architecture incorporating FasterNet and attention mechanisms to enhance the detection of foreign objects on railways and Airport runways. This study proposes a new dataset, AARFOD (Aero and Rail Foreign Object Detection), which combines two public datasets for detecting foreign objects in aviation and railway systems. The dataset aims to improve the recognition capabilities of foreign object targets. Experimental results on this large dataset have demonstrated significant performance improvements of the proposed model over the baseline YOLOv5 model, reducing computational requirements. improved YOLO model shows a significant improvement in precision by 1.2%, recall rate by 1.0%, and mAP@.5 by 0.6%, while mAP@.5-.95 remained unchanged. The parameters were reduced by approximately 25.12%, and GFLOPs were reduced by about 10.63%. In the ablation experiment, it is found that the FasterNet module can significantly reduce the number of parameters of the model, and the reference of the attention mechanism can slow down the performance loss caused by lightweight.
In the rapidly evolving landscape of communication and network security, the increasing reliance on deep neural networks (DNNs) and cloud services for data processing presents a significant vulnerability: the potential for backdoors that can be exploited by malicious actors. Our approach leverages advanced tensor decomposition algorithms Independent Vector Analysis (IVA), Multiset Canonical Correlation Analysis (MCCA), and Parallel Factor Analysis (PARAFAC2) to meticulously analyze the weights of pre-trained DNNs and distinguish between backdoored and clean models effectively. The key strengths of our method lie in its domain independence, adaptability to various network architectures, and ability to operate without access to the training data of the scrutinized models. This not only ensures versatility across different application scenarios but also addresses the challenge of identifying backdoors without prior knowledge of the specific triggers employed to alter network behavior. We have applied our detection pipeline to three distinct computer vision datasets, encompassing both image classification and object detection tasks. The results demonstrate a marked improvement in both accuracy and efficiency over existing backdoor detection methods. This advancement enhances the security of deep learning and AI in networked systems, providing essential cybersecurity against evolving threats in emerging technologies.
Few-shot detection is a major task in pattern recognition which seeks to localize objects using models trained with few labeled data. One of the mainstream few-shot methods is transfer learning which consists in pretraining a detection model in a source domain prior to its fine-tuning in a target domain. However, it is challenging for fine-tuned models to effectively identify new classes in the target domain, particularly when the underlying labeled training data are scarce. In this paper, we devise a novel sparse context transformer (SCT) that effectively leverages object knowledge in the source domain, and automatically learns a sparse context from only few training images in the target domain. As a result, it combines different relevant clues in order to enhance the discrimination power of the learned detectors and reduce class confusion. We evaluate the proposed method on two challenging few-shot object detection benchmarks, and empirical results show that the proposed method obtains competitive performance compared to the related state-of-the-art.
The rise of machine learning in recent years has brought benefits to various research fields such as wide fire detection. Nevertheless, small object detection and rare object detection remain a challenge. To address this problem, we present a dataset automata that can generate ground truth paired datasets using diffusion models. Specifically, we introduce a mask-guided diffusion framework that can fusion the wildfire into the existing images while the flame position and size can be precisely controlled. In advance, to fill the gap that the dataset of wildfire images in specific scenarios is missing, we vary the background of synthesized images by controlling both the text prompt and input image. Furthermore, to solve the color tint problem or the well-known domain shift issue, we apply the CLIP model to filter the generated massive dataset to preserve quality. Thus, our proposed framework can generate a massive dataset of that images are high-quality and ground truth-paired, which well addresses the needs of the annotated datasets in specific tasks.
Object detection in documents is a key step to automate the structural elements identification process in a digital or scanned document through understanding the hierarchical structure and relationships between different elements. Large and complex models, while achieving high accuracy, can be computationally expensive and memory-intensive, making them impractical for deployment on resource constrained devices. Knowledge distillation allows us to create small and more efficient models that retain much of the performance of their larger counterparts. Here we present a graph-based knowledge distillation framework to correctly identify and localize the document objects in a document image. Here, we design a structured graph with nodes containing proposal-level features and edges representing the relationship between the different proposal regions. Also, to reduce text bias an adaptive node sampling strategy is designed to prune the weight distribution and put more weightage on non-text nodes. We encode the complete graph as a knowledge representation and transfer it from the teacher to the student through the proposed distillation loss by effectively capturing both local and global information concurrently. Extensive experimentation on competitive benchmarks demonstrates that the proposed framework outperforms the current state-of-the-art approaches. The code will be available at: https://github.com/ayanban011/GraphKD.
In this paper, we present Mondrian, an edge system that enables high-performance object detection on high-resolution video streams. Many lightweight models and system optimization techniques have been proposed for resource-constrained devices, but they do not fully utilize the potential of the accelerators over dynamic, high-resolution videos. To enable such capability, we devise a novel Compressive Packed Inference to minimize per-pixel processing costs by selectively determining the necessary pixels to process and combining them to maximize processing parallelism. In particular, our system quickly extracts ROIs and dynamically shrinks them, reflecting the effect of the fast-changing characteristics of objects and scenes. It then intelligently combines such scaled ROIs into large canvases to maximize the utilization of inference accelerators such as GPU. Evaluation across various datasets, models, and devices shows Mondrian outperforms state-of-the-art baselines (e.g., input rescaling, ROI extractions, ROI extractions+batching) by 15.0-19.7% higher accuracy, leading to $\times$6.65 higher throughput than frame-wise inference for processing various 1080p video streams. We will release the code after the paper review.
The human visual perception system demonstrates exceptional capabilities in learning without explicit supervision and understanding the part-to-whole composition of objects. Drawing inspiration from these two abilities, we propose Hierarchical Adaptive Self-Supervised Object Detection (HASSOD), a novel approach that learns to detect objects and understand their compositions without human supervision. HASSOD employs a hierarchical adaptive clustering strategy to group regions into object masks based on self-supervised visual representations, adaptively determining the number of objects per image. Furthermore, HASSOD identifies the hierarchical levels of objects in terms of composition, by analyzing coverage relations between masks and constructing tree structures. This additional self-supervised learning task leads to improved detection performance and enhanced interpretability. Lastly, we abandon the inefficient multi-round self-training process utilized in prior methods and instead adapt the Mean Teacher framework from semi-supervised learning, which leads to a smoother and more efficient training process. Through extensive experiments on prevalent image datasets, we demonstrate the superiority of HASSOD over existing methods, thereby advancing the state of the art in self-supervised object detection. Notably, we improve Mask AR from 20.2 to 22.5 on LVIS, and from 17.0 to 26.0 on SA-1B. Project page: https://HASSOD-NeurIPS23.github.io.
Real-time processing is crucial in autonomous driving systems due to the imperative of instantaneous decision-making and rapid response. In real-world scenarios, autonomous vehicles are continuously tasked with interpreting their surroundings, analyzing intricate sensor data, and making decisions within split seconds to ensure safety through numerous computer vision tasks. In this paper, we present a new real-time multi-task network adept at three vital autonomous driving tasks: monocular 3D object detection, semantic segmentation, and dense depth estimation. To counter the challenge of negative transfer, which is the prevalent issue in multi-task learning, we introduce a task-adaptive attention generator. This generator is designed to automatically discern interrelations across the three tasks and arrange the task-sharing pattern, all while leveraging the efficiency of the hard-parameter sharing approach. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed model is pioneering in its capability to concurrently handle multiple tasks, notably 3D object detection, while maintaining real-time processing speeds. Our rigorously optimized network, when tested on the Cityscapes-3D datasets, consistently outperforms various baseline models. Moreover, an in-depth ablation study substantiates the efficacy of the methodologies integrated into our framework.