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Feng Zhao

Publications and source records attributed to Feng Zhao.

At least 163 records · Page 9Linked to original sources

Novel Quality Measure and Efficient Resolution of Convex Hull Pricing for Unit Commitment

Electricity prices determined by economic dispatch that do not consider fixed costs may lead to significant uplift payments. However, when fixed costs are included, prices become non-monotonic with respect to demand, which can adversely impact market transparency. To overcome this issue, convex hull (CH) pricing has been introduced for unit commitment with fixed costs. Several CH pricing methods have been presented, and a feasible cost has been used as a quality measure for the CH price. However, obtaining a feasible cost requires a computationally intensive optimization procedure, and the associated duality gap may not provide an accurate quality measure. This paper presents a new approach for quantifying the quality of the CH price by establishing an upper bound on the optimal dual value. The proposed approach uses Surrogate Lagrangian Relaxation (SLR) to efficiently obtain near-optimal CH prices, while the upper bound decreases rapidly due to the convergence of SLR. Testing results on the IEEE 118-bus system demonstrate that the novel quality measure is more accurate than the measure provided by a feasible cost, indicating the high quality of the upper bound and the efficiency of SLR.

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Towards 3D Scene Reconstruction from Locally Scale-Aligned Monocular Video Depth

Existing monocular depth estimation methods have achieved excellent robustness in diverse scenes, but they can only retrieve affine-invariant depth, up to an unknown scale and shift. However, in some video-based scenarios such as video depth estimation and 3D scene reconstruction from a video, the unknown scale and shift residing in per-frame prediction may cause the depth inconsistency. To solve this problem, we propose a locally weighted linear regression method to recover the scale and shift with very sparse anchor points, which ensures the scale consistency along consecutive frames. Extensive experiments show that our method can boost the performance of existing state-of-the-art approaches by 50% at most over several zero-shot benchmarks. Besides, we merge over 6.3 million RGBD images to train strong and robust depth models. Our produced ResNet50-backbone model even outperforms the state-of-the-art DPT ViT-Large model. Combining with geometry-based reconstruction methods, we formulate a new dense 3D scene reconstruction pipeline, which benefits from both the scale consistency of sparse points and the robustness of monocular methods. By performing the simple per-frame prediction over a video, the accurate 3D scene shape can be recovered.

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DETRDistill: A Universal Knowledge Distillation Framework for DETR-families

Transformer-based detectors (DETRs) are becoming popular for their simple framework, but the large model size and heavy time consumption hinder their deployment in the real world. While knowledge distillation (KD) can be an appealing technique to compress giant detectors into small ones for comparable detection performance and low inference cost. Since DETRs formulate object detection as a set prediction problem, existing KD methods designed for classic convolution-based detectors may not be directly applicable. In this paper, we propose DETRDistill, a novel knowledge distillation method dedicated to DETR-families. Specifically, we first design a Hungarian-matching logits distillation to encourage the student model to have the exact predictions as that of teacher DETRs. Next, we propose a target-aware feature distillation to help the student model learn from the object-centric features of the teacher model. Finally, in order to improve the convergence rate of the student DETR, we introduce a query-prior assignment distillation to speed up the student model learning from well-trained queries and stable assignment of the teacher model. Extensive experimental results on the COCO dataset validate the effectiveness of our approach. Notably, DETRDistill consistently improves various DETRs by more than 2.0 mAP, even surpassing their teacher models.

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Towards Domain Generalization for Multi-view 3D Object Detection in Bird-Eye-View

Multi-view 3D object detection (MV3D-Det) in Bird-Eye-View (BEV) has drawn extensive attention due to its low cost and high efficiency. Although new algorithms for camera-only 3D object detection have been continuously proposed, most of them may risk drastic performance degradation when the domain of input images differs from that of training. In this paper, we first analyze the causes of the domain gap for the MV3D-Det task. Based on the covariate shift assumption, we find that the gap mainly attributes to the feature distribution of BEV, which is determined by the quality of both depth estimation and 2D image's feature representation. To acquire a robust depth prediction, we propose to decouple the depth estimation from the intrinsic parameters of the camera (i.e. the focal length) through converting the prediction of metric depth to that of scale-invariant depth and perform dynamic perspective augmentation to increase the diversity of the extrinsic parameters (i.e. the camera poses) by utilizing homography. Moreover, we modify the focal length values to create multiple pseudo-domains and construct an adversarial training loss to encourage the feature representation to be more domain-agnostic. Without bells and whistles, our approach, namely DG-BEV, successfully alleviates the performance drop on the unseen target domain without impairing the accuracy of the source domain. Extensive experiments on various public datasets, including Waymo, nuScenes, and Lyft, demonstrate the generalization and effectiveness of our approach. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic study to explore a domain generalization method for MV3D-Det.

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CLIPER: A Unified Vision-Language Framework for In-the-Wild Facial Expression Recognition

Facial expression recognition (FER) is an essential task for understanding human behaviors. As one of the most informative behaviors of humans, facial expressions are often compound and variable, which is manifested by the fact that different people may express the same expression in very different ways. However, most FER methods still use one-hot or soft labels as the supervision, which lack sufficient semantic descriptions of facial expressions and are less interpretable. Recently, contrastive vision-language pre-training (VLP) models (e.g., CLIP) use text as supervision and have injected new vitality into various computer vision tasks, benefiting from the rich semantics in text. Therefore, in this work, we propose CLIPER, a unified framework for both static and dynamic facial Expression Recognition based on CLIP. Besides, we introduce multiple expression text descriptors (METD) to learn fine-grained expression representations that make CLIPER more interpretable. We conduct extensive experiments on several popular FER benchmarks and achieve state-of-the-art performance, which demonstrates the effectiveness of CLIPER.

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BEVDistill: Cross-Modal BEV Distillation for Multi-View 3D Object Detection

3D object detection from multiple image views is a fundamental and challenging task for visual scene understanding. Owing to its low cost and high efficiency, multi-view 3D object detection has demonstrated promising application prospects. However, accurately detecting objects through perspective views is extremely difficult due to the lack of depth information. Current approaches tend to adopt heavy backbones for image encoders, making them inapplicable for real-world deployment. Different from the images, LiDAR points are superior in providing spatial cues, resulting in highly precise localization. In this paper, we explore the incorporation of LiDAR-based detectors for multi-view 3D object detection. Instead of directly training a depth prediction network, we unify the image and LiDAR features in the Bird-Eye-View (BEV) space and adaptively transfer knowledge across non-homogenous representations in a teacher-student paradigm. To this end, we propose \textbf{BEVDistill}, a cross-modal BEV knowledge distillation (KD) framework for multi-view 3D object detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms current KD approaches on a highly-competitive baseline, BEVFormer, without introducing any extra cost in the inference phase. Notably, our best model achieves 59.4 NDS on the nuScenes test leaderboard, achieving new state-of-the-art in comparison with various image-based detectors. Code will be available at https://github.com/zehuichen123/BEVDistill.

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Panchromatic and Multispectral Image Fusion via Alternating Reverse Filtering Network

Panchromatic (PAN) and multi-spectral (MS) image fusion, named Pan-sharpening, refers to super-resolve the low-resolution (LR) multi-spectral (MS) images in the spatial domain to generate the expected high-resolution (HR) MS images, conditioning on the corresponding high-resolution PAN images. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective \textit{alternating reverse filtering network} for pan-sharpening. Inspired by the classical reverse filtering that reverses images to the status before filtering, we formulate pan-sharpening as an alternately iterative reverse filtering process, which fuses LR MS and HR MS in an interpretable manner. Different from existing model-driven methods that require well-designed priors and degradation assumptions, the reverse filtering process avoids the dependency on pre-defined exact priors. To guarantee the stability and convergence of the iterative process via contraction mapping on a metric space, we develop the learnable multi-scale Gaussian kernel module, instead of using specific filters. We demonstrate the theoretical feasibility of such formulations. Extensive experiments on diverse scenes to thoroughly verify the performance of our method, significantly outperforming the state of the arts.

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Deep Fourier Up-Sampling

Existing convolutional neural networks widely adopt spatial down-/up-sampling for multi-scale modeling. However, spatial up-sampling operators (\emph{e.g.}, interpolation, transposed convolution, and un-pooling) heavily depend on local pixel attention, incapably exploring the global dependency. In contrast, the Fourier domain obeys the nature of global modeling according to the spectral convolution theorem. Unlike the spatial domain that performs up-sampling with the property of local similarity, up-sampling in the Fourier domain is more challenging as it does not follow such a local property. In this study, we propose a theoretically sound Deep Fourier Up-Sampling (FourierUp) to solve these issues. We revisit the relationships between spatial and Fourier domains and reveal the transform rules on the features of different resolutions in the Fourier domain, which provide key insights for FourierUp's designs. FourierUp as a generic operator consists of three key components: 2D discrete Fourier transform, Fourier dimension increase rules, and 2D inverse Fourier transform, which can be directly integrated with existing networks. Extensive experiments across multiple computer vision tasks, including object detection, image segmentation, image de-raining, image dehazing, and guided image super-resolution, demonstrate the consistent performance gains obtained by introducing our FourierUp.

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Domain-Unified Prompt Representations for Source-Free Domain Generalization

Domain generalization (DG), aiming to make models work on unseen domains, is a surefire way toward general artificial intelligence. Limited by the scale and diversity of current DG datasets, it is difficult for existing methods to scale to diverse domains in open-world scenarios (e.g., science fiction and pixelate style). Therefore, the source-free domain generalization (SFDG) task is necessary and challenging. To address this issue, we propose an approach based on large-scale vision-language pretraining models (e.g., CLIP), which exploits the extensive domain information embedded in it. The proposed scheme generates diverse prompts from a domain bank that contains many more diverse domains than existing DG datasets. Furthermore, our method yields domain-unified representations from these prompts, thus being able to cope with samples from open-world domains. Extensive experiments on mainstream DG datasets, namely PACS, VLCS, OfficeHome, and DomainNet, show that the proposed method achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) DG methods that require source domain data for training. Besides, we collect a small datasets consists of two domains to evaluate the open-world domain generalization ability of the proposed method. The source code and the dataset will be made publicly available at https://github.com/muse1998/Source-Free-Domain-Generalization

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KSG: Knowledge and Skill Graph

The knowledge graph (KG) is an essential form of knowledge representation that has grown in prominence in recent years. Because it concentrates on nominal entities and their relationships, traditional knowledge graphs are static and encyclopedic in nature. On this basis, event knowledge graph (Event KG) models the temporal and spatial dynamics by text processing to facilitate downstream applications, such as question-answering, recommendation and intelligent search. Existing KG research, on the other hand, mostly focuses on text processing and static facts, ignoring the vast quantity of dynamic behavioral information included in photos, movies, and pre-trained neural networks. In addition, no effort has been done to include behavioral intelligence information into the knowledge graph for deep reinforcement learning (DRL) and robot learning. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic knowledge and skill graph (KSG), and then we develop a basic and specific KSG based on CN-DBpedia. The nodes are divided into entity and attribute nodes, with entity nodes containing the agent, environment, and skill (DRL policy or policy representation), and attribute nodes containing the entity description, pre-train network, and offline dataset. KSG can search for different agents' skills in various environments and provide transferable information for acquiring new skills. This is the first study that we are aware of that looks into dynamic KSG for skill retrieval and learning. Extensive experimental results on new skill learning show that KSG boosts new skill learning efficiency.

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CNSNet: A Cleanness-Navigated-Shadow Network for Shadow Removal

The key to shadow removal is recovering the contents of the shadow regions with the guidance of the non-shadow regions. Due to the inadequate long-range modeling, the CNN-based approaches cannot thoroughly investigate the information from the non-shadow regions. To solve this problem, we propose a novel cleanness-navigated-shadow network (CNSNet), with a shadow-oriented adaptive normalization (SOAN) module and a shadow-aware aggregation with transformer (SAAT) module based on the shadow mask. Under the guidance of the shadow mask, the SOAN module formulates the statistics from the non-shadow region and adaptively applies them to the shadow region for region-wise restoration. The SAAT module utilizes the shadow mask to precisely guide the restoration of each shadowed pixel by considering the highly relevant pixels from the shadow-free regions for global pixel-wise restoration. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets (ISTD, ISTD+, and SRD) show that our method achieves superior de-shadowing performance.

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MMNet: Muscle motion-guided network for micro-expression recognition

Facial micro-expressions (MEs) are involuntary facial motions revealing peoples real feelings and play an important role in the early intervention of mental illness, the national security, and many human-computer interaction systems. However, existing micro-expression datasets are limited and usually pose some challenges for training good classifiers. To model the subtle facial muscle motions, we propose a robust micro-expression recognition (MER) framework, namely muscle motion-guided network (MMNet). Specifically, a continuous attention (CA) block is introduced to focus on modeling local subtle muscle motion patterns with little identity information, which is different from most previous methods that directly extract features from complete video frames with much identity information. Besides, we design a position calibration (PC) module based on the vision transformer. By adding the position embeddings of the face generated by PC module at the end of the two branches, the PC module can help to add position information to facial muscle motion pattern features for the MER. Extensive experiments on three public micro-expression datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.

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Intensity-Aware Loss for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition in the Wild

Compared with the image-based static facial expression recognition (SFER) task, the dynamic facial expression recognition (DFER) task based on video sequences is closer to the natural expression recognition scene. However, DFER is often more challenging. One of the main reasons is that video sequences often contain frames with different expression intensities, especially for the facial expressions in the real-world scenarios, while the images in SFER frequently present uniform and high expression intensities. However, if the expressions with different intensities are treated equally, the features learned by the networks will have large intra-class and small inter-class differences, which is harmful to DFER. To tackle this problem, we propose the global convolution-attention block (GCA) to rescale the channels of the feature maps. In addition, we introduce the intensity-aware loss (IAL) in the training process to help the network distinguish the samples with relatively low expression intensities. Experiments on two in-the-wild dynamic facial expression datasets (i.e., DFEW and FERV39k) indicate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art DFER approaches. The source code will be made publicly available.

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AutoAlignV2: Deformable Feature Aggregation for Dynamic Multi-Modal 3D Object Detection

Point clouds and RGB images are two general perceptional sources in autonomous driving. The former can provide accurate localization of objects, and the latter is denser and richer in semantic information. Recently, AutoAlign presents a learnable paradigm in combining these two modalities for 3D object detection. However, it suffers from high computational cost introduced by the global-wise attention. To solve the problem, we propose Cross-Domain DeformCAFA module in this work. It attends to sparse learnable sampling points for cross-modal relational modeling, which enhances the tolerance to calibration error and greatly speeds up the feature aggregation across different modalities. To overcome the complex GT-AUG under multi-modal settings, we design a simple yet effective cross-modal augmentation strategy on convex combination of image patches given their depth information. Moreover, by carrying out a novel image-level dropout training scheme, our model is able to infer in a dynamic manner. To this end, we propose AutoAlignV2, a faster and stronger multi-modal 3D detection framework, built on top of AutoAlign. Extensive experiments on nuScenes benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of AutoAlignV2. Notably, our best model reaches 72.4 NDS on nuScenes test leaderboard, achieving new state-of-the-art results among all published multi-modal 3D object detectors. Code will be available at https://github.com/zehuichen123/AutoAlignV2.

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Enhancement by Your Aesthetic: An Intelligible Unsupervised Personalized Enhancer for Low-Light Images

Low-light image enhancement is an inherently subjective process whose targets vary with the user's aesthetic. Motivated by this, several personalized enhancement methods have been investigated. However, the enhancement process based on user preferences in these techniques is invisible, i.e., a "black box". In this work, we propose an intelligible unsupervised personalized enhancer (iUPEnhancer) for low-light images, which establishes the correlations between the low-light and the unpaired reference images with regard to three user-friendly attributions (brightness, chromaticity, and noise). The proposed iUP-Enhancer is trained with the guidance of these correlations and the corresponding unsupervised loss functions. Rather than a "black box" process, our iUP-Enhancer presents an intelligible enhancement process with the above attributions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm produces competitive qualitative and quantitative results while maintaining excellent flexibility and scalability. This can be validated by personalization with single/multiple references, cross-attribution references, or merely adjusting parameters.

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Source-Free Domain Adaptation for Real-world Image Dehazing

Deep learning-based source dehazing methods trained on synthetic datasets have achieved remarkable performance but suffer from dramatic performance degradation on real hazy images due to domain shift. Although certain Domain Adaptation (DA) dehazing methods have been presented, they inevitably require access to the source dataset to reduce the gap between the source synthetic and target real domains. To address these issues, we present a novel Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (SFUDA) image dehazing paradigm, in which only a well-trained source model and an unlabeled target real hazy dataset are available. Specifically, we devise the Domain Representation Normalization (DRN) module to make the representation of real hazy domain features match that of the synthetic domain to bridge the gaps. With our plug-and-play DRN module, unlabeled real hazy images can adapt existing well-trained source networks. Besides, the unsupervised losses are applied to guide the learning of the DRN module, which consists of frequency losses and physical prior losses. Frequency losses provide structure and style constraints, while the prior loss explores the inherent statistic property of haze-free images. Equipped with our DRN module and unsupervised loss, existing source dehazing models are able to dehaze unlabeled real hazy images. Extensive experiments on multiple baselines demonstrate the validity and superiority of our method visually and quantitatively.

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Graph-DETR3D: Rethinking Overlapping Regions for Multi-View 3D Object Detection

3D object detection from multiple image views is a fundamental and challenging task for visual scene understanding. Due to its low cost and high efficiency, multi-view 3D object detection has demonstrated promising application prospects. However, accurately detecting objects through perspective views in the 3D space is extremely difficult due to the lack of depth information. Recently, DETR3D introduces a novel 3D-2D query paradigm in aggregating multi-view images for 3D object detection and achieves state-of-the-art performance. In this paper, with intensive pilot experiments, we quantify the objects located at different regions and find that the "truncated instances" (i.e., at the border regions of each image) are the main bottleneck hindering the performance of DETR3D. Although it merges multiple features from two adjacent views in the overlapping regions, DETR3D still suffers from insufficient feature aggregation, thus missing the chance to fully boost the detection performance. In an effort to tackle the problem, we propose Graph-DETR3D to automatically aggregate multi-view imagery information through graph structure learning (GSL). It constructs a dynamic 3D graph between each object query and 2D feature maps to enhance the object representations, especially at the border regions. Besides, Graph-DETR3D benefits from a novel depth-invariant multi-scale training strategy, which maintains the visual depth consistency by simultaneously scaling the image size and the object depth. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our Graph-DETR3D. Notably, our best model achieves 49.5 NDS on the nuScenes test leaderboard, achieving new state-of-the-art in comparison with various published image-view 3D object detectors.

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Underdetermined 2D-DOD and 2D-DOA Estimation for Bistatic Coprime EMVS-MIMO Radar: From the Difference Coarray Perspective

In this paper, the underdetermined 2D-DOD and 2D-DOA estimation for bistatic coprime EMVS-MIMO radar is considered. Firstly, a 5-D tensor model was constructed by using the multi-dimensional space-time characteristics of the received data. Then, an 8-D tensor has been obtained by using the auto-correlation calculation. To obtain the difference coarrays of transmit and receive EMVS, the de-coupling process between the spatial response of EMVS and the steering vector is inevitable. Thus, a new 6-D tensor can be constructed via the tensor permutation and the generalized tensorization of the canonical polyadic decomposition. {According} to the theory of the Tensor-Matrix Product operation, the duplicated elements in the difference coarrays can be removed by the utilization of two designed selection matrices. Due to the centrosymmetric geometry of the difference coarrays, two DFT beamspace matrices were subsequently designed to convert the complex steering matrices into the real-valued ones, whose advantage is to improve the estimation accuracy of the 2D-DODs and 2D-DOAs. Afterwards, a third-order tensor with the third-way fixed at 36 was constructed and the Parallel Factor algorithm was deployed, which can yield the closed-form automatically paired 2D-DOD and 2D-DOA estimation. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can exhibit superior estimation performance for the underdetermined 2D-DOD and 2D-DOA estimation.

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