Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Daizong Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Daizong Liu.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources
arXiv2023

From Region to Patch: Attribute-Aware Foreground-Background Contrastive Learning for Fine-Grained Fashion Retrieval

Attribute-specific fashion retrieval (ASFR) is a challenging information retrieval task, which has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Different from traditional fashion retrieval which mainly focuses on optimizing holistic similarity, the ASFR task concentrates on attribute-specific similarity, resulting in more fine-grained and interpretable retrieval results. As the attribute-specific similarity typically corresponds to the specific subtle regions of images, we propose a Region-to-Patch Framework (RPF) that consists of a region-aware branch and a patch-aware branch to extract fine-grained attribute-related visual features for precise retrieval in a coarse-to-fine manner. In particular, the region-aware branch is first to be utilized to locate the potential regions related to the semantic of the given attribute. Then, considering that the located region is coarse and still contains the background visual contents, the patch-aware branch is proposed to capture patch-wise attribute-related details from the previous amplified region. Such a hybrid architecture strikes a proper balance between region localization and feature extraction. Besides, different from previous works that solely focus on discriminating the attribute-relevant foreground visual features, we argue that the attribute-irrelevant background features are also crucial for distinguishing the detailed visual contexts in a contrastive manner. Therefore, a novel E-InfoNCE loss based on the foreground and background representations is further proposed to improve the discrimination of attribute-specific representation. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, and also show a decent generalization of our RPF on out-of-domain fashion images. Our source code is available at https://github.com/HuiGuanLab/RPF.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Transform-Equivariant Consistency Learning for Temporal Sentence Grounding

This paper addresses the temporal sentence grounding (TSG). Although existing methods have made decent achievements in this task, they not only severely rely on abundant video-query paired data for training, but also easily fail into the dataset distribution bias. To alleviate these limitations, we introduce a novel Equivariant Consistency Regulation Learning (ECRL) framework to learn more discriminative query-related frame-wise representations for each video, in a self-supervised manner. Our motivation comes from that the temporal boundary of the query-guided activity should be consistently predicted under various video-level transformations. Concretely, we first design a series of spatio-temporal augmentations on both foreground and background video segments to generate a set of synthetic video samples. In particular, we devise a self-refine module to enhance the completeness and smoothness of the augmented video. Then, we present a novel self-supervised consistency loss (SSCL) applied on the original and augmented videos to capture their invariant query-related semantic by minimizing the KL-divergence between the sequence similarity of two videos and a prior Gaussian distribution of timestamp distance. At last, a shared grounding head is introduced to predict the transform-equivariant query-guided segment boundaries for both the original and augmented videos. Extensive experiments on three challenging datasets (ActivityNet, TACoS, and Charades-STA) demonstrate both effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed ECRL framework.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Density-Insensitive Unsupervised Domain Adaption on 3D Object Detection

3D object detection from point clouds is crucial in safety-critical autonomous driving. Although many works have made great efforts and achieved significant progress on this task, most of them suffer from expensive annotation cost and poor transferability to unknown data due to the domain gap. Recently, few works attempt to tackle the domain gap in objects, but still fail to adapt to the gap of varying beam-densities between two domains, which is critical to mitigate the characteristic differences of the LiDAR collectors. To this end, we make the attempt to propose a density-insensitive domain adaption framework to address the density-induced domain gap. In particular, we first introduce Random Beam Re-Sampling (RBRS) to enhance the robustness of 3D detectors trained on the source domain to the varying beam-density. Then, we take this pre-trained detector as the backbone model, and feed the unlabeled target domain data into our newly designed task-specific teacher-student framework for predicting its high-quality pseudo labels. To further adapt the property of density-insensitivity into the target domain, we feed the teacher and student branches with the same sample of different densities, and propose an Object Graph Alignment (OGA) module to construct two object-graphs between the two branches for enforcing the consistency in both the attribute and relation of cross-density objects. Experimental results on three widely adopted 3D object detection datasets demonstrate that our proposed domain adaption method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, especially over varying-density data. Code is available at https://github.com/WoodwindHu/DTS}{https://github.com/WoodwindHu/DTS.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Jointly Visual- and Semantic-Aware Graph Memory Networks for Temporal Sentence Localization in Videos

Temporal sentence localization in videos (TSLV) aims to retrieve the most interested segment in an untrimmed video according to a given sentence query. However, almost of existing TSLV approaches suffer from the same limitations: (1) They only focus on either frame-level or object-level visual representation learning and corresponding correlation reasoning, but fail to integrate them both; (2) They neglect to leverage the rich semantic contexts to further benefit the query reasoning. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel Hierarchical Visual- and Semantic-Aware Reasoning Network (HVSARN), which enables both visual- and semantic-aware query reasoning from object-level to frame-level. Specifically, we present a new graph memory mechanism to perform visual-semantic query reasoning: For visual reasoning, we design a visual graph memory to leverage visual information of video; For semantic reasoning, a semantic graph memory is also introduced to explicitly leverage semantic knowledge contained in the classes and attributes of video objects, and perform correlation reasoning in the semantic space. Experiments on three datasets demonstrate that our HVSARN achieves a new state-of-the-art performance.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Tracking Objects and Activities with Attention for Temporal Sentence Grounding

Temporal sentence grounding (TSG) aims to localize the temporal segment which is semantically aligned with a natural language query in an untrimmed video.Most existing methods extract frame-grained features or object-grained features by 3D ConvNet or detection network under a conventional TSG framework, failing to capture the subtle differences between frames or to model the spatio-temporal behavior of core persons/objects. In this paper, we introduce a new perspective to address the TSG task by tracking pivotal objects and activities to learn more fine-grained spatio-temporal behaviors. Specifically, we propose a novel Temporal Sentence Tracking Network (TSTNet), which contains (A) a Cross-modal Targets Generator to generate multi-modal templates and search space, filtering objects and activities, and (B) a Temporal Sentence Tracker to track multi-modal targets for modeling the targets' behavior and to predict query-related segment. Extensive experiments and comparisons with state-of-the-arts are conducted on challenging benchmarks: Charades-STA and TACoS. And our TSTNet achieves the leading performance with a considerable real-time speed.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Hypotheses Tree Building for One-Shot Temporal Sentence Localization

Given an untrimmed video, temporal sentence localization (TSL) aims to localize a specific segment according to a given sentence query. Though respectable works have made decent achievements in this task, they severely rely on dense video frame annotations, which require a tremendous amount of human effort to collect. In this paper, we target another more practical and challenging setting: one-shot temporal sentence localization (one-shot TSL), which learns to retrieve the query information among the entire video with only one annotated frame. Particularly, we propose an effective and novel tree-structure baseline for one-shot TSL, called Multiple Hypotheses Segment Tree (MHST), to capture the query-aware discriminative frame-wise information under the insufficient annotations. Each video frame is taken as the leaf-node, and the adjacent frames sharing the same visual-linguistic semantics will be merged into the upper non-leaf node for tree building. At last, each root node is an individual segment hypothesis containing the consecutive frames of its leaf-nodes. During the tree construction, we also introduce a pruning strategy to eliminate the interference of query-irrelevant nodes. With our designed self-supervised loss functions, our MHST is able to generate high-quality segment hypotheses for ranking and selection with the query. Experiments on two challenging datasets demonstrate that MHST achieves competitive performance compared to existing methods.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Rethinking the Video Sampling and Reasoning Strategies for Temporal Sentence Grounding

Temporal sentence grounding (TSG) aims to identify the temporal boundary of a specific segment from an untrimmed video by a sentence query. All existing works first utilize a sparse sampling strategy to extract a fixed number of video frames and then conduct multi-modal interactions with query sentence for reasoning. However, we argue that these methods have overlooked two indispensable issues: 1) Boundary-bias: The annotated target segment generally refers to two specific frames as corresponding start and end timestamps. The video downsampling process may lose these two frames and take the adjacent irrelevant frames as new boundaries. 2) Reasoning-bias: Such incorrect new boundary frames also lead to the reasoning bias during frame-query interaction, reducing the generalization ability of model. To alleviate above limitations, in this paper, we propose a novel Siamese Sampling and Reasoning Network (SSRN) for TSG, which introduces a siamese sampling mechanism to generate additional contextual frames to enrich and refine the new boundaries. Specifically, a reasoning strategy is developed to learn the inter-relationship among these frames and generate soft labels on boundaries for more accurate frame-query reasoning. Such mechanism is also able to supplement the absent consecutive visual semantics to the sampled sparse frames for fine-grained activity understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SSRN on three challenging datasets.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2022

Exploring the Devil in Graph Spectral Domain for 3D Point Cloud Attacks

With the maturity of depth sensors, point clouds have received increasing attention in various applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, surveillance, etc., while deep point cloud learning models have shown to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Existing attack methods generally add/delete points or perform point-wise perturbation over point clouds to generate adversarial examples in the data space, which may neglect the geometric characteristics of point clouds. Instead, we propose point cloud attacks from a new perspective -- Graph Spectral Domain Attack (GSDA), aiming to perturb transform coefficients in the graph spectral domain that corresponds to varying certain geometric structure. In particular, we naturally represent a point cloud over a graph, and adaptively transform the coordinates of points into the graph spectral domain via graph Fourier transform (GFT) for compact representation. We then analyze the influence of different spectral bands on the geometric structure of the point cloud, based on which we propose to perturb the GFT coefficients in a learnable manner guided by an energy constraint loss function. Finally, the adversarial point cloud is generated by transforming the perturbed spectral representation back to the data domain via the inverse GFT (IGFT). Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed GSDA in terms of both imperceptibility and attack success rates under a variety of defense strategies. The code is available at https://github.com/WoodwindHu/GSDA.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2022

Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition with Adaptive Teacher Learning and Fine-grained Student Ensemble

Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition (DS-NER) effectively alleviates the data scarcity problem in NER by automatically generating training samples. Unfortunately, the distant supervision may induce noisy labels, thus undermining the robustness of the learned models and restricting the practical application. To relieve this problem, recent works adopt self-training teacher-student frameworks to gradually refine the training labels and improve the generalization ability of NER models. However, we argue that the performance of the current self-training frameworks for DS-NER is severely underestimated by their plain designs, including both inadequate student learning and coarse-grained teacher updating. Therefore, in this paper, we make the first attempt to alleviate these issues by proposing: (1) adaptive teacher learning comprised of joint training of two teacher-student networks and considering both consistent and inconsistent predictions between two teachers, thus promoting comprehensive student learning. (2) fine-grained student ensemble that updates each fragment of the teacher model with a temporal moving average of the corresponding fragment of the student, which enhances consistent predictions on each model fragment against noise. To verify the effectiveness of our proposed method, we conduct experiments on four DS-NER datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly surpasses previous SOTA methods.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2022

Skimming, Locating, then Perusing: A Human-Like Framework for Natural Language Video Localization

This paper addresses the problem of natural language video localization (NLVL). Almost all existing works follow the "only look once" framework that exploits a single model to directly capture the complex cross- and self-modal relations among video-query pairs and retrieve the relevant segment. However, we argue that these methods have overlooked two indispensable characteristics of an ideal localization method: 1) Frame-differentiable: considering the imbalance of positive/negative video frames, it is effective to highlight positive frames and weaken negative ones during the localization. 2) Boundary-precise: to predict the exact segment boundary, the model should capture more fine-grained differences between consecutive frames since their variations are often smooth. To this end, inspired by how humans perceive and localize a segment, we propose a two-step human-like framework called Skimming-Locating-Perusing (SLP). SLP consists of a Skimming-and-Locating (SL) module and a Bi-directional Perusing (BP) module. The SL module first refers to the query semantic and selects the best matched frame from the video while filtering out irrelevant frames. Then, the BP module constructs an initial segment based on this frame, and dynamically updates it by exploring its adjacent frames until no frame shares the same activity semantic. Experimental results on three challenging benchmarks show that our SLP is superior to the state-of-the-art methods and localizes more precise segment boundaries.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2022

Reducing the Vision and Language Bias for Temporal Sentence Grounding

Temporal sentence grounding (TSG) is an important yet challenging task in multimedia information retrieval. Although previous TSG methods have achieved decent performance, they tend to capture the selection biases of frequently appeared video-query pairs in the dataset rather than present robust multimodal reasoning abilities, especially for the rarely appeared pairs. In this paper, we study the above issue of selection biases and accordingly propose a Debiasing-TSG (D-TSG) model to filter and remove the negative biases in both vision and language modalities for enhancing the model generalization ability. Specifically, we propose to alleviate the issue from two perspectives: 1) Feature distillation. We built a multi-modal debiasing branch to firstly capture the vision and language biases, and then apply a bias identification module to explicitly recognize the true negative biases and remove them from the benign multi-modal representations. 2) Contrastive sample generation. We construct two types of negative samples to enforce the model to accurately learn the aligned multi-modal semantics and make complete semantic reasoning. We apply the proposed model to both commonly and rarely appeared TSG cases, and demonstrate its effectiveness by achieving the state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets (ActivityNet Caption, TACoS, and Charades-STA).

cs.CV↗
arXiv2022

Gaussian Kernel-based Cross Modal Network for Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding

Spatial-Temporal Video Grounding (STVG) is a challenging task which aims to localize the spatio-temporal tube of the interested object semantically according to a natural language query. Most previous works not only severely rely on the anchor boxes extracted by Faster R-CNN, but also simply regard the video as a series of individual frames, thus lacking their temporal modeling. Instead, in this paper, we are the first to propose an anchor-free framework for STVG, called Gaussian Kernel-based Cross Modal Network (GKCMN). Specifically, we utilize the learned Gaussian Kernel-based heatmaps of each video frame to locate the query-related object. A mixed serial and parallel connection network is further developed to leverage both spatial and temporal relations among frames for better grounding. Experimental results on VidSTG dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed GKCMN.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2022

Imperceptible Transfer Attack and Defense on 3D Point Cloud Classification

Although many efforts have been made into attack and defense on the 2D image domain in recent years, few methods explore the vulnerability of 3D models. Existing 3D attackers generally perform point-wise perturbation over point clouds, resulting in deformed structures or outliers, which is easily perceivable by humans. Moreover, their adversarial examples are generated under the white-box setting, which frequently suffers from low success rates when transferred to attack remote black-box models. In this paper, we study 3D point cloud attacks from two new and challenging perspectives by proposing a novel Imperceptible Transfer Attack (ITA): 1) Imperceptibility: we constrain the perturbation direction of each point along its normal vector of the neighborhood surface, leading to generated examples with similar geometric properties and thus enhancing the imperceptibility. 2) Transferability: we develop an adversarial transformation model to generate the most harmful distortions and enforce the adversarial examples to resist it, improving their transferability to unknown black-box models. Further, we propose to train more robust black-box 3D models to defend against such ITA attacks by learning more discriminative point cloud representations. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our ITA attack is more imperceptible and transferable than state-of-the-arts and validate the superiority of our defense strategy.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2022

Multi-Scale Self-Contrastive Learning with Hard Negative Mining for Weakly-Supervised Query-based Video Grounding

Query-based video grounding is an important yet challenging task in video understanding, which aims to localize the target segment in an untrimmed video according to a sentence query. Most previous works achieve significant progress by addressing this task in a fully-supervised manner with segment-level labels, which require high labeling cost. Although some recent efforts develop weakly-supervised methods that only need the video-level knowledge, they generally match multiple pre-defined segment proposals with query and select the best one, which lacks fine-grained frame-level details for distinguishing frames with high repeatability and similarity within the entire video. To alleviate the above limitations, we propose a self-contrastive learning framework to address the query-based video grounding task under a weakly-supervised setting. Firstly, instead of utilizing redundant segment proposals, we propose a new grounding scheme that learns frame-wise matching scores referring to the query semantic to predict the possible foreground frames by only using the video-level annotations. Secondly, since some predicted frames (i.e., boundary frames) are relatively coarse and exhibit similar appearance to their adjacent frames, we propose a coarse-to-fine contrastive learning paradigm to learn more discriminative frame-wise representations for distinguishing the false positive frames. In particular, we iteratively explore multi-scale hard negative samples that are close to positive samples in the representation space for distinguishing fine-grained frame-wise details, thus enforcing more accurate segment grounding. Extensive experiments on two challenging benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2022

Exploring Optical-Flow-Guided Motion and Detection-Based Appearance for Temporal Sentence Grounding

Temporal sentence grounding aims to localize a target segment in an untrimmed video semantically according to a given sentence query. Most previous works focus on learning frame-level features of each whole frame in the entire video, and directly match them with the textual information. Such frame-level feature extraction leads to the obstacles of these methods in distinguishing ambiguous video frames with complicated contents and subtle appearance differences, thus limiting their performance. In order to differentiate fine-grained appearance similarities among consecutive frames, some state-of-the-art methods additionally employ a detection model like Faster R-CNN to obtain detailed object-level features in each frame for filtering out the redundant background contents. However, these methods suffer from missing motion analysis since the object detection module in Faster R-CNN lacks temporal modeling. To alleviate the above limitations, in this paper, we propose a novel Motion- and Appearance-guided 3D Semantic Reasoning Network (MA3SRN), which incorporates optical-flow-guided motion-aware, detection-based appearance-aware, and 3D-aware object-level features to better reason the spatial-temporal object relations for accurately modelling the activity among consecutive frames. Specifically, we first develop three individual branches for motion, appearance, and 3D encoding separately to learn fine-grained motion-guided, appearance-guided, and 3D-aware object features, respectively. Then, both motion and appearance information from corresponding branches are associated to enhance the 3D-aware features for the final precise grounding. Extensive experiments on three challenging datasets (ActivityNet Caption, Charades-STA and TACoS) demonstrate that the proposed MA3SRN model achieves a new state-of-the-art.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2022

Unsupervised Temporal Video Grounding with Deep Semantic Clustering

Temporal video grounding (TVG) aims to localize a target segment in a video according to a given sentence query. Though respectable works have made decent achievements in this task, they severely rely on abundant video-query paired data, which is expensive and time-consuming to collect in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we explore whether a video grounding model can be learned without any paired annotations. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first work trying to address TVG in an unsupervised setting. Considering there is no paired supervision, we propose a novel Deep Semantic Clustering Network (DSCNet) to leverage all semantic information from the whole query set to compose the possible activity in each video for grounding. Specifically, we first develop a language semantic mining module, which extracts implicit semantic features from the whole query set. Then, these language semantic features serve as the guidance to compose the activity in video via a video-based semantic aggregation module. Finally, we utilize a foreground attention branch to filter out the redundant background activities and refine the grounding results. To validate the effectiveness of our DSCNet, we conduct experiments on both ActivityNet Captions and Charades-STA datasets. The results demonstrate that DSCNet achieves competitive performance, and even outperforms most weakly-supervised approaches.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2022

Memory-Guided Semantic Learning Network for Temporal Sentence Grounding

Temporal sentence grounding (TSG) is crucial and fundamental for video understanding. Although the existing methods train well-designed deep networks with a large amount of data, we find that they can easily forget the rarely appeared cases in the training stage due to the off-balance data distribution, which influences the model generalization and leads to undesirable performance. To tackle this issue, we propose a memory-augmented network, called Memory-Guided Semantic Learning Network (MGSL-Net), that learns and memorizes the rarely appeared content in TSG tasks. Specifically, MGSL-Net consists of three main parts: a cross-modal inter-action module, a memory augmentation module, and a heterogeneous attention module. We first align the given video-query pair by a cross-modal graph convolutional network, and then utilize a memory module to record the cross-modal shared semantic features in the domain-specific persistent memory. During training, the memory slots are dynamically associated with both common and rare cases, alleviating the forgetting issue. In testing, the rare cases can thus be enhanced by retrieving the stored memories, resulting in better generalization. At last, the heterogeneous attention module is utilized to integrate the enhanced multi-modal features in both video and query domains. Experimental results on three benchmarks show the superiority of our method on both effectiveness and efficiency, which substantially improves the accuracy not only on the entire dataset but also on rare cases.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2022

Exploring Motion and Appearance Information for Temporal Sentence Grounding

This paper addresses temporal sentence grounding. Previous works typically solve this task by learning frame-level video features and align them with the textual information. A major limitation of these works is that they fail to distinguish ambiguous video frames with subtle appearance differences due to frame-level feature extraction. Recently, a few methods adopt Faster R-CNN to extract detailed object features in each frame to differentiate the fine-grained appearance similarities. However, the object-level features extracted by Faster R-CNN suffer from missing motion analysis since the object detection model lacks temporal modeling. To solve this issue, we propose a novel Motion-Appearance Reasoning Network (MARN), which incorporates both motion-aware and appearance-aware object features to better reason object relations for modeling the activity among successive frames. Specifically, we first introduce two individual video encoders to embed the video into corresponding motion-oriented and appearance-aspect object representations. Then, we develop separate motion and appearance branches to learn motion-guided and appearance-guided object relations, respectively. At last, both motion and appearance information from two branches are associated to generate more representative features for final grounding. Extensive experiments on two challenging datasets (Charades-STA and TACoS) show that our proposed MARN significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.

cs.CV↗