arXiv subjects

Zuxuan Wu

Publications and source records attributed to Zuxuan Wu.

234 records · Page 13Linked to original sources

arXiv2019

ACE: Adapting to Changing Environments for Semantic Segmentation

Deep neural networks exhibit exceptional accuracy when they are trained and tested on the same data distributions. However, neural classifiers are often extremely brittle when confronted with domain shift---changes in the input distribution that occur over time. We present ACE, a framework for semantic segmentation that dynamically adapts to changing environments over the time. By aligning the distribution of labeled training data from the original source domain with the distribution of incoming data in a shifted domain, ACE synthesizes labeled training data for environments as it sees them. This stylized data is then used to update a segmentation model so that it performs well in new environments. To avoid forgetting knowledge from past environments, we introduce a memory that stores feature statistics from previously seen domains. These statistics can be used to replay images in any of the previously observed domains, thus preventing catastrophic forgetting. In addition to standard batch training using stochastic gradient decent (SGD), we also experiment with fast adaptation methods based on adaptive meta-learning. Extensive experiments are conducted on two datasets from SYNTHIA, the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach when adapting to a number of tasks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

An Analysis of Pre-Training on Object Detection

We provide a detailed analysis of convolutional neural networks which are pre-trained on the task of object detection. To this end, we train detectors on large datasets like OpenImagesV4, ImageNet Localization and COCO. We analyze how well their features generalize to tasks like image classification, semantic segmentation and object detection on small datasets like PASCAL-VOC, Caltech-256, SUN-397, Flowers-102 etc. Some important conclusions from our analysis are --- 1) Pre-training on large detection datasets is crucial for fine-tuning on small detection datasets, especially when precise localization is needed. For example, we obtain 81.1% mAP on the PASCAL-VOC dataset at 0.7 IoU after pre-training on OpenImagesV4, which is 7.6% better than the recently proposed DeformableConvNetsV2 which uses ImageNet pre-training. 2) Detection pre-training also benefits other localization tasks like semantic segmentation but adversely affects image classification. 3) Features for images (like avg. pooled Conv5) which are similar in the object detection feature space are likely to be similar in the image classification feature space but the converse is not true. 4) Visualization of features reveals that detection neurons have activations over an entire object, while activations for classification networks typically focus on parts. Therefore, detection networks are poor at classification when multiple instances are present in an image or when an instance only covers a small fraction of an image.

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arXiv2019

AdaFrame: Adaptive Frame Selection for Fast Video Recognition

We present AdaFrame, a framework that adaptively selects relevant frames on a per-input basis for fast video recognition. AdaFrame contains a Long Short-Term Memory network augmented with a global memory that provides context information for searching which frames to use over time. Trained with policy gradient methods, AdaFrame generates a prediction, determines which frame to observe next, and computes the utility, i.e., expected future rewards, of seeing more frames at each time step. At testing time, AdaFrame exploits predicted utilities to achieve adaptive lookahead inference such that the overall computational costs are reduced without incurring a decrease in accuracy. Extensive experiments are conducted on two large-scale video benchmarks, FCVID and ActivityNet. AdaFrame matches the performance of using all frames with only 8.21 and 8.65 frames on FCVID and ActivityNet, respectively. We further qualitatively demonstrate learned frame usage can indicate the difficulty of making classification decisions; easier samples need fewer frames while harder ones require more, both at instance-level within the same class and at class-level among different categories.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

The Regretful Agent: Heuristic-Aided Navigation through Progress Estimation

As deep learning continues to make progress for challenging perception tasks, there is increased interest in combining vision, language, and decision-making. Specifically, the Vision and Language Navigation (VLN) task involves navigating to a goal purely from language instructions and visual information without explicit knowledge of the goal. Recent successful approaches have made in-roads in achieving good success rates for this task but rely on beam search, which thoroughly explores a large number of trajectories and is unrealistic for applications such as robotics. In this paper, inspired by the intuition of viewing the problem as search on a navigation graph, we propose to use a progress monitor developed in prior work as a learnable heuristic for search. We then propose two modules incorporated into an end-to-end architecture: 1) A learned mechanism to perform backtracking, which decides whether to continue moving forward or roll back to a previous state (Regret Module) and 2) A mechanism to help the agent decide which direction to go next by showing directions that are visited and their associated progress estimate (Progress Marker). Combined, the proposed approach significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods using greedy action selection, with 5% absolute improvement on the test server in success rates, and more importantly 8% on success rates normalized by the path length. Our code is available at https://github.com/chihyaoma/regretful-agent .

cs.AI↗

arXiv2019

Weakly-Supervised Spatial Context Networks

We explore the power of spatial context as a self-supervisory signal for learning visual representations. In particular, we propose spatial context networks that learn to predict a representation of one image patch from another image patch, within the same image, conditioned on their real-valued relative spatial offset. Unlike auto-encoders, that aim to encode and reconstruct original image patches, our network aims to encode and reconstruct intermediate representations of the spatially offset patches. As such, the network learns a spatially conditioned contextual representation. By testing performance with various patch selection mechanisms we show that focusing on object-centric patches is important, and that using object proposal as a patch selection mechanism leads to the highest improvement in performance. Further, unlike auto-encoders, context encoders [21], or other forms of unsupervised feature learning, we illustrate that contextual supervision (with pre-trained model initialization) can improve on existing pre-trained model performance. We build our spatial context networks on top of standard VGG_19 and CNN_M architectures and, among other things, show that we can achieve improvements (with no additional explicit supervision) over the original ImageNet pre-trained VGG_19 and CNN_M models in object categorization and detection on VOC2007.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

BlockDrop: Dynamic Inference Paths in Residual Networks

Very deep convolutional neural networks offer excellent recognition results, yet their computational expense limits their impact for many real-world applications. We introduce BlockDrop, an approach that learns to dynamically choose which layers of a deep network to execute during inference so as to best reduce total computation without degrading prediction accuracy. Exploiting the robustness of Residual Networks (ResNets) to layer dropping, our framework selects on-the-fly which residual blocks to evaluate for a given novel image. In particular, given a pretrained ResNet, we train a policy network in an associative reinforcement learning setting for the dual reward of utilizing a minimal number of blocks while preserving recognition accuracy. We conduct extensive experiments on CIFAR and ImageNet. The results provide strong quantitative and qualitative evidence that these learned policies not only accelerate inference but also encode meaningful visual information. Built upon a ResNet-101 model, our method achieves a speedup of 20\% on average, going as high as 36\% for some images, while maintaining the same 76.4\% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet.

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arXiv2019

Self-Monitoring Navigation Agent via Auxiliary Progress Estimation

The Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) task entails an agent following navigational instruction in photo-realistic unknown environments. This challenging task demands that the agent be aware of which instruction was completed, which instruction is needed next, which way to go, and its navigation progress towards the goal. In this paper, we introduce a self-monitoring agent with two complementary components: (1) visual-textual co-grounding module to locate the instruction completed in the past, the instruction required for the next action, and the next moving direction from surrounding images and (2) progress monitor to ensure the grounded instruction correctly reflects the navigation progress. We test our self-monitoring agent on a standard benchmark and analyze our proposed approach through a series of ablation studies that elucidate the contributions of the primary components. Using our proposed method, we set the new state of the art by a significant margin (8% absolute increase in success rate on the unseen test set). Code is available at https://github.com/chihyaoma/selfmonitoring-agent .

cs.AI↗

arXiv2018

VITON: An Image-based Virtual Try-on Network

We present an image-based VIirtual Try-On Network (VITON) without using 3D information in any form, which seamlessly transfers a desired clothing item onto the corresponding region of a person using a coarse-to-fine strategy. Conditioned upon a new clothing-agnostic yet descriptive person representation, our framework first generates a coarse synthesized image with the target clothing item overlaid on that same person in the same pose. We further enhance the initial blurry clothing area with a refinement network. The network is trained to learn how much detail to utilize from the target clothing item, and where to apply to the person in order to synthesize a photo-realistic image in which the target item deforms naturally with clear visual patterns. Experiments on our newly collected Zalando dataset demonstrate its promise in the image-based virtual try-on task over state-of-the-art generative models.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

DCAN: Dual Channel-wise Alignment Networks for Unsupervised Scene Adaptation

Harvesting dense pixel-level annotations to train deep neural networks for semantic segmentation is extremely expensive and unwieldy at scale. While learning from synthetic data where labels are readily available sounds promising, performance degrades significantly when testing on novel realistic data due to domain discrepancies. We present Dual Channel-wise Alignment Networks (DCAN), a simple yet effective approach to reduce domain shift at both pixel-level and feature-level. Exploring statistics in each channel of CNN feature maps, our framework performs channel-wise feature alignment, which preserves spatial structures and semantic information, in both an image generator and a segmentation network. In particular, given an image from the source domain and unlabeled samples from the target domain, the generator synthesizes new images on-the-fly to resemble samples from the target domain in appearance and the segmentation network further refines high-level features before predicting semantic maps, both of which leverage feature statistics of sampled images from the target domain. Unlike much recent and concurrent work relying on adversarial training, our framework is lightweight and easy to train. Extensive experiments on adapting models trained on synthetic segmentation benchmarks to real urban scenes demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Deep Learning for Video Classification and Captioning

Accelerated by the tremendous increase in Internet bandwidth and storage space, video data has been generated, published and spread explosively, becoming an indispensable part of today's big data. In this paper, we focus on reviewing two lines of research aiming to stimulate the comprehension of videos with deep learning: video classification and video captioning. While video classification concentrates on automatically labeling video clips based on their semantic contents like human actions or complex events, video captioning attempts to generate a complete and natural sentence, enriching the single label as in video classification, to capture the most informative dynamics in videos. In addition, we also provide a review of popular benchmarks and competitions, which are critical for evaluating the technical progress of this vibrant field.

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arXiv2018

Exploiting Feature and Class Relationships in Video Categorization with Regularized Deep Neural Networks

In this paper, we study the challenging problem of categorizing videos according to high-level semantics such as the existence of a particular human action or a complex event. Although extensive efforts have been devoted in recent years, most existing works combined multiple video features using simple fusion strategies and neglected the utilization of inter-class semantic relationships. This paper proposes a novel unified framework that jointly exploits the feature relationships and the class relationships for improved categorization performance. Specifically, these two types of relationships are estimated and utilized by rigorously imposing regularizations in the learning process of a deep neural network (DNN). Such a regularized DNN (rDNN) can be efficiently realized using a GPU-based implementation with an affordable training cost. Through arming the DNN with better capability of harnessing both the feature and the class relationships, the proposed rDNN is more suitable for modeling video semantics. With extensive experimental evaluations, we show that rDNN produces superior performance over several state-of-the-art approaches. On the well-known Hollywood2 and Columbia Consumer Video benchmarks, we obtain very competitive results: 66.9\% and 73.5\% respectively in terms of mean average precision. In addition, to substantially evaluate our rDNN and stimulate future research on large scale video categorization, we collect and release a new benchmark dataset, called FCVID, which contains 91,223 Internet videos and 239 manually annotated categories.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

Automatic Spatially-aware Fashion Concept Discovery

This paper proposes an automatic spatially-aware concept discovery approach using weakly labeled image-text data from shopping websites. We first fine-tune GoogleNet by jointly modeling clothing images and their corresponding descriptions in a visual-semantic embedding space. Then, for each attribute (word), we generate its spatially-aware representation by combining its semantic word vector representation with its spatial representation derived from the convolutional maps of the fine-tuned network. The resulting spatially-aware representations are further used to cluster attributes into multiple groups to form spatially-aware concepts (e.g., the neckline concept might consist of attributes like v-neck, round-neck, etc). Finally, we decompose the visual-semantic embedding space into multiple concept-specific subspaces, which facilitates structured browsing and attribute-feedback product retrieval by exploiting multimodal linguistic regularities. We conducted extensive experiments on our newly collected Fashion200K dataset, and results on clustering quality evaluation and attribute-feedback product retrieval task demonstrate the effectiveness of our automatically discovered spatially-aware concepts.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

Learning Fashion Compatibility with Bidirectional LSTMs

The ubiquity of online fashion shopping demands effective recommendation services for customers. In this paper, we study two types of fashion recommendation: (i) suggesting an item that matches existing components in a set to form a stylish outfit (a collection of fashion items), and (ii) generating an outfit with multimodal (images/text) specifications from a user. To this end, we propose to jointly learn a visual-semantic embedding and the compatibility relationships among fashion items in an end-to-end fashion. More specifically, we consider a fashion outfit to be a sequence (usually from top to bottom and then accessories) and each item in the outfit as a time step. Given the fashion items in an outfit, we train a bidirectional LSTM (Bi-LSTM) model to sequentially predict the next item conditioned on previous ones to learn their compatibility relationships. Further, we learn a visual-semantic space by regressing image features to their semantic representations aiming to inject attribute and category information as a regularization for training the LSTM. The trained network can not only perform the aforementioned recommendations effectively but also predict the compatibility of a given outfit. We conduct extensive experiments on our newly collected Polyvore dataset, and the results provide strong qualitative and quantitative evidence that our framework outperforms alternative methods.

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arXiv2017

Aggregating Frame-level Features for Large-Scale Video Classification

This paper introduces the system we developed for the Google Cloud & YouTube-8M Video Understanding Challenge, which can be considered as a multi-label classification problem defined on top of the large scale YouTube-8M Dataset. We employ a large set of techniques to aggregate the provided frame-level feature representations and generate video-level predictions, including several variants of recurrent neural networks (RNN) and generalized VLAD. We also adopt several fusion strategies to explore the complementarity among the models. In terms of the official metric GAP@20 (global average precision at 20), our best fusion model attains 0.84198 on the public 50\% of test data and 0.84193 on the private 50\% of test data, ranking 4th out of 650 teams worldwide in the competition.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

Modeling Multimodal Clues in a Hybrid Deep Learning Framework for Video Classification

Videos are inherently multimodal. This paper studies the problem of how to fully exploit the abundant multimodal clues for improved video categorization. We introduce a hybrid deep learning framework that integrates useful clues from multiple modalities, including static spatial appearance information, motion patterns within a short time window, audio information as well as long-range temporal dynamics. More specifically, we utilize three Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) operating on appearance, motion and audio signals to extract their corresponding features. We then employ a feature fusion network to derive a unified representation with an aim to capture the relationships among features. Furthermore, to exploit the long-range temporal dynamics in videos, we apply two Long Short Term Memory networks with extracted appearance and motion features as inputs. Finally, we also propose to refine the prediction scores by leveraging contextual relationships among video semantics. The hybrid deep learning framework is able to exploit a comprehensive set of multimodal features for video classification. Through an extensive set of experiments, we demonstrate that (1) LSTM networks which model sequences in an explicitly recurrent manner are highly complementary with CNN models; (2) the feature fusion network which produces a fused representation through modeling feature relationships outperforms alternative fusion strategies; (3) the semantic context of video classes can help further refine the predictions for improved performance. Experimental results on two challenging benchmarks, the UCF-101 and the Columbia Consumer Videos (CCV), provide strong quantitative evidence that our framework achieves promising results: $93.1\%$ on the UCF-101 and $84.5\%$ on the CCV, outperforming competing methods with clear margins.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2015

Fusing Multi-Stream Deep Networks for Video Classification

This paper studies deep network architectures to address the problem of video classification. A multi-stream framework is proposed to fully utilize the rich multimodal information in videos. Specifically, we first train three Convolutional Neural Networks to model spatial, short-term motion and audio clues respectively. Long Short Term Memory networks are then adopted to explore long-term temporal dynamics. With the outputs of the individual streams, we propose a simple and effective fusion method to generate the final predictions, where the optimal fusion weights are learned adaptively for each class, and the learning process is regularized by automatically estimated class relationships. Our contributions are two-fold. First, the proposed multi-stream framework is able to exploit multimodal features that are more comprehensive than those previously attempted. Second, we demonstrate that the adaptive fusion method using the class relationship as a regularizer outperforms traditional alternatives that estimate the weights in a "free" fashion. Our framework produces significantly better results than the state of the arts on two popular benchmarks, 92.2\% on UCF-101 (without using audio) and 84.9\% on Columbia Consumer Videos.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2015

Evaluating Two-Stream CNN for Video Classification

Videos contain very rich semantic information. Traditional hand-crafted features are known to be inadequate in analyzing complex video semantics. Inspired by the huge success of the deep learning methods in analyzing image, audio and text data, significant efforts are recently being devoted to the design of deep nets for video analytics. Among the many practical needs, classifying videos (or video clips) based on their major semantic categories (e.g., "skiing") is useful in many applications. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth study to investigate important implementation options that may affect the performance of deep nets on video classification. Our evaluations are conducted on top of a recent two-stream convolutional neural network (CNN) pipeline, which uses both static frames and motion optical flows, and has demonstrated competitive performance against the state-of-the-art methods. In order to gain insights and to arrive at a practical guideline, many important options are studied, including network architectures, model fusion, learning parameters and the final prediction methods. Based on the evaluations, very competitive results are attained on two popular video classification benchmarks. We hope that the discussions and conclusions from this work can help researchers in related fields to quickly set up a good basis for further investigations along this very promising direction.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2015

Modeling Spatial-Temporal Clues in a Hybrid Deep Learning Framework for Video Classification

Classifying videos according to content semantics is an important problem with a wide range of applications. In this paper, we propose a hybrid deep learning framework for video classification, which is able to model static spatial information, short-term motion, as well as long-term temporal clues in the videos. Specifically, the spatial and the short-term motion features are extracted separately by two Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). These two types of CNN-based features are then combined in a regularized feature fusion network for classification, which is able to learn and utilize feature relationships for improved performance. In addition, Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks are applied on top of the two features to further model longer-term temporal clues. The main contribution of this work is the hybrid learning framework that can model several important aspects of the video data. We also show that (1) combining the spatial and the short-term motion features in the regularized fusion network is better than direct classification and fusion using the CNN with a softmax layer, and (2) the sequence-based LSTM is highly complementary to the traditional classification strategy without considering the temporal frame orders. Extensive experiments are conducted on two popular and challenging benchmarks, the UCF-101 Human Actions and the Columbia Consumer Videos (CCV). On both benchmarks, our framework achieves to-date the best reported performance: $91.3\%$ on the UCF-101 and $83.5\%$ on the CCV.

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