arXiv subjects

Tao Mei

Publications and source records attributed to Tao Mei.

At least 145 records · Page 8Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Edge-aware Graph Representation Learning and Reasoning for Face Parsing

Face parsing infers a pixel-wise label to each facial component, which has drawn much attention recently. Previous methods have shown their efficiency in face parsing, which however overlook the correlation among different face regions. The correlation is a critical clue about the facial appearance, pose, expression etc., and should be taken into account for face parsing. To this end, we propose to model and reason the region-wise relations by learning graph representations, and leverage the edge information between regions for optimized abstraction. Specifically, we encode a facial image onto a global graph representation where a collection of pixels ("regions") with similar features are projected to each vertex. Our model learns and reasons over relations between the regions by propagating information across vertices on the graph. Furthermore, we incorporate the edge information to aggregate the pixel-wise features onto vertices, which emphasizes on the features around edges for fine segmentation along edges. The finally learned graph representation is projected back to pixel grids for parsing. Experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the widely used Helen dataset, and also exhibits the superior performance on the large-scale CelebAMask-HQ and LaPa dataset. The code is available at https://github.com/tegusi/EAGRNet.

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arXiv2020

Classes Matter: A Fine-grained Adversarial Approach to Cross-domain Semantic Segmentation

Despite great progress in supervised semantic segmentation,a large performance drop is usually observed when deploying the model in the wild. Domain adaptation methods tackle the issue by aligning the source domain and the target domain. However, most existing methods attempt to perform the alignment from a holistic view, ignoring the underlying class-level data structure in the target domain. To fully exploit the supervision in the source domain, we propose a fine-grained adversarial learning strategy for class-level feature alignment while preserving the internal structure of semantics across domains. We adopt a fine-grained domain discriminator that not only plays as a domain distinguisher, but also differentiates domains at class level. The traditional binary domain labels are also generalized to domain encodings as the supervision signal to guide the fine-grained feature alignment. An analysis with Class Center Distance (CCD) validates that our fine-grained adversarial strategy achieves better class-level alignment compared to other state-of-the-art methods. Our method is easy to implement and its effectiveness is evaluated on three classical domain adaptation tasks, i.e., GTA5 to Cityscapes, SYNTHIA to Cityscapes and Cityscapes to Cross-City. Large performance gains show that our method outperforms other global feature alignment based and class-wise alignment based counterparts. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/JDAI-CV/FADA.

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arXiv2020

Semi-Siamese Training for Shallow Face Learning

Most existing public face datasets, such as MS-Celeb-1M and VGGFace2, provide abundant information in both breadth (large number of IDs) and depth (sufficient number of samples) for training. However, in many real-world scenarios of face recognition, the training dataset is limited in depth, i.e. only two face images are available for each ID. $\textit{We define this situation as Shallow Face Learning, and find it problematic with existing training methods.}$ Unlike deep face data, the shallow face data lacks intra-class diversity. As such, it can lead to collapse of feature dimension and consequently the learned network can easily suffer from degeneration and over-fitting in the collapsed dimension. In this paper, we aim to address the problem by introducing a novel training method named Semi-Siamese Training (SST). A pair of Semi-Siamese networks constitute the forward propagation structure, and the training loss is computed with an updating gallery queue, conducting effective optimization on shallow training data. Our method is developed without extra-dependency, thus can be flexibly integrated with the existing loss functions and network architectures. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks of face recognition show the proposed method significantly improves the training, not only in shallow face learning, but also for conventional deep face data.

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arXiv2020

FastReID: A Pytorch Toolbox for General Instance Re-identification

General Instance Re-identification is a very important task in the computer vision, which can be widely used in many practical applications, such as person/vehicle re-identification, face recognition, wildlife protection, commodity tracing, and snapshop, etc.. To meet the increasing application demand for general instance re-identification, we present FastReID as a widely used software system in JD AI Research. In FastReID, highly modular and extensible design makes it easy for the researcher to achieve new research ideas. Friendly manageable system configuration and engineering deployment functions allow practitioners to quickly deploy models into productions. We have implemented some state-of-the-art projects, including person re-id, partial re-id, cross-domain re-id and vehicle re-id, and plan to release these pre-trained models on multiple benchmark datasets. FastReID is by far the most general and high-performance toolbox that supports single and multiple GPU servers, you can reproduce our project results very easily and are very welcome to use it, the code and models are available at https://github.com/JDAI-CV/fast-reid.

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arXiv2020

Loss Function Search for Face Recognition

In face recognition, designing margin-based (e.g., angular, additive, additive angular margins) softmax loss functions plays an important role in learning discriminative features. However, these hand-crafted heuristic methods are sub-optimal because they require much effort to explore the large design space. Recently, an AutoML for loss function search method AM-LFS has been derived, which leverages reinforcement learning to search loss functions during the training process. But its search space is complex and unstable that hindering its superiority. In this paper, we first analyze that the key to enhance the feature discrimination is actually \textbf{how to reduce the softmax probability}. We then design a unified formulation for the current margin-based softmax losses. Accordingly, we define a novel search space and develop a reward-guided search method to automatically obtain the best candidate. Experimental results on a variety of face recognition benchmarks have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method over the state-of-the-art alternatives.

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arXiv2020

Single Shot Video Object Detector

Single shot detectors that are potentially faster and simpler than two-stage detectors tend to be more applicable to object detection in videos. Nevertheless, the extension of such object detectors from image to video is not trivial especially when appearance deterioration exists in videos, \emph{e.g.}, motion blur or occlusion. A valid question is how to explore temporal coherence across frames for boosting detection. In this paper, we propose to address the problem by enhancing per-frame features through aggregation of neighboring frames. Specifically, we present Single Shot Video Object Detector (SSVD) -- a new architecture that novelly integrates feature aggregation into a one-stage detector for object detection in videos. Technically, SSVD takes Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) as backbone network to produce multi-scale features. Unlike the existing feature aggregation methods, SSVD, on one hand, estimates the motion and aggregates the nearby features along the motion path, and on the other, hallucinates features by directly sampling features from the adjacent frames in a two-stream structure. Extensive experiments are conducted on ImageNet VID dataset, and competitive results are reported when comparing to state-of-the-art approaches. More remarkably, for $448 \times 448$ input, SSVD achieves 79.2% mAP on ImageNet VID, by processing one frame in 85 ms on an Nvidia Titan X Pascal GPU. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/ddjiajun/SSVD}.

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arXiv2020

Auto-captions on GIF: A Large-scale Video-sentence Dataset for Vision-language Pre-training

In this work, we present Auto-captions on GIF, which is a new large-scale pre-training dataset for generic video understanding. All video-sentence pairs are created by automatically extracting and filtering video caption annotations from billions of web pages. Auto-captions on GIF dataset can be utilized to pre-train the generic feature representation or encoder-decoder structure for video captioning, and other downstream tasks (e.g., sentence localization in videos, video question answering, etc.) as well. We present a detailed analysis of Auto-captions on GIF dataset in comparison to existing video-sentence datasets. We also provide an evaluation of a Transformer-based encoder-decoder structure for vision-language pre-training, which is further adapted to video captioning downstream task and yields the compelling generalizability on MSR-VTT. The dataset is available at \url{http://www.auto-video-captions.top/2020/dataset}.

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arXiv2020

Learning a Unified Sample Weighting Network for Object Detection

Region sampling or weighting is significantly important to the success of modern region-based object detectors. Unlike some previous works, which only focus on "hard" samples when optimizing the objective function, we argue that sample weighting should be data-dependent and task-dependent. The importance of a sample for the objective function optimization is determined by its uncertainties to both object classification and bounding box regression tasks. To this end, we devise a general loss function to cover most region-based object detectors with various sampling strategies, and then based on it we propose a unified sample weighting network to predict a sample's task weights. Our framework is simple yet effective. It leverages the samples' uncertainty distributions on classification loss, regression loss, IoU, and probability score, to predict sample weights. Our approach has several advantages: (i). It jointly learns sample weights for both classification and regression tasks, which differentiates it from most previous work. (ii). It is a data-driven process, so it avoids some manual parameter tuning. (iii). It can be effortlessly plugged into most object detectors and achieves noticeable performance improvements without affecting their inference time. Our approach has been thoroughly evaluated with recent object detection frameworks and it can consistently boost the detection accuracy. Code has been made available at \url{https://github.com/caiqi/sample-weighting-network}.

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arXiv2020

Exploring Category-Agnostic Clusters for Open-Set Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised domain adaptation has received significant attention in recent years. Most of existing works tackle the closed-set scenario, assuming that the source and target domains share the exactly same categories. In practice, nevertheless, a target domain often contains samples of classes unseen in source domain (i.e., unknown class). The extension of domain adaptation from closed-set to such open-set situation is not trivial since the target samples in unknown class are not expected to align with the source. In this paper, we address this problem by augmenting the state-of-the-art domain adaptation technique, Self-Ensembling, with category-agnostic clusters in target domain. Specifically, we present Self-Ensembling with Category-agnostic Clusters (SE-CC) -- a novel architecture that steers domain adaptation with the additional guidance of category-agnostic clusters that are specific to target domain. These clustering information provides domain-specific visual cues, facilitating the generalization of Self-Ensembling for both closed-set and open-set scenarios. Technically, clustering is firstly performed over all the unlabeled target samples to obtain the category-agnostic clusters, which reveal the underlying data space structure peculiar to target domain. A clustering branch is capitalized on to ensure that the learnt representation preserves such underlying structure by matching the estimated assignment distribution over clusters to the inherent cluster distribution for each target sample. Furthermore, SE-CC enhances the learnt representation with mutual information maximization. Extensive experiments are conducted on Office and VisDA datasets for both open-set and closed-set domain adaptation, and superior results are reported when comparing to the state-of-the-art approaches.

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arXiv2020

Transferring and Regularizing Prediction for Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation often requires a large set of images with pixel-level annotations. In the view of extremely expensive expert labeling, recent research has shown that the models trained on photo-realistic synthetic data (e.g., computer games) with computer-generated annotations can be adapted to real images. Despite this progress, without constraining the prediction on real images, the models will easily overfit on synthetic data due to severe domain mismatch. In this paper, we novelly exploit the intrinsic properties of semantic segmentation to alleviate such problem for model transfer. Specifically, we present a Regularizer of Prediction Transfer (RPT) that imposes the intrinsic properties as constraints to regularize model transfer in an unsupervised fashion. These constraints include patch-level, cluster-level and context-level semantic prediction consistencies at different levels of image formation. As the transfer is label-free and data-driven, the robustness of prediction is addressed by selectively involving a subset of image regions for model regularization. Extensive experiments are conducted to verify the proposal of RPT on the transfer of models trained on GTA5 and SYNTHIA (synthetic data) to Cityscapes dataset (urban street scenes). RPT shows consistent improvements when injecting the constraints on several neural networks for semantic segmentation. More remarkably, when integrating RPT into the adversarial-based segmentation framework, we report to-date the best results: mIoU of 53.2%/51.7% when transferring from GTA5/SYNTHIA to Cityscapes, respectively.

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arXiv2020

Learning the Compositional Visual Coherence for Complementary Recommendations

Complementary recommendations, which aim at providing users product suggestions that are supplementary and compatible with their obtained items, have become a hot topic in both academia and industry in recent years. %However, it is challenging due to its complexity and subjectivity. Existing work mainly focused on modeling the co-purchased relations between two items, but the compositional associations of item collections are largely unexplored. Actually, when a user chooses the complementary items for the purchased products, it is intuitive that she will consider the visual semantic coherence (such as color collocations, texture compatibilities) in addition to global impressions. Towards this end, in this paper, we propose a novel Content Attentive Neural Network (CANN) to model the comprehensive compositional coherence on both global contents and semantic contents. Specifically, we first propose a \textit{Global Coherence Learning} (GCL) module based on multi-heads attention to model the global compositional coherence. Then, we generate the semantic-focal representations from different semantic regions and design a \textit{Focal Coherence Learning} (FCL) module to learn the focal compositional coherence from different semantic-focal representations. Finally, we optimize the CANN in a novel compositional optimization strategy. Extensive experiments on the large-scale real-world data clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of CANN compared with several state-of-the-art methods.

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arXiv2020

Robust Visual Object Tracking with Two-Stream Residual Convolutional Networks

The current deep learning based visual tracking approaches have been very successful by learning the target classification and/or estimation model from a large amount of supervised training data in offline mode. However, most of them can still fail in tracking objects due to some more challenging issues such as dense distractor objects, confusing background, motion blurs, and so on. Inspired by the human "visual tracking" capability which leverages motion cues to distinguish the target from the background, we propose a Two-Stream Residual Convolutional Network (TS-RCN) for visual tracking, which successfully exploits both appearance and motion features for model update. Our TS-RCN can be integrated with existing deep learning based visual trackers. To further improve the tracking performance, we adopt a "wider" residual network ResNeXt as its feature extraction backbone. To the best of our knowledge, TS-RCN is the first end-to-end trainable two-stream visual tracking system, which makes full use of both appearance and motion features of the target. We have extensively evaluated the TS-RCN on most widely used benchmark datasets including VOT2018, VOT2019, and GOT-10K. The experiment results have successfully demonstrated that our two-stream model can greatly outperform the appearance based tracker, and it also achieves state-of-the-art performance. The tracking system can run at up to 38.1 FPS.

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arXiv2020

Long Short-Term Relation Networks for Video Action Detection

It has been well recognized that modeling human-object or object-object relations would be helpful for detection task. Nevertheless, the problem is not trivial especially when exploring the interactions between human actor, object and scene (collectively as human-context) to boost video action detectors. The difficulty originates from the aspect that reliable relations in a video should depend on not only short-term human-context relation in the present clip but also the temporal dynamics distilled over a long-range span of the video. This motivates us to capture both short-term and long-term relations in a video. In this paper, we present a new Long Short-Term Relation Networks, dubbed as LSTR, that novelly aggregates and propagates relation to augment features for video action detection. Technically, Region Proposal Networks (RPN) is remoulded to first produce 3D bounding boxes, i.e., tubelets, in each video clip. LSTR then models short-term human-context interactions within each clip through spatio-temporal attention mechanism and reasons long-term temporal dynamics across video clips via Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) in a cascaded manner. Extensive experiments are conducted on four benchmark datasets, and superior results are reported when comparing to state-of-the-art methods.

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arXiv2020

X-Linear Attention Networks for Image Captioning

Recent progress on fine-grained visual recognition and visual question answering has featured Bilinear Pooling, which effectively models the 2$^{nd}$ order interactions across multi-modal inputs. Nevertheless, there has not been evidence in support of building such interactions concurrently with attention mechanism for image captioning. In this paper, we introduce a unified attention block -- X-Linear attention block, that fully employs bilinear pooling to selectively capitalize on visual information or perform multi-modal reasoning. Technically, X-Linear attention block simultaneously exploits both the spatial and channel-wise bilinear attention distributions to capture the 2$^{nd}$ order interactions between the input single-modal or multi-modal features. Higher and even infinity order feature interactions are readily modeled through stacking multiple X-Linear attention blocks and equipping the block with Exponential Linear Unit (ELU) in a parameter-free fashion, respectively. Furthermore, we present X-Linear Attention Networks (dubbed as X-LAN) that novelly integrates X-Linear attention block(s) into image encoder and sentence decoder of image captioning model to leverage higher order intra- and inter-modal interactions. The experiments on COCO benchmark demonstrate that our X-LAN obtains to-date the best published CIDEr performance of 132.0% on COCO Karpathy test split. When further endowing Transformer with X-Linear attention blocks, CIDEr is boosted up to 132.8%. Source code is available at \url{https://github.com/Panda-Peter/image-captioning}.

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arXiv2020

Look-into-Object: Self-supervised Structure Modeling for Object Recognition

Most object recognition approaches predominantly focus on learning discriminative visual patterns while overlooking the holistic object structure. Though important, structure modeling usually requires significant manual annotations and therefore is labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose to "look into object" (explicitly yet intrinsically model the object structure) through incorporating self-supervisions into the traditional framework. We show the recognition backbone can be substantially enhanced for more robust representation learning, without any cost of extra annotation and inference speed. Specifically, we first propose an object-extent learning module for localizing the object according to the visual patterns shared among the instances in the same category. We then design a spatial context learning module for modeling the internal structures of the object, through predicting the relative positions within the extent. These two modules can be easily plugged into any backbone networks during training and detached at inference time. Extensive experiments show that our look-into-object approach (LIO) achieves large performance gain on a number of benchmarks, including generic object recognition (ImageNet) and fine-grained object recognition tasks (CUB, Cars, Aircraft). We also show that this learning paradigm is highly generalizable to other tasks such as object detection and segmentation (MS COCO). Project page: https://github.com/JDAI-CV/LIO.

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arXiv2020

Adaptive Semantic-Visual Tree for Hierarchical Embeddings

Merchandise categories inherently form a semantic hierarchy with different levels of concept abstraction, especially for fine-grained categories. This hierarchy encodes rich correlations among various categories across different levels, which can effectively regularize the semantic space and thus make predictions less ambiguous. However, previous studies of fine-grained image retrieval primarily focus on semantic similarities or visual similarities. In a real application, merely using visual similarity may not satisfy the need of consumers to search merchandise with real-life images, e.g., given a red coat as a query image, we might get a red suit in recall results only based on visual similarity since they are visually similar. But the users actually want a coat rather than suit even the coat is with different color or texture attributes. We introduce this new problem based on photoshopping in real practice. That's why semantic information are integrated to regularize the margins to make "semantic" prior to "visual". To solve this new problem, we propose a hierarchical adaptive semantic-visual tree (ASVT) to depict the architecture of merchandise categories, which evaluates semantic similarities between different semantic levels and visual similarities within the same semantic class simultaneously. The semantic information satisfies the demand of consumers for similar merchandise with the query while the visual information optimizes the correlations within the semantic class. At each level, we set different margins based on the semantic hierarchy and incorporate them as prior information to learn a fine-grained feature embedding. To evaluate our framework, we propose a new dataset named JDProduct, with hierarchical labels collected from actual image queries and official merchandise images on an online shopping application. Extensive experimental results on the public CARS196 and CUB-

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arXiv2019

Vision and Language: from Visual Perception to Content Creation

Vision and language are two fundamental capabilities of human intelligence. Humans routinely perform tasks through the interactions between vision and language, supporting the uniquely human capacity to talk about what they see or hallucinate a picture on a natural-language description. The valid question of how language interacts with vision motivates us researchers to expand the horizons of computer vision area. In particular, "vision to language" is probably one of the most popular topics in the past five years, with a significant growth in both volume of publications and extensive applications, e.g., captioning, visual question answering, visual dialog, language navigation, etc. Such tasks boost visual perception with more comprehensive understanding and diverse linguistic representations. Going beyond the progresses made in "vision to language," language can also contribute to vision understanding and offer new possibilities of visual content creation, i.e., "language to vision." The process performs as a prism through which to create visual content conditioning on the language inputs. This paper reviews the recent advances along these two dimensions: "vision to language" and "language to vision." More concretely, the former mainly focuses on the development of image/video captioning, as well as typical encoder-decoder structures and benchmarks, while the latter summarizes the technologies of visual content creation. The real-world deployment or services of vision and language are elaborated as well.

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arXiv2019

Zooming into Face Forensics: A Pixel-level Analysis

The stunning progress in face manipulation methods has made it possible to synthesize realistic fake face images, which poses potential threats to our society. It is urgent to have face forensics techniques to distinguish those tampered images. A large scale dataset "FaceForensics++" has provided enormous training data generated from prominent face manipulation methods to facilitate anti-fake research. However, previous works focus more on casting it as a classification problem by only considering a global prediction. Through investigation to the problem, we find that training a classification network often fails to capture high quality features, which might lead to sub-optimal solutions. In this paper, we zoom in on the problem by conducting a pixel-level analysis, i.e. formulating it as a pixel-level segmentation task. By evaluating multiple architectures on both segmentation and classification tasks, We show the superiority of viewing the problem from a segmentation perspective. Different ablation studies are also performed to investigate what makes an effective and efficient anti-fake model. Strong baselines are also established, which, we hope, could shed some light on the field of face forensics.

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