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Jiashi Feng

Publications and source records attributed to Jiashi Feng.

At least 235 records · Page 13Linked to original sources

Similarity R-C3D for Few-shot Temporal Activity Detection

Many activities of interest are rare events, with only a few labeled examples available. Therefore models for temporal activity detection which are able to learn from a few examples are desirable. In this paper, we present a conceptually simple and general yet novel framework for few-shot temporal activity detection which detects the start and end time of the few-shot input activities in an untrimmed video. Our model is end-to-end trainable and can benefit from more few-shot examples. At test time, each proposal is assigned the label of the few-shot activity class corresponding to the maximum similarity score. Our Similarity R-C3D method outperforms previous work on three large-scale benchmarks for temporal activity detection (THUMOS14, ActivityNet1.2, and ActivityNet1.3 datasets) in the few-shot setting. Our code will be made available.

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Graph-Based Global Reasoning Networks

Globally modeling and reasoning over relations between regions can be beneficial for many computer vision tasks on both images and videos. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) excel at modeling local relations by convolution operations, but they are typically inefficient at capturing global relations between distant regions and require stacking multiple convolution layers. In this work, we propose a new approach for reasoning globally in which a set of features are globally aggregated over the coordinate space and then projected to an interaction space where relational reasoning can be efficiently computed. After reasoning, relation-aware features are distributed back to the original coordinate space for down-stream tasks. We further present a highly efficient instantiation of the proposed approach and introduce the Global Reasoning unit (GloRe unit) that implements the coordinate-interaction space mapping by weighted global pooling and weighted broadcasting, and the relation reasoning via graph convolution on a small graph in interaction space. The proposed GloRe unit is lightweight, end-to-end trainable and can be easily plugged into existing CNNs for a wide range of tasks. Extensive experiments show our GloRe unit can consistently boost the performance of state-of-the-art backbone architectures, including ResNet, ResNeXt, SE-Net and DPN, for both 2D and 3D CNNs, on image classification, semantic segmentation and video action recognition task.

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Faster First-Order Methods for Stochastic Non-Convex Optimization on Riemannian Manifolds

SPIDER (Stochastic Path Integrated Differential EstimatoR) is an efficient gradient estimation technique developed for non-convex stochastic optimization. Although having been shown to attain nearly optimal computational complexity bounds, the SPIDER-type methods are limited to linear metric spaces. In this paper, we introduce the Riemannian SPIDER (R-SPIDER) method as a novel nonlinear-metric extension of SPIDER for efficient non-convex optimization on Riemannian manifolds. We prove that for finite-sum problems with $n$ components, R-SPIDER converges to an $ε$-accuracy stationary point within $\mathcal{O}\big(\min\big(n+\frac{\sqrt{n}}{ε^2},\frac{1}{ε^3}\big)\big)$ stochastic gradient evaluations, which is sharper in magnitude than the prior Riemannian first-order methods. For online optimization, R-SPIDER is shown to converge with $\mathcal{O}\big(\frac{1}{ε^3}\big)$ complexity which is, to the best of our knowledge, the first non-asymptotic result for online Riemannian optimization. Especially, for gradient dominated functions, we further develop a variant of R-SPIDER and prove its linear convergence rate. Numerical results demonstrate the computational efficiency of the proposed methods.

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$A^2$-Nets: Double Attention Networks

Learning to capture long-range relations is fundamental to image/video recognition. Existing CNN models generally rely on increasing depth to model such relations which is highly inefficient. In this work, we propose the "double attention block", a novel component that aggregates and propagates informative global features from the entire spatio-temporal space of input images/videos, enabling subsequent convolution layers to access features from the entire space efficiently. The component is designed with a double attention mechanism in two steps, where the first step gathers features from the entire space into a compact set through second-order attention pooling and the second step adaptively selects and distributes features to each location via another attention. The proposed double attention block is easy to adopt and can be plugged into existing deep neural networks conveniently. We conduct extensive ablation studies and experiments on both image and video recognition tasks for evaluating its performance. On the image recognition task, a ResNet-50 equipped with our double attention blocks outperforms a much larger ResNet-152 architecture on ImageNet-1k dataset with over 40% less the number of parameters and less FLOPs. On the action recognition task, our proposed model achieves the state-of-the-art results on the Kinetics and UCF-101 datasets with significantly higher efficiency than recent works.

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Look Across Elapse: Disentangled Representation Learning and Photorealistic Cross-Age Face Synthesis for Age-Invariant Face Recognition

Despite the remarkable progress in face recognition related technologies, reliably recognizing faces across ages still remains a big challenge. The appearance of a human face changes substantially over time, resulting in significant intra-class variations. As opposed to current techniques for age-invariant face recognition, which either directly extract age-invariant features for recognition, or first synthesize a face that matches target age before feature extraction, we argue that it is more desirable to perform both tasks jointly so that they can leverage each other. To this end, we propose a deep Age-Invariant Model (AIM) for face recognition in the wild with three distinct novelties. First, AIM presents a novel unified deep architecture jointly performing cross-age face synthesis and recognition in a mutual boosting way. Second, AIM achieves continuous face rejuvenation/aging with remarkable photorealistic and identity-preserving properties, avoiding the requirement of paired data and the true age of testing samples. Third, we develop effective and novel training strategies for end-to-end learning the whole deep architecture, which generates powerful age-invariant face representations explicitly disentangled from the age variation. Moreover, we propose a new large-scale Cross-Age Face Recognition (CAFR) benchmark dataset to facilitate existing efforts and push the frontiers of age-invariant face recognition research. Extensive experiments on both our CAFR and several other cross-age datasets (MORPH, CACD and FG-NET) demonstrate the superiority of the proposed AIM model over the state-of-the-arts. Benchmarking our model on one of the most popular unconstrained face recognition datasets IJB-C additionally verifies the promising generalizability of AIM in recognizing faces in the wild.

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Multi-Fiber Networks for Video Recognition

In this paper, we aim to reduce the computational cost of spatio-temporal deep neural networks, making them run as fast as their 2D counterparts while preserving state-of-the-art accuracy on video recognition benchmarks. To this end, we present the novel Multi-Fiber architecture that slices a complex neural network into an ensemble of lightweight networks or fibers that run through the network. To facilitate information flow between fibers we further incorporate multiplexer modules and end up with an architecture that reduces the computational cost of 3D networks by an order of magnitude, while increasing recognition performance at the same time. Extensive experimental results show that our multi-fiber architecture significantly boosts the efficiency of existing convolution networks for both image and video recognition tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance on UCF-101, HMDB-51 and Kinetics datasets. Our proposed model requires over 9x and 13x less computations than the I3D and R(2+1)D models, respectively, yet providing higher accuracy.

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Egocentric Spatial Memory

Egocentric spatial memory (ESM) defines a memory system with encoding, storing, recognizing and recalling the spatial information about the environment from an egocentric perspective. We introduce an integrated deep neural network architecture for modeling ESM. It learns to estimate the occupancy state of the world and progressively construct top-down 2D global maps from egocentric views in a spatially extended environment. During the exploration, our proposed ESM model updates belief of the global map based on local observations using a recurrent neural network. It also augments the local mapping with a novel external memory to encode and store latent representations of the visited places over long-term exploration in large environments which enables agents to perform place recognition and hence, loop closure. Our proposed ESM network contributes in the following aspects: (1) without feature engineering, our model predicts free space based on egocentric views efficiently in an end-to-end manner; (2) different from other deep learning-based mapping system, ESMN deals with continuous actions and states which is vitally important for robotic control in real applications. In the experiments, we demonstrate its accurate and robust global mapping capacities in 3D virtual mazes and realistic indoor environments by comparing with several competitive baselines.

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Finding any Waldo: zero-shot invariant and efficient visual search

Searching for a target object in a cluttered scene constitutes a fundamental challenge in daily vision. Visual search must be selective enough to discriminate the target from distractors, invariant to changes in the appearance of the target, efficient to avoid exhaustive exploration of the image, and must generalize to locate novel target objects with zero-shot training. Previous work has focused on searching for perfect matches of a target after extensive category-specific training. Here we show for the first time that humans can efficiently and invariantly search for natural objects in complex scenes. To gain insight into the mechanisms that guide visual search, we propose a biologically inspired computational model that can locate targets without exhaustive sampling and generalize to novel objects. The model provides an approximation to the mechanisms integrating bottom-up and top-down signals during search in natural scenes.

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Object Relation Detection Based on One-shot Learning

Detecting the relations among objects, such as "cat on sofa" and "person ride horse", is a crucial task in image understanding, and beneficial to bridging the semantic gap between images and natural language. Despite the remarkable progress of deep learning in detection and recognition of individual objects, it is still a challenging task to localize and recognize the relations between objects due to the complex combinatorial nature of various kinds of object relations. Inspired by the recent advances in one-shot learning, we propose a simple yet effective Semantics Induced Learner (SIL) model for solving this challenging task. Learning in one-shot manner can enable a detection model to adapt to a huge number of object relations with diverse appearance effectively and robustly. In addition, the SIL combines bottom-up and top-down attention mech- anisms, therefore enabling attention at the level of vision and semantics favorably. Within our proposed model, the bottom-up mechanism, which is based on Faster R-CNN, proposes objects regions, and the top-down mechanism selects and integrates visual features according to semantic information. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework over other state-of-the-art methods on two large-scale data sets for object relation detection.

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TS2C: Tight Box Mining with Surrounding Segmentation Context for Weakly Supervised Object Detection

This work provides a simple approach to discover tight object bounding boxes with only image-level supervision, called Tight box mining with Surrounding Segmentation Context (TS2C). We observe that object candidates mined through current multiple instance learning methods are usually trapped to discriminative object parts, rather than the entire object. TS2C leverages surrounding segmentation context derived from weakly-supervised segmentation to suppress such low-quality distracting candidates and boost the high-quality ones. Specifically, TS2C is developed based on two key properties of desirable bounding boxes: 1) high purity, meaning most pixels in the box are with high object response, and 2) high completeness, meaning the box covers high object response pixels comprehensively. With such novel and computable criteria, more tight candidates can be discovered for learning a better object detector. With TS2C, we obtain 48.0% and 44.4% mAP scores on VOC 2007 and 2012 benchmarks, which are the new state-of-the-arts.

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Understanding Humans in Crowded Scenes: Deep Nested Adversarial Learning and A New Benchmark for Multi-Human Parsing

Despite the noticeable progress in perceptual tasks like detection, instance segmentation and human parsing, computers still perform unsatisfactorily on visually understanding humans in crowded scenes, such as group behavior analysis, person re-identification and autonomous driving, etc. To this end, models need to comprehensively perceive the semantic information and the differences between instances in a multi-human image, which is recently defined as the multi-human parsing task. In this paper, we present a new large-scale database "Multi-Human Parsing (MHP)" for algorithm development and evaluation, and advances the state-of-the-art in understanding humans in crowded scenes. MHP contains 25,403 elaborately annotated images with 58 fine-grained semantic category labels, involving 2-26 persons per image and captured in real-world scenes from various viewpoints, poses, occlusion, interactions and background. We further propose a novel deep Nested Adversarial Network (NAN) model for multi-human parsing. NAN consists of three Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-like sub-nets, respectively performing semantic saliency prediction, instance-agnostic parsing and instance-aware clustering. These sub-nets form a nested structure and are carefully designed to learn jointly in an end-to-end way. NAN consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art solutions on our MHP and several other datasets, and serves as a strong baseline to drive the future research for multi-human parsing.

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Exact Low Tubal Rank Tensor Recovery from Gaussian Measurements

The recent proposed Tensor Nuclear Norm (TNN) [Lu et al., 2016; 2018a] is an interesting convex penalty induced by the tensor SVD [Kilmer and Martin, 2011]. It plays a similar role as the matrix nuclear norm which is the convex surrogate of the matrix rank. Considering that the TNN based Tensor Robust PCA [Lu et al., 2018a] is an elegant extension of Robust PCA with a similar tight recovery bound, it is natural to solve other low rank tensor recovery problems extended from the matrix cases. However, the extensions and proofs are generally tedious. The general atomic norm provides a unified view of low-complexity structures induced norms, e.g., the $\ell_1$-norm and nuclear norm. The sharp estimates of the required number of generic measurements for exact recovery based on the atomic norm are known in the literature. In this work, with a careful choice of the atomic set, we prove that TNN is a special atomic norm. Then by computing the Gaussian width of certain cone which is necessary for the sharp estimate, we achieve a simple bound for guaranteed low tubal rank tensor recovery from Gaussian measurements. Specifically, we show that by solving a TNN minimization problem, the underlying tensor of size $n_1\times n_2\times n_3$ with tubal rank $r$ can be exactly recovered when the given number of Gaussian measurements is $O(r(n_1+n_2-r)n_3)$. It is order optimal when comparing with the degrees of freedom $r(n_1+n_2-r)n_3$. Beyond the Gaussian mapping, we also give the recovery guarantee of tensor completion based on the uniform random mapping by TNN minimization. Numerical experiments verify our theoretical results.

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Object Region Mining with Adversarial Erasing: A Simple Classification to Semantic Segmentation Approach

We investigate a principle way to progressively mine discriminative object regions using classification networks to address the weakly-supervised semantic segmentation problems. Classification networks are only responsive to small and sparse discriminative regions from the object of interest, which deviates from the requirement of the segmentation task that needs to localize dense, interior and integral regions for pixel-wise inference. To mitigate this gap, we propose a new adversarial erasing approach for localizing and expanding object regions progressively. Starting with a single small object region, our proposed approach drives the classification network to sequentially discover new and complement object regions by erasing the current mined regions in an adversarial manner. These localized regions eventually constitute a dense and complete object region for learning semantic segmentation. To further enhance the quality of the discovered regions by adversarial erasing, an online prohibitive segmentation learning approach is developed to collaborate with adversarial erasing by providing auxiliary segmentation supervision modulated by the more reliable classification scores. Despite its apparent simplicity, the proposed approach achieves 55.0% and 55.7% mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU) scores on PASCAL VOC 2012 val and test sets, which are the new state-of-the-arts.

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Revisiting Dilated Convolution: A Simple Approach for Weakly- and Semi- Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Despite the remarkable progress, weakly supervised segmentation approaches are still inferior to their fully supervised counterparts. We obverse the performance gap mainly comes from their limitation on learning to produce high-quality dense object localization maps from image-level supervision. To mitigate such a gap, we revisit the dilated convolution [1] and reveal how it can be utilized in a novel way to effectively overcome this critical limitation of weakly supervised segmentation approaches. Specifically, we find that varying dilation rates can effectively enlarge the receptive fields of convolutional kernels and more importantly transfer the surrounding discriminative information to non-discriminative object regions, promoting the emergence of these regions in the object localization maps. Then, we design a generic classification network equipped with convolutional blocks of different dilated rates. It can produce dense and reliable object localization maps and effectively benefit both weakly- and semi- supervised semantic segmentation. Despite the apparent simplicity, our proposed approach obtains superior performance over state-of-the-arts. In particular, it achieves 60.8% and 67.6% mIoU scores on Pascal VOC 2012 test set in weakly- (only image-level labels are available) and semi- (1,464 segmentation masks are available) supervised settings, which are the new state-of-the-arts.

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Understanding Generalization and Optimization Performance of Deep CNNs

This work aims to provide understandings on the remarkable success of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) by theoretically analyzing their generalization performance and establishing optimization guarantees for gradient descent based training algorithms. Specifically, for a CNN model consisting of $l$ convolutional layers and one fully connected layer, we prove that its generalization error is bounded by $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{\dt\widetilde{\varrho}/n})$ where $θ$ denotes freedom degree of the network parameters and $\widetilde{\varrho}=\mathcal{O}(\log(\prod_{i=1}^{l}\rwi{i} (\ki{i}-\si{i}+1)/p)+\log(\rf))$ encapsulates architecture parameters including the kernel size $\ki{i}$, stride $\si{i}$, pooling size $p$ and parameter magnitude $\rwi{i}$. To our best knowledge, this is the first generalization bound that only depends on $\mathcal{O}(\log(\prod_{i=1}^{l+1}\rwi{i}))$, tighter than existing ones that all involve an exponential term like $\mathcal{O}(\prod_{i=1}^{l+1}\rwi{i})$. Besides, we prove that for an arbitrary gradient descent algorithm, the computed approximate stationary point by minimizing empirical risk is also an approximate stationary point to the population risk. This well explains why gradient descent training algorithms usually perform sufficiently well in practice. Furthermore, we prove the one-to-one correspondence and convergence guarantees for the non-degenerate stationary points between the empirical and population risks. It implies that the computed local minimum for the empirical risk is also close to a local minimum for the population risk, thus ensuring the good generalization performance of CNNs.

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Tensor Robust Principal Component Analysis: Exact Recovery of Corrupted Low-Rank Tensors via Convex Optimization

This paper studies the Tensor Robust Principal Component (TRPCA) problem which extends the known Robust PCA (Candes et al. 2011) to the tensor case. Our model is based on a new tensor Singular Value Decomposition (t-SVD) (Kilmer and Martin 2011) and its induced tensor tubal rank and tensor nuclear norm. Consider that we have a 3-way tensor ${\mathcal{X}}\in\mathbb{R}^{n_1\times n_2\times n_3}$ such that ${\mathcal{X}}={\mathcal{L}}_0+{\mathcal{E}}_0$, where ${\mathcal{L}}_0$ has low tubal rank and ${\mathcal{E}}_0$ is sparse. Is that possible to recover both components? In this work, we prove that under certain suitable assumptions, we can recover both the low-rank and the sparse components exactly by simply solving a convex program whose objective is a weighted combination of the tensor nuclear norm and the $\ell_1$-norm, i.e., $\min_{\mathcal{L},\ {\mathcal{E}}} \ \|{\mathcal{L}}\|_*+λ\|{\mathcal{E}}\|_1, \ \text{s.t.} \ {\mathcal{X}}={\mathcal{L}}+{\mathcal{E}}$, where $λ= {1}/{\sqrt{\max(n_1,n_2)n_3}}$. Interestingly, TRPCA involves RPCA as a special case when $n_3=1$ and thus it is a simple and elegant tensor extension of RPCA. Also numerical experiments verify our theory and the application for the image denoising demonstrates the effectiveness of our method.

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Subspace Clustering by Block Diagonal Representation

This paper studies the subspace clustering problem. Given some data points approximately drawn from a union of subspaces, the goal is to group these data points into their underlying subspaces. Many subspace clustering methods have been proposed and among which sparse subspace clustering and low-rank representation are two representative ones. Despite the different motivations, we observe that many existing methods own the common block diagonal property, which possibly leads to correct clustering, yet with their proofs given case by case. In this work, we consider a general formulation and provide a unified theoretical guarantee of the block diagonal property. The block diagonal property of many existing methods falls into our special case. Second, we observe that many existing methods approximate the block diagonal representation matrix by using different structure priors, e.g., sparsity and low-rankness, which are indirect. We propose the first block diagonal matrix induced regularizer for directly pursuing the block diagonal matrix. With this regularizer, we solve the subspace clustering problem by Block Diagonal Representation (BDR), which uses the block diagonal structure prior. The BDR model is nonconvex and we propose an alternating minimization solver and prove its convergence. Experiments on real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of BDR.

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WSNet: Compact and Efficient Networks Through Weight Sampling

We present a new approach and a novel architecture, termed WSNet, for learning compact and efficient deep neural networks. Existing approaches conventionally learn full model parameters independently and then compress them via ad hoc processing such as model pruning or filter factorization. Alternatively, WSNet proposes learning model parameters by sampling from a compact set of learnable parameters, which naturally enforces {parameter sharing} throughout the learning process. We demonstrate that such a novel weight sampling approach (and induced WSNet) promotes both weights and computation sharing favorably. By employing this method, we can more efficiently learn much smaller networks with competitive performance compared to baseline networks with equal numbers of convolution filters. Specifically, we consider learning compact and efficient 1D convolutional neural networks for audio classification. Extensive experiments on multiple audio classification datasets verify the effectiveness of WSNet. Combined with weight quantization, the resulted models are up to 180 times smaller and theoretically up to 16 times faster than the well-established baselines, without noticeable performance drop.

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