arXiv subjects

Jianqiang Huang

Publications and source records attributed to Jianqiang Huang.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

On Mitigating Hard Clusters for Face Clustering

Face clustering is a promising way to scale up face recognition systems using large-scale unlabeled face images. It remains challenging to identify small or sparse face image clusters that we call hard clusters, which is caused by the heterogeneity, \ie, high variations in size and sparsity, of the clusters. Consequently, the conventional way of using a uniform threshold (to identify clusters) often leads to a terrible misclassification for the samples that should belong to hard clusters. We tackle this problem by leveraging the neighborhood information of samples and inferring the cluster memberships (of samples) in a probabilistic way. We introduce two novel modules, Neighborhood-Diffusion-based Density (NDDe) and Transition-Probability-based Distance (TPDi), based on which we can simply apply the standard Density Peak Clustering algorithm with a uniform threshold. Our experiments on multiple benchmarks show that each module contributes to the final performance of our method, and by incorporating them into other advanced face clustering methods, these two modules can boost the performance of these methods to a new state-of-the-art. Code is available at: https://github.com/echoanran/On-Mitigating-Hard-Clusters.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Rethinking IoU-based Optimization for Single-stage 3D Object Detection

Since Intersection-over-Union (IoU) based optimization maintains the consistency of the final IoU prediction metric and losses, it has been widely used in both regression and classification branches of single-stage 2D object detectors. Recently, several 3D object detection methods adopt IoU-based optimization and directly replace the 2D IoU with 3D IoU. However, such a direct computation in 3D is very costly due to the complex implementation and inefficient backward operations. Moreover, 3D IoU-based optimization is sub-optimal as it is sensitive to rotation and thus can cause training instability and detection performance deterioration. In this paper, we propose a novel Rotation-Decoupled IoU (RDIoU) method that can mitigate the rotation-sensitivity issue, and produce more efficient optimization objectives compared with 3D IoU during the training stage. Specifically, our RDIoU simplifies the complex interactions of regression parameters by decoupling the rotation variable as an independent term, yet preserving the geometry of 3D IoU. By incorporating RDIoU into both the regression and classification branches, the network is encouraged to learn more precise bounding boxes and concurrently overcome the misalignment issue between classification and regression. Extensive experiments on the benchmark KITTI and Waymo Open Dataset validate that our RDIoU method can bring substantial improvement for the single-stage 3D object detection.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

A Survey on Deep Hashing Methods

Nearest neighbor search aims to obtain the samples in the database with the smallest distances from them to the queries, which is a basic task in a range of fields, including computer vision and data mining. Hashing is one of the most widely used methods for its computational and storage efficiency. With the development of deep learning, deep hashing methods show more advantages than traditional methods. In this survey, we detailedly investigate current deep hashing algorithms including deep supervised hashing and deep unsupervised hashing. Specifically, we categorize deep supervised hashing methods into pairwise methods, ranking-based methods, pointwise methods as well as quantization according to how measuring the similarities of the learned hash codes. Moreover, deep unsupervised hashing is categorized into similarity reconstruction-based methods, pseudo-label-based methods and prediction-free self-supervised learning-based methods based on their semantic learning manners. We also introduce three related important topics including semi-supervised deep hashing, domain adaption deep hashing and multi-modal deep hashing. Meanwhile, we present some commonly used public datasets and the scheme to measure the performance of deep hashing algorithms. Finally, we discuss some potential research directions in conclusion.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Spatial Likelihood Voting with Self-Knowledge Distillation for Weakly Supervised Object Detection

Weakly supervised object detection (WSOD), which is an effective way to train an object detection model using only image-level annotations, has attracted considerable attention from researchers. However, most of the existing methods, which are based on multiple instance learning (MIL), tend to localize instances to the discriminative parts of salient objects instead of the entire content of all objects. In this paper, we propose a WSOD framework called the Spatial Likelihood Voting with Self-knowledge Distillation Network (SLV-SD Net). In this framework, we introduce a spatial likelihood voting (SLV) module to converge region proposal localization without bounding box annotations. Specifically, in every iteration during training, all the region proposals in a given image act as voters voting for the likelihood of each category in the spatial dimensions. After dilating the alignment on the area with large likelihood values, the voting results are regularized as bounding boxes, which are then used for the final classification and localization. Based on SLV, we further propose a self-knowledge distillation (SD) module to refine the feature representations of the given image. The likelihood maps generated by the SLV module are used to supervise the feature learning of the backbone network, encouraging the network to attend to wider and more diverse areas of the image. Extensive experiments on the PASCAL VOC 2007/2012 and MS-COCO datasets demonstrate the excellent performance of SLV-SD Net. In addition, SLV-SD Net produces new state-of-the-art results on these benchmarks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Homography Loss for Monocular 3D Object Detection

Monocular 3D object detection is an essential task in autonomous driving. However, most current methods consider each 3D object in the scene as an independent training sample, while ignoring their inherent geometric relations, thus inevitably resulting in a lack of leveraging spatial constraints. In this paper, we propose a novel method that takes all the objects into consideration and explores their mutual relationships to help better estimate the 3D boxes. Moreover, since 2D detection is more reliable currently, we also investigate how to use the detected 2D boxes as guidance to globally constrain the optimization of the corresponding predicted 3D boxes. To this end, a differentiable loss function, termed as Homography Loss, is proposed to achieve the goal, which exploits both 2D and 3D information, aiming at balancing the positional relationships between different objects by global constraints, so as to obtain more accurately predicted 3D boxes. Thanks to the concise design, our loss function is universal and can be plugged into any mature monocular 3D detector, while significantly boosting the performance over their baseline. Experiments demonstrate that our method yields the best performance (Nov. 2021) compared with the other state-of-the-arts by a large margin on KITTI 3D datasets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Online Convolutional Re-parameterization

Structural re-parameterization has drawn increasing attention in various computer vision tasks. It aims at improving the performance of deep models without introducing any inference-time cost. Though efficient during inference, such models rely heavily on the complicated training-time blocks to achieve high accuracy, leading to large extra training cost. In this paper, we present online convolutional re-parameterization (OREPA), a two-stage pipeline, aiming to reduce the huge training overhead by squeezing the complex training-time block into a single convolution. To achieve this goal, we introduce a linear scaling layer for better optimizing the online blocks. Assisted with the reduced training cost, we also explore some more effective re-param components. Compared with the state-of-the-art re-param models, OREPA is able to save the training-time memory cost by about 70% and accelerate the training speed by around 2x. Meanwhile, equipped with OREPA, the models outperform previous methods on ImageNet by up to +0.6%.We also conduct experiments on object detection and semantic segmentation and show consistent improvements on the downstream tasks. Codes are available at https://github.com/JUGGHM/OREPA_CVPR2022 .

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Dynamic Supervisor for Cross-dataset Object Detection

The application of cross-dataset training in object detection tasks is complicated because the inconsistency in the category range across datasets transforms fully supervised learning into semi-supervised learning. To address this problem, recent studies focus on the generation of high-quality missing annotations. In this study, we first point out that it is not enough to generate high-quality annotations using a single model, which only looks once for annotations. Through detailed experimental analyses, we further conclude that hard-label training is conducive to generating high-recall annotations, while soft-label training tends to obtain high-precision annotations. Inspired by the aspects mentioned above, we propose a dynamic supervisor framework that updates the annotations multiple times through multiple-updated submodels trained using hard and soft labels. In the final generated annotations, both recall and precision improve significantly through the integration of hard-label training with soft-label training. Extensive experiments conducted on various dataset combination settings support our analyses and demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed dynamic supervisor.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Cloth-Changing Person Re-identification from A Single Image with Gait Prediction and Regularization

Cloth-Changing person re-identification (CC-ReID) aims at matching the same person across different locations over a long-duration, e.g., over days, and therefore inevitably meets challenge of changing clothing. In this paper, we focus on handling well the CC-ReID problem under a more challenging setting, i.e., just from a single image, which enables high-efficiency and latency-free pedestrian identify for real-time surveillance applications. Specifically, we introduce Gait recognition as an auxiliary task to drive the Image ReID model to learn cloth-agnostic representations by leveraging personal unique and cloth-independent gait information, we name this framework as GI-ReID. GI-ReID adopts a two-stream architecture that consists of a image ReID-Stream and an auxiliary gait recognition stream (Gait-Stream). The Gait-Stream, that is discarded in the inference for high computational efficiency, acts as a regulator to encourage the ReID-Stream to capture cloth-invariant biometric motion features during the training. To get temporal continuous motion cues from a single image, we design a Gait Sequence Prediction (GSP) module for Gait-Stream to enrich gait information. Finally, a high-level semantics consistency over two streams is enforced for effective knowledge regularization. Experiments on multiple image-based Cloth-Changing ReID benchmarks, e.g., LTCC, PRCC, Real28, and VC-Clothes, demonstrate that GI-ReID performs favorably against the state-of-the-arts. Codes are available at https://github.com/jinx-USTC/GI-ReID.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Out-of-distribution Generalization via Partial Feature Decorrelation

Most deep-learning-based image classification methods assume that all samples are generated under an independent and identically distributed (IID) setting. However, out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization is more common in practice, which means an agnostic context distribution shift between training and testing environments. To address this problem, we present a novel Partial Feature Decorrelation Learning (PFDL) algorithm, which jointly optimizes a feature decomposition network and the target image classification model. The feature decomposition network decomposes feature embeddings into the independent and the correlated parts such that the correlations between features will be highlighted. Then, the correlated features help learn a stable feature representation by decorrelating the highlighted correlations while optimizing the image classification model. We verify the correlation modeling ability of the feature decomposition network on a synthetic dataset. The experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our method can improve the backbone model's accuracy on OOD image classification datasets.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Continual Learning for CTR Prediction: A Hybrid Approach

Click-through rate(CTR) prediction is a core task in cost-per-click(CPC) advertising systems and has been studied extensively by machine learning practitioners. While many existing methods have been successfully deployed in practice, most of them are built upon i.i.d.(independent and identically distributed) assumption, ignoring that the click data used for training and inference is collected through time and is intrinsically non-stationary and drifting. This mismatch will inevitably lead to sub-optimal performance. To address this problem, we formulate CTR prediction as a continual learning task and propose COLF, a hybrid COntinual Learning Framework for CTR prediction, which has a memory-based modular architecture that is designed to adapt, learn and give predictions continuously when faced with non-stationary drifting click data streams. Married with a memory population method that explicitly controls the discrepancy between memory and target data, COLF is able to gain positive knowledge from its historical experience and makes improved CTR predictions. Empirical evaluations on click log collected from a major shopping app in China demonstrate our method's superiority over existing methods. Additionally, we have deployed our method online and observed significant CTR and revenue improvement, which further demonstrates our method's efficacy.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2021

Deconfounded Visual Grounding

We focus on the confounding bias between language and location in the visual grounding pipeline, where we find that the bias is the major visual reasoning bottleneck. For example, the grounding process is usually a trivial language-location association without visual reasoning, e.g., grounding any language query containing sheep to the nearly central regions, due to that most queries about sheep have ground-truth locations at the image center. First, we frame the visual grounding pipeline into a causal graph, which shows the causalities among image, query, target location and underlying confounder. Through the causal graph, we know how to break the grounding bottleneck: deconfounded visual grounding. Second, to tackle the challenge that the confounder is unobserved in general, we propose a confounder-agnostic approach called: Referring Expression Deconfounder (RED), to remove the confounding bias. Third, we implement RED as a simple language attention, which can be applied in any grounding method. On popular benchmarks, RED improves various state-of-the-art grounding methods by a significant margin. Code will soon be available at: https://github.com/JianqiangH/Deconfounded_VG.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

AutoHEnsGNN: Winning Solution to AutoGraph Challenge for KDD Cup 2020

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become increasingly popular and achieved impressive results in many graph-based applications. However, extensive manual work and domain knowledge are required to design effective architectures, and the results of GNN models have high variance with different training setups, which limits the application of existing GNN models. In this paper, we present AutoHEnsGNN, a framework to build effective and robust models for graph tasks without any human intervention. AutoHEnsGNN won first place in the AutoGraph Challenge for KDD Cup 2020, and achieved the best rank score of five real-life datasets in the final phase. Given a task, AutoHEnsGNN first applies a fast proxy evaluation to automatically select a pool of promising GNN models. Then it builds a hierarchical ensemble framework: 1) We propose graph self-ensemble (GSE), which can reduce the variance of weight initialization and efficiently exploit the information of local and global neighborhoods; 2) Based on GSE, a weighted ensemble of different types of GNN models is used to effectively learn more discriminative node representations. To efficiently search the architectures and ensemble weights, we propose AutoHEnsGNN$_{\text{Gradient}}$, which treats the architectures and ensemble weights as architecture parameters and uses gradient-based architecture search to obtain optimal configurations, and AutoHEnsGNN$_{\text{Adaptive}}$, which can adaptively adjust the ensemble weight based on the model accuracy. Extensive experiments on node classification, graph classification, edge prediction and KDD Cup challenge demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of AutoHEnsGNN

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Self-Supervised Learning Disentangled Group Representation as Feature

A good visual representation is an inference map from observations (images) to features (vectors) that faithfully reflects the hidden modularized generative factors (semantics). In this paper, we formulate the notion of "good" representation from a group-theoretic view using Higgins' definition of disentangled representation, and show that existing Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) only disentangles simple augmentation features such as rotation and colorization, thus unable to modularize the remaining semantics. To break the limitation, we propose an iterative SSL algorithm: Iterative Partition-based Invariant Risk Minimization (IP-IRM), which successfully grounds the abstract semantics and the group acting on them into concrete contrastive learning. At each iteration, IP-IRM first partitions the training samples into two subsets that correspond to an entangled group element. Then, it minimizes a subset-invariant contrastive loss, where the invariance guarantees to disentangle the group element. We prove that IP-IRM converges to a fully disentangled representation and show its effectiveness on various benchmarks. Codes are available at https://github.com/Wangt-CN/IP-IRM.

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arXiv2021

Density-Based Clustering with Kernel Diffusion

Finding a suitable density function is essential for density-based clustering algorithms such as DBSCAN and DPC. A naive density corresponding to the indicator function of a unit $d$-dimensional Euclidean ball is commonly used in these algorithms. Such density suffers from capturing local features in complex datasets. To tackle this issue, we propose a new kernel diffusion density function, which is adaptive to data of varying local distributional characteristics and smoothness. Furthermore, we develop a surrogate that can be efficiently computed in linear time and space and prove that it is asymptotically equivalent to the kernel diffusion density function. Extensive empirical experiments on benchmark and large-scale face image datasets show that the proposed approach not only achieves a significant improvement over classic density-based clustering algorithms but also outperforms the state-of-the-art face clustering methods by a large margin.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Intuitive and Efficient Roof Modeling for Reconstruction and Synthesis

We propose a novel and flexible roof modeling approach that can be used for constructing planar 3D polygon roof meshes. Our method uses a graph structure to encode roof topology and enforces the roof validity by optimizing a simple but effective planarity metric we propose. This approach is significantly more efficient than using general purpose 3D modeling tools such as 3ds Max or SketchUp, and more powerful and expressive than specialized tools such as the straight skeleton. Our optimization-based formulation is also flexible and can accommodate different styles and user preferences for roof modeling. We showcase two applications. The first application is an interactive roof editing framework that can be used for roof design or roof reconstruction from aerial images. We highlight the efficiency and generality of our approach by constructing a mesh-image paired dataset consisting of 2539 roofs. Our second application is a generative model to synthesize new roof meshes from scratch. We use our novel dataset to combine machine learning and our roof optimization techniques, by using transformers and graph convolutional networks to model roof topology, and our roof optimization methods to enforce the planarity constraint.

cs.GR↗

arXiv2021

Improving 3D Object Detection with Channel-wise Transformer

Though 3D object detection from point clouds has achieved rapid progress in recent years, the lack of flexible and high-performance proposal refinement remains a great hurdle for existing state-of-the-art two-stage detectors. Previous works on refining 3D proposals have relied on human-designed components such as keypoints sampling, set abstraction and multi-scale feature fusion to produce powerful 3D object representations. Such methods, however, have limited ability to capture rich contextual dependencies among points. In this paper, we leverage the high-quality region proposal network and a Channel-wise Transformer architecture to constitute our two-stage 3D object detection framework (CT3D) with minimal hand-crafted design. The proposed CT3D simultaneously performs proposal-aware embedding and channel-wise context aggregation for the point features within each proposal. Specifically, CT3D uses proposal's keypoints for spatial contextual modelling and learns attention propagation in the encoding module, mapping the proposal to point embeddings. Next, a new channel-wise decoding module enriches the query-key interaction via channel-wise re-weighting to effectively merge multi-level contexts, which contributes to more accurate object predictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our CT3D method has superior performance and excellent scalability. Remarkably, CT3D achieves the AP of 81.77% in the moderate car category on the KITTI test 3D detection benchmark, outperforms state-of-the-art 3D detectors.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

AutoSmart: An Efficient and Automatic Machine Learning framework for Temporal Relational Data

Temporal relational data, perhaps the most commonly used data type in industrial machine learning applications, needs labor-intensive feature engineering and data analyzing for giving precise model predictions. An automatic machine learning framework is needed to ease the manual efforts in fine-tuning the models so that the experts can focus more on other problems that really need humans' engagement such as problem definition, deployment, and business services. However, there are three main challenges for building automatic solutions for temporal relational data: 1) how to effectively and automatically mining useful information from the multiple tables and the relations from them? 2) how to be self-adjustable to control the time and memory consumption within a certain budget? and 3) how to give generic solutions to a wide range of tasks? In this work, we propose our solution that successfully addresses the above issues in an end-to-end automatic way. The proposed framework, AutoSmart, is the winning solution to the KDD Cup 2019 of the AutoML Track, which is one of the largest AutoML competition to date (860 teams with around 4,955 submissions). The framework includes automatic data processing, table merging, feature engineering, and model tuning, with a time\&memory controller for efficiently and automatically formulating the models. The proposed framework outperforms the baseline solution significantly on several datasets in various domains.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

CIMON: Towards High-quality Hash Codes

Recently, hashing is widely used in approximate nearest neighbor search for its storage and computational efficiency. Most of the unsupervised hashing methods learn to map images into semantic similarity-preserving hash codes by constructing local semantic similarity structure from the pre-trained model as the guiding information, i.e., treating each point pair similar if their distance is small in feature space. However, due to the inefficient representation ability of the pre-trained model, many false positives and negatives in local semantic similarity will be introduced and lead to error propagation during the hash code learning. Moreover, few of the methods consider the robustness of models, which will cause instability of hash codes to disturbance. In this paper, we propose a new method named {\textbf{C}}omprehensive s{\textbf{I}}milarity {\textbf{M}}ining and c{\textbf{O}}nsistency lear{\textbf{N}}ing (CIMON). First, we use global refinement and similarity statistical distribution to obtain reliable and smooth guidance. Second, both semantic and contrastive consistency learning are introduced to derive both disturb-invariant and discriminative hash codes. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets show that the proposed method outperforms a wide range of state-of-the-art methods in both retrieval performance and robustness.

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