arXiv subjects

Quanzeng You

Publications and source records attributed to Quanzeng You.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

Consistent Video Instance Segmentation with Inter-Frame Recurrent Attention

Video instance segmentation aims at predicting object segmentation masks for each frame, as well as associating the instances across multiple frames. Recent end-to-end video instance segmentation methods are capable of performing object segmentation and instance association together in a direct parallel sequence decoding/prediction framework. Although these methods generally predict higher quality object segmentation masks, they can fail to associate instances in challenging cases because they do not explicitly model the temporal instance consistency for adjacent frames. We propose a consistent end-to-end video instance segmentation framework with Inter-Frame Recurrent Attention to model both the temporal instance consistency for adjacent frames and the global temporal context. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the Inter-Frame Recurrent Attention significantly improves temporal instance consistency while maintaining the quality of the object segmentation masks. Our model achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on both YouTubeVIS-2019 (62.1\%) and YouTubeVIS-2021 (54.7\%) datasets. In addition, quantitative and qualitative results show that the proposed methods predict more temporally consistent instance segmentation masks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Lifelong Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Person Re-identification with Coordinated Anti-forgetting and Adaptation

Unsupervised domain adaptive person re-identification (ReID) has been extensively investigated to mitigate the adverse effects of domain gaps. Those works assume the target domain data can be accessible all at once. However, for the real-world streaming data, this hinders the timely adaptation to changing data statistics and sufficient exploitation of increasing samples. In this paper, to address more practical scenarios, we propose a new task, Lifelong Unsupervised Domain Adaptive (LUDA) person ReID. This is challenging because it requires the model to continuously adapt to unlabeled data in the target environments while alleviating catastrophic forgetting for such a fine-grained person retrieval task. We design an effective scheme for this task, dubbed CLUDA-ReID, where the anti-forgetting is harmoniously coordinated with the adaptation. Specifically, a meta-based Coordinated Data Replay strategy is proposed to replay old data and update the network with a coordinated optimization direction for both adaptation and memorization. Moreover, we propose Relational Consistency Learning for old knowledge distillation/inheritance in line with the objective of retrieval-based tasks. We set up two evaluation settings to simulate the practical application scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our CLUDA-ReID for both scenarios with stationary target streams and scenarios with dynamic target streams.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

SA-VQA: Structured Alignment of Visual and Semantic Representations for Visual Question Answering

Visual Question Answering (VQA) attracts much attention from both industry and academia. As a multi-modality task, it is challenging since it requires not only visual and textual understanding, but also the ability to align cross-modality representations. Previous approaches extensively employ entity-level alignments, such as the correlations between the visual regions and their semantic labels, or the interactions across question words and object features. These attempts aim to improve the cross-modality representations, while ignoring their internal relations. Instead, we propose to apply structured alignments, which work with graph representation of visual and textual content, aiming to capture the deep connections between the visual and textual modalities. Nevertheless, it is nontrivial to represent and integrate graphs for structured alignments. In this work, we attempt to solve this issue by first converting different modality entities into sequential nodes and the adjacency graph, then incorporating them for structured alignments. As demonstrated in our experimental results, such a structured alignment improves reasoning performance. In addition, our model also exhibits better interpretability for each generated answer. The proposed model, without any pretraining, outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on GQA dataset, and beats the non-pretrained state-of-the-art methods on VQA-v2 dataset.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

MMPTRACK: Large-scale Densely Annotated Multi-camera Multiple People Tracking Benchmark

Multi-camera tracking systems are gaining popularity in applications that demand high-quality tracking results, such as frictionless checkout because monocular multi-object tracking (MOT) systems often fail in cluttered and crowded environments due to occlusion. Multiple highly overlapped cameras can significantly alleviate the problem by recovering partial 3D information. However, the cost of creating a high-quality multi-camera tracking dataset with diverse camera settings and backgrounds has limited the dataset scale in this domain. In this paper, we provide a large-scale densely-labeled multi-camera tracking dataset in five different environments with the help of an auto-annotation system. The system uses overlapped and calibrated depth and RGB cameras to build a high-performance 3D tracker that automatically generates the 3D tracking results. The 3D tracking results are projected to each RGB camera view using camera parameters to create 2D tracking results. Then, we manually check and correct the 3D tracking results to ensure the label quality, which is much cheaper than fully manual annotation. We have conducted extensive experiments using two real-time multi-camera trackers and a person re-identification (ReID) model with different settings. This dataset provides a more reliable benchmark of multi-camera, multi-object tracking systems in cluttered and crowded environments. Also, our results demonstrate that adapting the trackers and ReID models on this dataset significantly improves their performance. Our dataset will be publicly released upon the acceptance of this work.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Writing by Memorizing: Hierarchical Retrieval-based Medical Report Generation

Medical report generation is one of the most challenging tasks in medical image analysis. Although existing approaches have achieved promising results, they either require a predefined template database in order to retrieve sentences or ignore the hierarchical nature of medical report generation. To address these issues, we propose MedWriter that incorporates a novel hierarchical retrieval mechanism to automatically extract both report and sentence-level templates for clinically accurate report generation. MedWriter first employs the Visual-Language Retrieval~(VLR) module to retrieve the most relevant reports for the given images. To guarantee the logical coherence between sentences, the Language-Language Retrieval~(LLR) module is introduced to retrieve relevant sentences based on the previous generated description. At last, a language decoder fuses image features and features from retrieved reports and sentences to generate meaningful medical reports. We verified the effectiveness of our model by automatic evaluation and human evaluation on two datasets, i.e., Open-I and MIMIC-CXR.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

TransMOT: Spatial-Temporal Graph Transformer for Multiple Object Tracking

Tracking multiple objects in videos relies on modeling the spatial-temporal interactions of the objects. In this paper, we propose a solution named TransMOT, which leverages powerful graph transformers to efficiently model the spatial and temporal interactions among the objects. TransMOT effectively models the interactions of a large number of objects by arranging the trajectories of the tracked objects as a set of sparse weighted graphs, and constructing a spatial graph transformer encoder layer, a temporal transformer encoder layer, and a spatial graph transformer decoder layer based on the graphs. TransMOT is not only more computationally efficient than the traditional Transformer, but it also achieves better tracking accuracy. To further improve the tracking speed and accuracy, we propose a cascade association framework to handle low-score detections and long-term occlusions that require large computational resources to model in TransMOT. The proposed method is evaluated on multiple benchmark datasets including MOT15, MOT16, MOT17, and MOT20, and it achieves state-of-the-art performance on all the datasets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Disentanglement-based Cross-Domain Feature Augmentation for Effective Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Person Re-identification

Unsupervised domain adaptive (UDA) person re-identification (ReID) aims to transfer the knowledge from the labeled source domain to the unlabeled target domain for person matching. One challenge is how to generate target domain samples with reliable labels for training. To address this problem, we propose a Disentanglement-based Cross-Domain Feature Augmentation (DCDFA) strategy, where the augmented features characterize well the target and source domain data distributions while inheriting reliable identity labels. Particularly, we disentangle each sample feature into a robust domain-invariant/shared feature and a domain-specific feature, and perform cross-domain feature recomposition to enhance the diversity of samples used in the training, with the constraints of cross-domain ReID loss and domain classification loss. Each recomposed feature, obtained based on the domain-invariant feature (which enables a reliable inheritance of identity) and an enhancement from a domain specific feature (which enables the approximation of real distributions), is thus an "ideal" augmentation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Real-time 3D Deep Multi-Camera Tracking

Tracking a crowd in 3D using multiple RGB cameras is a challenging task. Most previous multi-camera tracking algorithms are designed for offline setting and have high computational complexity. Robust real-time multi-camera 3D tracking is still an unsolved problem. In this work, we propose a novel end-to-end tracking pipeline, Deep Multi-Camera Tracking (DMCT), which achieves reliable real-time multi-camera people tracking. Our DMCT consists of 1) a fast and novel perspective-aware Deep GroudPoint Network, 2) a fusion procedure for ground-plane occupancy heatmap estimation, 3) a novel Deep Glimpse Network for person detection and 4) a fast and accurate online tracker. Our design fully unleashes the power of deep neural network to estimate the "ground point" of each person in each color image, which can be optimized to run efficiently and robustly. Our fusion procedure, glimpse network and tracker merge the results from different views, find people candidates using multiple video frames and then track people on the fused heatmap. Our system achieves the state-of-the-art tracking results while maintaining real-time performance. Apart from evaluation on the challenging WILDTRACK dataset, we also collect two more tracking datasets with high-quality labels from two different environments and camera settings. Our experimental results confirm that our proposed real-time pipeline gives superior results to previous approaches.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Real-time Multiple People Hand Localization in 4D Point Clouds

We propose novel real-time algorithm to localize hands and find their associations with multiple people in the cluttered 4D volumetric data (dynamic 3D volumes). Different from the traditional multiple view approaches, which find key points in 2D and then triangulate to recover the 3D locations, our method directly processes the dynamic 3D data that involve both clutter and crowd. The volumetric representation is more desirable than the partial observations from different view points and enables more robust and accurate results. However, due to the large amount of data in the volumetric representation brute force 3D schemes are slow. In this paper, we propose novel real-time methods to tackle the problem to achieve both higher accuracy and faster speed than previous approaches. Our method detects the 3D bounding box of each subject and localizes the hands of each person. We develop new 2D features for fast candidate proposals and optimize the trajectory linking using a new max-covering bipartite matching formulation, which is critical for robust performance. We propose a novel decomposition method to reduce the key point localization in each person 3D volume to a sequence of efficient 2D problems. Our experiments show that the proposed method is faster than different competing methods and it gives almost half the localization error.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Twitter Sentiment Analysis via Bi-sense Emoji Embedding and Attention-based LSTM

Sentiment analysis on large-scale social media data is important to bridge the gaps between social media contents and real world activities including political election prediction, individual and public emotional status monitoring and analysis, and so on. Although textual sentiment analysis has been well studied based on platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, analysis of the role of extensive emoji uses in sentiment analysis remains light. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme for Twitter sentiment analysis with extra attention on emojis. We first learn bi-sense emoji embeddings under positive and negative sentimental tweets individually, and then train a sentiment classifier by attending on these bi-sense emoji embeddings with an attention-based long short-term memory network (LSTM). Our experiments show that the bi-sense embedding is effective for extracting sentiment-aware embeddings of emojis and outperforms the state-of-the-art models. We also visualize the attentions to show that the bi-sense emoji embedding provides better guidance on the attention mechanism to obtain a more robust understanding of the semantics and sentiments.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2018

"Factual" or "Emotional": Stylized Image Captioning with Adaptive Learning and Attention

Generating stylized captions for an image is an emerging topic in image captioning. Given an image as input, it requires the system to generate a caption that has a specific style (e.g., humorous, romantic, positive, and negative) while describing the image content semantically accurately. In this paper, we propose a novel stylized image captioning model that effectively takes both requirements into consideration. To this end, we first devise a new variant of LSTM, named style-factual LSTM, as the building block of our model. It uses two groups of matrices to capture the factual and stylized knowledge, respectively, and automatically learns the word-level weights of the two groups based on previous context. In addition, when we train the model to capture stylized elements, we propose an adaptive learning approach based on a reference factual model, it provides factual knowledge to the model as the model learns from stylized caption labels, and can adaptively compute how much information to supply at each time step. We evaluate our model on two stylized image captioning datasets, which contain humorous/romantic captions and positive/negative captions, respectively. Experiments shows that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches, without using extra ground truth supervision.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Action4D: Real-time Action Recognition in the Crowd and Clutter

Recognizing every person's action in a crowded and cluttered environment is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a real-time action recognition method, Action4D, which gives reliable and accurate results in the real-world settings. We propose to tackle the action recognition problem using a holistic 4D "scan" of a cluttered scene to include every detail about the people and environment. Recognizing multiple people's actions in the cluttered 4D representation is a new problem. In this paper, we propose novel methods to solve this problem. We propose a new method to track people in 4D, which can reliably detect and follow each person in real time. We propose a new deep neural network, the Action4D-Net, to recognize the action of each tracked person. The Action4D-Net's novel structure uses both the global feature and the focused attention to achieve state-of-the-art result. Our real-time method is invariant to camera view angles, resistant to clutter and able to handle crowd. The experimental results show that the proposed method is fast, reliable and accurate. Our method paves the way to action recognition in the real-world applications and is ready to be deployed to enable smart homes, smart factories and smart stores.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Touch Your Heart: A Tone-aware Chatbot for Customer Care on Social Media

Chatbot has become an important solution to rapidly increasing customer care demands on social media in recent years. However, current work on chatbot for customer care ignores a key to impact user experience - tones. In this work, we create a novel tone-aware chatbot that generates toned responses to user requests on social media. We first conduct a formative research, in which the effects of tones are studied. Significant and various influences of different tones on user experience are uncovered in the study. With the knowledge of effects of tones, we design a deep learning based chatbot that takes tone information into account. We train our system on over 1.5 million real customer care conversations collected from Twitter. The evaluation reveals that our tone-aware chatbot generates as appropriate responses to user requests as human agents. More importantly, our chatbot is perceived to be even more empathetic than human agents.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2018

Image Captioning at Will: A Versatile Scheme for Effectively Injecting Sentiments into Image Descriptions

Automatic image captioning has recently approached human-level performance due to the latest advances in computer vision and natural language understanding. However, most of the current models can only generate plain factual descriptions about the content of a given image. However, for human beings, image caption writing is quite flexible and diverse, where additional language dimensions, such as emotion, humor and language styles, are often incorporated to produce diverse, emotional, or appealing captions. In particular, we are interested in generating sentiment-conveying image descriptions, which has received little attention. The main challenge is how to effectively inject sentiments into the generated captions without altering the semantic matching between the visual content and the generated descriptions. In this work, we propose two different models, which employ different schemes for injecting sentiments into image captions. Compared with the few existing approaches, the proposed models are much simpler and yet more effective. The experimental results show that our model outperform the state-of-the-art models in generating sentimental (i.e., sentiment-bearing) image captions. In addition, we can also easily manipulate the model by assigning different sentiments to the testing image to generate captions with the corresponding sentiments.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

Image Based Appraisal of Real Estate Properties

Real estate appraisal, which is the process of estimating the price for real estate properties, is crucial for both buys and sellers as the basis for negotiation and transaction. Traditionally, the repeat sales model has been widely adopted to estimate real estate price. However, it depends the design and calculation of a complex economic related index, which is challenging to estimate accurately. Today, real estate brokers provide easy access to detailed online information on real estate properties to their clients. We are interested in estimating the real estate price from these large amounts of easily accessed data. In particular, we analyze the prediction power of online house pictures, which is one of the key factors for online users to make a potential visiting decision. The development of robust computer vision algorithms makes the analysis of visual content possible. In this work, we employ a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) to predict real estate price using the state-of-the-art visual features. The experimental results indicate that our model outperforms several of other state-of-the-art baseline algorithms in terms of both mean absolute error (MAE) and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE).

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

Dipole: Diagnosis Prediction in Healthcare via Attention-based Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks

Predicting the future health information of patients from the historical Electronic Health Records (EHR) is a core research task in the development of personalized healthcare. Patient EHR data consist of sequences of visits over time, where each visit contains multiple medical codes, including diagnosis, medication, and procedure codes. The most important challenges for this task are to model the temporality and high dimensionality of sequential EHR data and to interpret the prediction results. Existing work solves this problem by employing recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to model EHR data and utilizing simple attention mechanism to interpret the results. However, RNN-based approaches suffer from the problem that the performance of RNNs drops when the length of sequences is large, and the relationships between subsequent visits are ignored by current RNN-based approaches. To address these issues, we propose {\sf Dipole}, an end-to-end, simple and robust model for predicting patients' future health information. Dipole employs bidirectional recurrent neural networks to remember all the information of both the past visits and the future visits, and it introduces three attention mechanisms to measure the relationships of different visits for the prediction. With the attention mechanisms, Dipole can interpret the prediction results effectively. Dipole also allows us to interpret the learned medical code representations which are confirmed positively by medical experts. Experimental results on two real world EHR datasets show that the proposed Dipole can significantly improve the prediction accuracy compared with the state-of-the-art diagnosis prediction approaches and provide clinically meaningful interpretation.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2017

Cultural Diffusion and Trends in Facebook Photographs

Online social media is a social vehicle in which people share various moments of their lives with their friends, such as playing sports, cooking dinner or just taking a selfie for fun, via visual means, that is, photographs. Our study takes a closer look at the popular visual concepts illustrating various cultural lifestyles from aggregated, de-identified photographs. We perform analysis both at macroscopic and microscopic levels, to gain novel insights about global and local visual trends as well as the dynamics of interpersonal cultural exchange and diffusion among Facebook friends. We processed images by automatically classifying the visual content by a convolutional neural network (CNN). Through various statistical tests, we find that socially tied individuals more likely post images showing similar cultural lifestyles. To further identify the main cause of the observed social correlation, we use the Shuffle test and the Preference-based Matched Estimation (PME) test to distinguish the effects of influence and homophily. The results indicate that the visual content of each user's photographs are temporally, although not necessarily causally, correlated with the photographs of their friends, which may suggest the effect of influence. Our paper demonstrates that Facebook photographs exhibit diverse cultural lifestyles and preferences and that the social interaction mediated through the visual channel in social media can be an effective mechanism for cultural diffusion.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2016

The Effect of Pets on Happiness: A Data-Driven Approach via Large-Scale Social Media

Psychologists have demonstrated that pets have a positive impact on owners' happiness. For example, lonely people are often advised to have a dog or cat to quell their social isolation. Conventional psychological research methods of analyzing this phenomenon are mostly based on surveys or self-reported questionnaires, which are time-consuming and lack of scalability. Utilizing social media as an alternative and complimentary resource could potentially address both issues and provide different perspectives on this psychological investigation. In this paper, we propose a novel and effective approach that exploits social media to study the effect of pets on owners' happiness. The proposed framework includes three major components: 1) collecting user-level data from Instagram consisting of about 300,000 images from 2905 users; 2) constructing a convolutional neural network (CNN) for pets classification, and combined with timeline information, further identifying pet owners and the control group; 3) measuring the confidence score of happiness by detecting and analyzing selfie images. Furthermore, various factors of demographics are employed to analyze the fine-grained effects of pets on happiness. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach and we believe that this approach can be applied to other related domains as a large-scale, high-confidence methodology of user activity analysis through social media.

cs.SI↗