arXiv subjects

Zhongang Cai

Publications and source records attributed to Zhongang Cai.

68 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

Delving Deep into the Generalization of Vision Transformers under Distribution Shifts

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved impressive performance on various vision tasks, yet their generalization under distribution shifts (DS) is rarely understood. In this work, we comprehensively study the out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization of ViTs. For systematic investigation, we first present a taxonomy of DS. We then perform extensive evaluations of ViT variants under different DS and compare their generalization with Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models. Important observations are obtained: 1) ViTs learn weaker biases on backgrounds and textures, while they are equipped with stronger inductive biases towards shapes and structures, which is more consistent with human cognitive traits. Therefore, ViTs generalize better than CNNs under DS. With the same or less amount of parameters, ViTs are ahead of corresponding CNNs by more than 5% in top-1 accuracy under most types of DS. 2) As the model scale increases, ViTs strengthen these biases and thus gradually narrow the in-distribution and OOD performance gap. To further improve the generalization of ViTs, we design the Generalization-Enhanced ViTs (GE-ViTs) from the perspectives of adversarial learning, information theory, and self-supervised learning. By comprehensively investigating these GE-ViTs and comparing with their corresponding CNN models, we observe: 1) For the enhanced model, larger ViTs still benefit more for the OOD generalization. 2) GE-ViTs are more sensitive to the hyper-parameters than their corresponding CNN models. We design a smoother learning strategy to achieve a stable training process and obtain performance improvements on OOD data by 4% from vanilla ViTs. We hope our comprehensive study could shed light on the design of more generalizable learning architectures.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Multi-View Partial (MVP) Point Cloud Challenge 2021 on Completion and Registration: Methods and Results

As real-scanned point clouds are mostly partial due to occlusions and viewpoints, reconstructing complete 3D shapes based on incomplete observations becomes a fundamental problem for computer vision. With a single incomplete point cloud, it becomes the partial point cloud completion problem. Given multiple different observations, 3D reconstruction can be addressed by performing partial-to-partial point cloud registration. Recently, a large-scale Multi-View Partial (MVP) point cloud dataset has been released, which consists of over 100,000 high-quality virtual-scanned partial point clouds. Based on the MVP dataset, this paper reports methods and results in the Multi-View Partial Point Cloud Challenge 2021 on Completion and Registration. In total, 128 participants registered for the competition, and 31 teams made valid submissions. The top-ranked solutions will be analyzed, and then we will discuss future research directions.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Garment4D: Garment Reconstruction from Point Cloud Sequences

Learning to reconstruct 3D garments is important for dressing 3D human bodies of different shapes in different poses. Previous works typically rely on 2D images as input, which however suffer from the scale and pose ambiguities. To circumvent the problems caused by 2D images, we propose a principled framework, Garment4D, that uses 3D point cloud sequences of dressed humans for garment reconstruction. Garment4D has three dedicated steps: sequential garments registration, canonical garment estimation, and posed garment reconstruction. The main challenges are two-fold: 1) effective 3D feature learning for fine details, and 2) capture of garment dynamics caused by the interaction between garments and the human body, especially for loose garments like skirts. To unravel these problems, we introduce a novel Proposal-Guided Hierarchical Feature Network and Iterative Graph Convolution Network, which integrate both high-level semantic features and low-level geometric features for fine details reconstruction. Furthermore, we propose a Temporal Transformer for smooth garment motions capture. Unlike non-parametric methods, the reconstructed garment meshes by our method are separable from the human body and have strong interpretability, which is desirable for downstream tasks. As the first attempt at this task, high-quality reconstruction results are qualitatively and quantitatively illustrated through extensive experiments. Codes are available at https://github.com/hongfz16/Garment4D.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

CSG-Stump: A Learning Friendly CSG-Like Representation for Interpretable Shape Parsing

Generating an interpretable and compact representation of 3D shapes from point clouds is an important and challenging problem. This paper presents CSG-Stump Net, an unsupervised end-to-end network for learning shapes from point clouds and discovering the underlying constituent modeling primitives and operations as well. At the core is a three-level structure called {\em CSG-Stump}, consisting of a complement layer at the bottom, an intersection layer in the middle, and a union layer at the top. CSG-Stump is proven to be equivalent to CSG in terms of representation, therefore inheriting the interpretable, compact and editable nature of CSG while freeing from CSG's complex tree structures. Particularly, the CSG-Stump has a simple and regular structure, allowing neural networks to give outputs of a constant dimensionality, which makes itself deep-learning friendly. Due to these characteristics of CSG-Stump, CSG-Stump Net achieves superior results compared to previous CSG-based methods and generates much more appealing shapes, as confirmed by extensive experiments. Project page: https://kimren227.github.io/projects/CSGStump/

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Unsupervised Domain Adaptive 3D Detection with Multi-Level Consistency

Deep learning-based 3D object detection has achieved unprecedented success with the advent of large-scale autonomous driving datasets. However, drastic performance degradation remains a critical challenge for cross-domain deployment. In addition, existing 3D domain adaptive detection methods often assume prior access to the target domain annotations, which is rarely feasible in the real world. To address this challenge, we study a more realistic setting, unsupervised 3D domain adaptive detection, which only utilizes source domain annotations. 1) We first comprehensively investigate the major underlying factors of the domain gap in 3D detection. Our key insight is that geometric mismatch is the key factor of domain shift. 2) Then, we propose a novel and unified framework, Multi-Level Consistency Network (MLC-Net), which employs a teacher-student paradigm to generate adaptive and reliable pseudo-targets. MLC-Net exploits point-, instance- and neural statistics-level consistency to facilitate cross-domain transfer. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MLC-Net outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods (including those using additional target domain information) on standard benchmarks. Notably, our approach is detector-agnostic, which achieves consistent gains on both single- and two-stage 3D detectors.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

BiPointNet: Binary Neural Network for Point Clouds

To alleviate the resource constraint for real-time point cloud applications that run on edge devices, in this paper we present BiPointNet, the first model binarization approach for efficient deep learning on point clouds. We discover that the immense performance drop of binarized models for point clouds mainly stems from two challenges: aggregation-induced feature homogenization that leads to a degradation of information entropy, and scale distortion that hinders optimization and invalidates scale-sensitive structures. With theoretical justifications and in-depth analysis, our BiPointNet introduces Entropy-Maximizing Aggregation (EMA) to modulate the distribution before aggregation for the maximum information entropy, and Layer-wise Scale Recovery (LSR) to efficiently restore feature representation capacity. Extensive experiments show that BiPointNet outperforms existing binarization methods by convincing margins, at the level even comparable with the full precision counterpart. We highlight that our techniques are generic, guaranteeing significant improvements on various fundamental tasks and mainstream backbones. Moreover, BiPointNet gives an impressive 14.7x speedup and 18.9x storage saving on real-world resource-constrained devices.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Unsupervised 3D Shape Completion through GAN Inversion

Most 3D shape completion approaches rely heavily on partial-complete shape pairs and learn in a fully supervised manner. Despite their impressive performances on in-domain data, when generalizing to partial shapes in other forms or real-world partial scans, they often obtain unsatisfactory results due to domain gaps. In contrast to previous fully supervised approaches, in this paper we present ShapeInversion, which introduces Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) inversion to shape completion for the first time. ShapeInversion uses a GAN pre-trained on complete shapes by searching for a latent code that gives a complete shape that best reconstructs the given partial input. In this way, ShapeInversion no longer needs paired training data, and is capable of incorporating the rich prior captured in a well-trained generative model. On the ShapeNet benchmark, the proposed ShapeInversion outperforms the SOTA unsupervised method, and is comparable with supervised methods that are learned using paired data. It also demonstrates remarkable generalization ability, giving robust results for real-world scans and partial inputs of various forms and incompleteness levels. Importantly, ShapeInversion naturally enables a series of additional abilities thanks to the involvement of a pre-trained GAN, such as producing multiple valid complete shapes for an ambiguous partial input, as well as shape manipulation and interpolation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Variational Relational Point Completion Network

Real-scanned point clouds are often incomplete due to viewpoint, occlusion, and noise. Existing point cloud completion methods tend to generate global shape skeletons and hence lack fine local details. Furthermore, they mostly learn a deterministic partial-to-complete mapping, but overlook structural relations in man-made objects. To tackle these challenges, this paper proposes a variational framework, Variational Relational point Completion network (VRCNet) with two appealing properties: 1) Probabilistic Modeling. In particular, we propose a dual-path architecture to enable principled probabilistic modeling across partial and complete clouds. One path consumes complete point clouds for reconstruction by learning a point VAE. The other path generates complete shapes for partial point clouds, whose embedded distribution is guided by distribution obtained from the reconstruction path during training. 2) Relational Enhancement. Specifically, we carefully design point self-attention kernel and point selective kernel module to exploit relational point features, which refines local shape details conditioned on the coarse completion. In addition, we contribute a multi-view partial point cloud dataset (MVP dataset) containing over 100,000 high-quality scans, which renders partial 3D shapes from 26 uniformly distributed camera poses for each 3D CAD model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VRCNet outperforms state-of-theart methods on all standard point cloud completion benchmarks. Notably, VRCNet shows great generalizability and robustness on real-world point cloud scans.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Balanced Activation for Long-tailed Visual Recognition

Deep classifiers have achieved great success in visual recognition. However, real-world data is long-tailed by nature, leading to the mismatch between training and testing distributions. In this report, we introduce Balanced Activation (Balanced Softmax and Balanced Sigmoid), an elegant unbiased, and simple extension of Sigmoid and Softmax activation function, to accommodate the label distribution shift between training and testing in object detection. We derive the generalization bound for multiclass Softmax regression and show our loss minimizes the bound. In our experiments, we demonstrate that Balanced Activation generally provides ~3% gain in terms of mAP on LVIS-1.0 and outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods without introducing any extra parameters.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Leveraging Localization for Multi-camera Association

We present McAssoc, a deep learning approach to the as-sociation of detection bounding boxes in different views ofa multi-camera system. The vast majority of the academiahas been developing single-camera computer vision algo-rithms, however, little research attention has been directedto incorporating them into a multi-camera system. In thispaper, we designed a 3-branch architecture that leveragesdirect association and additional cross localization infor-mation. A new metric, image-pair association accuracy(IPAA) is designed specifically for performance evaluationof cross-camera detection association. We show in the ex-periments that localization information is critical to suc-cessful cross-camera association, especially when similar-looking objects are present. This paper is an experimentalwork prior to MessyTable, which is a large-scale bench-mark for instance association in mutliple cameras.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

MessyTable: Instance Association in Multiple Camera Views

We present an interesting and challenging dataset that features a large number of scenes with messy tables captured from multiple camera views. Each scene in this dataset is highly complex, containing multiple object instances that could be identical, stacked and occluded by other instances. The key challenge is to associate all instances given the RGB image of all views. The seemingly simple task surprisingly fails many popular methods or heuristics that we assume good performance in object association. The dataset challenges existing methods in mining subtle appearance differences, reasoning based on contexts, and fusing appearance with geometric cues for establishing an association. We report interesting findings with some popular baselines, and discuss how this dataset could help inspire new problems and catalyse more robust formulations to tackle real-world instance association problems. Project page: $\href{https://caizhongang.github.io/projects/MessyTable/}{\text{MessyTable}}$

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Leveraging Temporal Information for 3D Detection and Domain Adaptation

Ever since the prevalent use of the LiDARs in autonomous driving, tremendous improvements have been made to the learning on the point clouds. However, recent progress largely focuses on detecting objects in a single 360-degree sweep, without extensively exploring the temporal information. In this report, we describe a simple way to pass such information in the learning pipeline by adding timestamps to the point clouds, which shows consistent improvements across all three classes.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Siamese Convolutional Neural Network for Sub-millimeter-accurate Camera Pose Estimation and Visual Servoing

Visual Servoing (VS), where images taken from a camera typically attached to the robot end-effector are used to guide the robot motions, is an important technique to tackle robotic tasks that require a high level of accuracy. We propose a new neural network, based on a Siamese architecture, for highly accurate camera pose estimation. This, in turn, can be used as a final refinement step following a coarse VS or, if applied in an iterative manner, as a standalone VS on its own. The key feature of our neural network is that it outputs the relative pose between any pair of images, and does so with sub-millimeter accuracy. We show that our network can reduce pose estimation errors to 0.6 mm in translation and 0.4 degrees in rotation, from initial errors of 10 mm / 5 degrees if applied once, or of several cm / tens of degrees if applied iteratively. The network can generalize to similar objects, is robust against changing lighting conditions, and to partial occlusions (when used iteratively). The high accuracy achieved enables tackling low-tolerance assembly tasks downstream: using our network, an industrial robot can achieve 97.5% success rate on a VGA-connector insertion task without any force sensing mechanism.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2018

3D Convolution on RGB-D Point Clouds for Accurate Model-free Object Pose Estimation

The conventional pose estimation of a 3D object usually requires the knowledge of the 3D model of the object. Even with the recent development in convolutional neural networks (CNNs), a 3D model is often necessary in the final estimation. In this paper, we propose a two-stage pipeline that takes in raw colored point cloud data and estimates an object's translation and rotation by running 3D convolutions on voxels. The pipeline is simple yet highly accurate: translation error is reduced to the voxel resolution (around 1 cm) and rotation error is around 5 degrees. The pipeline is also put to actual robotic grasping tests where it achieves above 90% success rate for test objects. Another innovation is that a motion capture system is used to automatically label the point cloud samples which makes it possible to rapidly collect a large amount of highly accurate real data for training the neural networks.

cs.RO↗