arXiv subjects

Jianzhuang Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Jianzhuang Liu.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

CoupAlign: Coupling Word-Pixel with Sentence-Mask Alignments for Referring Image Segmentation

Referring image segmentation aims at localizing all pixels of the visual objects described by a natural language sentence. Previous works learn to straightforwardly align the sentence embedding and pixel-level embedding for highlighting the referred objects, but ignore the semantic consistency of pixels within the same object, leading to incomplete masks and localization errors in predictions. To tackle this problem, we propose CoupAlign, a simple yet effective multi-level visual-semantic alignment method, to couple sentence-mask alignment with word-pixel alignment to enforce object mask constraint for achieving more accurate localization and segmentation. Specifically, the Word-Pixel Alignment (WPA) module performs early fusion of linguistic and pixel-level features in intermediate layers of the vision and language encoders. Based on the word-pixel aligned embedding, a set of mask proposals are generated to hypothesize possible objects. Then in the Sentence-Mask Alignment (SMA) module, the masks are weighted by the sentence embedding to localize the referred object, and finally projected back to aggregate the pixels for the target. To further enhance the learning of the two alignment modules, an auxiliary loss is designed to contrast the foreground and background pixels. By hierarchically aligning pixels and masks with linguistic features, our CoupAlign captures the pixel coherence at both visual and semantic levels, thus generating more accurate predictions. Extensive experiments on popular datasets (e.g., RefCOCO and G-Ref) show that our method achieves consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods, e.g., about 2% oIoU increase on the validation and testing set of RefCOCO. Especially, CoupAlign has remarkable ability in distinguishing the target from multiple objects of the same class.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Anti-Retroactive Interference for Lifelong Learning

Humans can continuously learn new knowledge. However, machine learning models suffer from drastic dropping in performance on previous tasks after learning new tasks. Cognitive science points out that the competition of similar knowledge is an important cause of forgetting. In this paper, we design a paradigm for lifelong learning based on meta-learning and associative mechanism of the brain. It tackles the problem from two aspects: extracting knowledge and memorizing knowledge. First, we disrupt the sample's background distribution through a background attack, which strengthens the model to extract the key features of each task. Second, according to the similarity between incremental knowledge and base knowledge, we design an adaptive fusion of incremental knowledge, which helps the model allocate capacity to the knowledge of different difficulties. It is theoretically analyzed that the proposed learning paradigm can make the models of different tasks converge to the same optimum. The proposed method is validated on the MNIST, CIFAR100, CUB200 and ImageNet100 datasets.

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arXiv2022

CLIFF: Carrying Location Information in Full Frames into Human Pose and Shape Estimation

Top-down methods dominate the field of 3D human pose and shape estimation, because they are decoupled from human detection and allow researchers to focus on the core problem. However, cropping, their first step, discards the location information from the very beginning, which makes themselves unable to accurately predict the global rotation in the original camera coordinate system. To address this problem, we propose to Carry Location Information in Full Frames (CLIFF) into this task. Specifically, we feed more holistic features to CLIFF by concatenating the cropped-image feature with its bounding box information. We calculate the 2D reprojection loss with a broader view of the full frame, taking a projection process similar to that of the person projected in the image. Fed and supervised by global-location-aware information, CLIFF directly predicts the global rotation along with more accurate articulated poses. Besides, we propose a pseudo-ground-truth annotator based on CLIFF, which provides high-quality 3D annotations for in-the-wild 2D datasets and offers crucial full supervision for regression-based methods. Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks show that CLIFF outperforms prior arts by a significant margin, and reaches the first place on the AGORA leaderboard (the SMPL-Algorithms track). The code and data are available at https://github.com/huawei-noah/noah-research/tree/master/CLIFF.

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arXiv2022

FNeVR: Neural Volume Rendering for Face Animation

Face animation, one of the hottest topics in computer vision, has achieved a promising performance with the help of generative models. However, it remains a critical challenge to generate identity preserving and photo-realistic images due to the sophisticated motion deformation and complex facial detail modeling. To address these problems, we propose a Face Neural Volume Rendering (FNeVR) network to fully explore the potential of 2D motion warping and 3D volume rendering in a unified framework. In FNeVR, we design a 3D Face Volume Rendering (FVR) module to enhance the facial details for image rendering. Specifically, we first extract 3D information with a well-designed architecture, and then introduce an orthogonal adaptive ray-sampling module for efficient rendering. We also design a lightweight pose editor, enabling FNeVR to edit the facial pose in a simple yet effective way. Extensive experiments show that our FNeVR obtains the best overall quality and performance on widely used talking-head benchmarks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Removing Rain Streaks via Task Transfer Learning

Due to the difficulty in collecting paired real-world training data, image deraining is currently dominated by supervised learning with synthesized data generated by e.g., Photoshop rendering. However, the generalization to real rainy scenes is usually limited due to the gap between synthetic and real-world data. In this paper, we first statistically explore why the supervised deraining models cannot generalize well to real rainy cases, and find the substantial difference of synthetic and real rainy data. Inspired by our studies, we propose to remove rain by learning favorable deraining representations from other connected tasks. In connected tasks, the label for real data can be easily obtained. Hence, our core idea is to learn representations from real data through task transfer to improve deraining generalization. We thus term our learning strategy as \textit{task transfer learning}. If there are more than one connected tasks, we propose to reduce model size by knowledge distillation. The pretrained models for the connected tasks are treated as teachers, all their knowledge is distilled to a student network, so that we reduce the model size, meanwhile preserve effective prior representations from all the connected tasks. At last, the student network is fine-tuned with minority of paired synthetic rainy data to guide the pretrained prior representations to remove rain. Extensive experiments demonstrate that proposed task transfer learning strategy is surprisingly successful and compares favorably with state-of-the-art supervised learning methods and apparently surpass other semi-supervised deraining methods on synthetic data. Particularly, it shows superior generalization over them to real-world scenes.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Low-Light Video Enhancement with Synthetic Event Guidance

Low-light video enhancement (LLVE) is an important yet challenging task with many applications such as photographing and autonomous driving. Unlike single image low-light enhancement, most LLVE methods utilize temporal information from adjacent frames to restore the color and remove the noise of the target frame. However, these algorithms, based on the framework of multi-frame alignment and enhancement, may produce multi-frame fusion artifacts when encountering extreme low light or fast motion. In this paper, inspired by the low latency and high dynamic range of events, we use synthetic events from multiple frames to guide the enhancement and restoration of low-light videos. Our method contains three stages: 1) event synthesis and enhancement, 2) event and image fusion, and 3) low-light enhancement. In this framework, we design two novel modules (event-image fusion transform and event-guided dual branch) for the second and third stages, respectively. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing low-light video or single image enhancement approaches on both synthetic and real LLVE datasets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Self-Supervision Can Be a Good Few-Shot Learner

Existing few-shot learning (FSL) methods rely on training with a large labeled dataset, which prevents them from leveraging abundant unlabeled data. From an information-theoretic perspective, we propose an effective unsupervised FSL method, learning representations with self-supervision. Following the InfoMax principle, our method learns comprehensive representations by capturing the intrinsic structure of the data. Specifically, we maximize the mutual information (MI) of instances and their representations with a low-bias MI estimator to perform self-supervised pre-training. Rather than supervised pre-training focusing on the discriminable features of the seen classes, our self-supervised model has less bias toward the seen classes, resulting in better generalization for unseen classes. We explain that supervised pre-training and self-supervised pre-training are actually maximizing different MI objectives. Extensive experiments are further conducted to analyze their FSL performance with various training settings. Surprisingly, the results show that self-supervised pre-training can outperform supervised pre-training under the appropriate conditions. Compared with state-of-the-art FSL methods, our approach achieves comparable performance on widely used FSL benchmarks without any labels of the base classes.

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arXiv2022

ADAPT: Vision-Language Navigation with Modality-Aligned Action Prompts

Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) is a challenging task that requires an embodied agent to perform action-level modality alignment, i.e., make instruction-asked actions sequentially in complex visual environments. Most existing VLN agents learn the instruction-path data directly and cannot sufficiently explore action-level alignment knowledge inside the multi-modal inputs. In this paper, we propose modAlity-aligneD Action PrompTs (ADAPT), which provides the VLN agent with action prompts to enable the explicit learning of action-level modality alignment to pursue successful navigation. Specifically, an action prompt is defined as a modality-aligned pair of an image sub-prompt and a text sub-prompt, where the former is a single-view observation and the latter is a phrase like ''walk past the chair''. When starting navigation, the instruction-related action prompt set is retrieved from a pre-built action prompt base and passed through a prompt encoder to obtain the prompt feature. Then the prompt feature is concatenated with the original instruction feature and fed to a multi-layer transformer for action prediction. To collect high-quality action prompts into the prompt base, we use the Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) model which has powerful cross-modality alignment ability. A modality alignment loss and a sequential consistency loss are further introduced to enhance the alignment of the action prompt and enforce the agent to focus on the related prompt sequentially. Experimental results on both R2R and RxR show the superiority of ADAPT over state-of-the-art methods.

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arXiv2022

Diversity Matters: Fully Exploiting Depth Clues for Reliable Monocular 3D Object Detection

As an inherently ill-posed problem, depth estimation from single images is the most challenging part of monocular 3D object detection (M3OD). Many existing methods rely on preconceived assumptions to bridge the missing spatial information in monocular images, and predict a sole depth value for every object of interest. However, these assumptions do not always hold in practical applications. To tackle this problem, we propose a depth solving system that fully explores the visual clues from the subtasks in M3OD and generates multiple estimations for the depth of each target. Since the depth estimations rely on different assumptions in essence, they present diverse distributions. Even if some assumptions collapse, the estimations established on the remaining assumptions are still reliable. In addition, we develop a depth selection and combination strategy. This strategy is able to remove abnormal estimations caused by collapsed assumptions, and adaptively combine the remaining estimations into a single one. In this way, our depth solving system becomes more precise and robust. Exploiting the clues from multiple subtasks of M3OD and without introducing any extra information, our method surpasses the current best method by more than 20% relatively on the Moderate level of test split in the KITTI 3D object detection benchmark, while still maintaining real-time efficiency.

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arXiv2022

Prompt Distribution Learning

We present prompt distribution learning for effectively adapting a pre-trained vision-language model to address downstream recognition tasks. Our method not only learns low-bias prompts from a few samples but also captures the distribution of diverse prompts to handle the varying visual representations. In this way, we provide high-quality task-related content for facilitating recognition. This prompt distribution learning is realized by an efficient approach that learns the output embeddings of prompts instead of the input embeddings. Thus, we can employ a Gaussian distribution to model them effectively and derive a surrogate loss for efficient training. Extensive experiments on 12 datasets demonstrate that our method consistently and significantly outperforms existing methods. For example, with 1 sample per category, it relatively improves the average result by 9.1% compared to human-crafted prompts.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Learning Enriched Illuminants for Cross and Single Sensor Color Constancy

Color constancy aims to restore the constant colors of a scene under different illuminants. However, due to the existence of camera spectral sensitivity, the network trained on a certain sensor, cannot work well on others. Also, since the training datasets are collected in certain environments, the diversity of illuminants is limited for complex real world prediction. In this paper, we tackle these problems via two aspects. First, we propose cross-sensor self-supervised training to train the network. In detail, we consider both the general sRGB images and the white-balanced RAW images from current available datasets as the white-balanced agents. Then, we train the network by randomly sampling the artificial illuminants in a sensor-independent manner for scene relighting and supervision. Second, we analyze a previous cascaded framework and present a more compact and accurate model by sharing the backbone parameters with learning attention specifically. Experiments show that our cross-sensor model and single-sensor model outperform other state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on cross and single sensor evaluations, respectively, with only 16% parameters of the previous best model.

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arXiv2022

IntraQ: Learning Synthetic Images with Intra-Class Heterogeneity for Zero-Shot Network Quantization

Learning to synthesize data has emerged as a promising direction in zero-shot quantization (ZSQ), which represents neural networks by low-bit integer without accessing any of the real data. In this paper, we observe an interesting phenomenon of intra-class heterogeneity in real data and show that existing methods fail to retain this property in their synthetic images, which causes a limited performance increase. To address this issue, we propose a novel zero-shot quantization method referred to as IntraQ. First, we propose a local object reinforcement that locates the target objects at different scales and positions of the synthetic images. Second, we introduce a marginal distance constraint to form class-related features distributed in a coarse area. Lastly, we devise a soft inception loss which injects a soft prior label to prevent the synthetic images from being overfitting to a fixed object. Our IntraQ is demonstrated to well retain the intra-class heterogeneity in the synthetic images and also observed to perform state-of-the-art. For example, compared to the advanced ZSQ, our IntraQ obtains 9.17\% increase of the top-1 accuracy on ImageNet when all layers of MobileNetV1 are quantized to 4-bit. Code is at https://github.com/zysxmu/IntraQ.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

SiamTrans: Zero-Shot Multi-Frame Image Restoration with Pre-Trained Siamese Transformers

We propose a novel zero-shot multi-frame image restoration method for removing unwanted obstruction elements (such as rains, snow, and moire patterns) that vary in successive frames. It has three stages: transformer pre-training, zero-shot restoration, and hard patch refinement. Using the pre-trained transformers, our model is able to tell the motion difference between the true image information and the obstructing elements. For zero-shot image restoration, we design a novel model, termed SiamTrans, which is constructed by Siamese transformers, encoders, and decoders. Each transformer has a temporal attention layer and several self-attention layers, to capture both temporal and spatial information of multiple frames. Only pre-trained (self-supervised) on the denoising task, SiamTrans is tested on three different low-level vision tasks (deraining, demoireing, and desnowing). Compared with related methods, ours achieves the best performances, even outperforming those with supervised learning.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Uformer: A General U-Shaped Transformer for Image Restoration

In this paper, we present Uformer, an effective and efficient Transformer-based architecture for image restoration, in which we build a hierarchical encoder-decoder network using the Transformer block. In Uformer, there are two core designs. First, we introduce a novel locally-enhanced window (LeWin) Transformer block, which performs nonoverlapping window-based self-attention instead of global self-attention. It significantly reduces the computational complexity on high resolution feature map while capturing local context. Second, we propose a learnable multi-scale restoration modulator in the form of a multi-scale spatial bias to adjust features in multiple layers of the Uformer decoder. Our modulator demonstrates superior capability for restoring details for various image restoration tasks while introducing marginal extra parameters and computational cost. Powered by these two designs, Uformer enjoys a high capability for capturing both local and global dependencies for image restoration. To evaluate our approach, extensive experiments are conducted on several image restoration tasks, including image denoising, motion deblurring, defocus deblurring and deraining. Without bells and whistles, our Uformer achieves superior or comparable performance compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms. The code and models are available at https://github.com/ZhendongWang6/Uformer.

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arXiv2021

Motion Deblurring with Real Events

In this paper, we propose an end-to-end learning framework for event-based motion deblurring in a self-supervised manner, where real-world events are exploited to alleviate the performance degradation caused by data inconsistency. To achieve this end, optical flows are predicted from events, with which the blurry consistency and photometric consistency are exploited to enable self-supervision on the deblurring network with real-world data. Furthermore, a piece-wise linear motion model is proposed to take into account motion non-linearities and thus leads to an accurate model for the physical formation of motion blurs in the real-world scenario. Extensive evaluation on both synthetic and real motion blur datasets demonstrates that the proposed algorithm bridges the gap between simulated and real-world motion blurs and shows remarkable performance for event-based motion deblurring in real-world scenarios.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

ReCU: Reviving the Dead Weights in Binary Neural Networks

Binary neural networks (BNNs) have received increasing attention due to their superior reductions of computation and memory. Most existing works focus on either lessening the quantization error by minimizing the gap between the full-precision weights and their binarization or designing a gradient approximation to mitigate the gradient mismatch, while leaving the "dead weights" untouched. This leads to slow convergence when training BNNs. In this paper, for the first time, we explore the influence of "dead weights" which refer to a group of weights that are barely updated during the training of BNNs, and then introduce rectified clamp unit (ReCU) to revive the "dead weights" for updating. We prove that reviving the "dead weights" by ReCU can result in a smaller quantization error. Besides, we also take into account the information entropy of the weights, and then mathematically analyze why the weight standardization can benefit BNNs. We demonstrate the inherent contradiction between minimizing the quantization error and maximizing the information entropy, and then propose an adaptive exponential scheduler to identify the range of the "dead weights". By considering the "dead weights", our method offers not only faster BNN training, but also state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet, compared with recent methods. Code can be available at https://github.com/z-hXu/ReCU.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Multi-Source Domain Adaptation with Collaborative Learning for Semantic Segmentation

Multi-source unsupervised domain adaptation~(MSDA) aims at adapting models trained on multiple labeled source domains to an unlabeled target domain. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-source domain adaptation framework based on collaborative learning for semantic segmentation. Firstly, a simple image translation method is introduced to align the pixel value distribution to reduce the gap between source domains and target domain to some extent. Then, to fully exploit the essential semantic information across source domains, we propose a collaborative learning method for domain adaptation without seeing any data from target domain. In addition, similar to the setting of unsupervised domain adaptation, unlabeled target domain data is leveraged to further improve the performance of domain adaptation. This is achieved by additionally constraining the outputs of multiple adaptation models with pseudo labels online generated by an ensembled model. Extensive experiments and ablation studies are conducted on the widely-used domain adaptation benchmark datasets in semantic segmentation. Our proposed method achieves 59.0\% mIoU on the validation set of Cityscapes by training on the labeled Synscapes and GTA5 datasets and unlabeled training set of Cityscapes. It significantly outperforms all previous state-of-the-arts single-source and multi-source unsupervised domain adaptation methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Multi-Target Domain Adaptation with Collaborative Consistency Learning

Recently unsupervised domain adaptation for the semantic segmentation task has become more and more popular due to high-cost of pixel-level annotation on real-world images. However, most domain adaptation methods are only restricted to single-source-single-target pair, and can not be directly extended to multiple target domains. In this work, we propose a collaborative learning framework to achieve unsupervised multi-target domain adaptation. An unsupervised domain adaptation expert model is first trained for each source-target pair and is further encouraged to collaborate with each other through a bridge built between different target domains. These expert models are further improved by adding the regularization of making the consistent pixel-wise prediction for each sample with the same structured context. To obtain a single model that works across multiple target domains, we propose to simultaneously learn a student model which is trained to not only imitate the output of each expert on the corresponding target domain, but also to pull different expert close to each other with regularization on their weights. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively exploit rich structured information contained in both labeled source domain and multiple unlabeled target domains. Not only does it perform well across multiple target domains but also performs favorably against state-of-the-art unsupervised domain adaptation methods specially trained on a single source-target pair

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