Computer vision models excel at making predictions when the test distribution closely resembles the training distribution. Such models have yet to match the ability of biological vision to learn from multiple sources and generalize to new data sources and tasks. To facilitate the development and evaluation of more general vision systems, we introduce the General Robust Image Task (GRIT) benchmark. GRIT evaluates the performance, robustness, and calibration of a vision system across a variety of image prediction tasks, concepts, and data sources. The seven tasks in GRIT are selected to cover a range of visual skills: object categorization, object localization, referring expression grounding, visual question answering, segmentation, human keypoint detection, and surface normal estimation. GRIT is carefully designed to enable the evaluation of robustness under image perturbations, image source distribution shift, and concept distribution shift. By providing a unified platform for thorough assessment of skills and concepts learned by a vision model, we hope GRIT catalyzes the development of performant and robust general purpose vision systems.
Weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) aims at predicting object locations in an image using only image-level category labels. Common challenges that image classification models encounter when localizing objects are, (a) they tend to look at the most discriminative features in an image that confines the localization map to a very small region, (b) the localization maps are class agnostic, and the models highlight objects of multiple classes in the same image and, (c) the localization performance is affected by background noise. To alleviate the above challenges we introduce the following simple changes through our proposed method ViTOL. We leverage the vision-based transformer for self-attention and introduce a patch-based attention dropout layer (p-ADL) to increase the coverage of the localization map and a gradient attention rollout mechanism to generate class-dependent attention maps. We conduct extensive quantitative, qualitative and ablation experiments on the ImageNet-1K and CUB datasets. We achieve state-of-the-art MaxBoxAcc-V2 localization scores of 70.47% and 73.17% on the two datasets respectively. Code is available on https://github.com/Saurav-31/ViTOL
Optimization within a layer of a deep-net has emerged as a new direction for deep-net layer design. However, there are two main challenges when applying these layers to computer vision tasks: (a) which optimization problem within a layer is useful?; (b) how to ensure that computation within a layer remains efficient? To study question (a), in this work, we propose total variation (TV) minimization as a layer for computer vision. Motivated by the success of total variation in image processing, we hypothesize that TV as a layer provides useful inductive bias for deep-nets too. We study this hypothesis on five computer vision tasks: image classification, weakly supervised object localization, edge-preserving smoothing, edge detection, and image denoising, improving over existing baselines. To achieve these results we had to address question (b): we developed a GPU-based projected-Newton method which is $37\times$ faster than existing solutions.
To interpret deep networks, one main approach is to associate neurons with human-understandable concepts. However, existing methods often ignore the inherent relationships of different concepts (e.g., dog and cat both belong to animals), and thus lose the chance to explain neurons responsible for higher-level concepts (e.g., animal). In this paper, we study hierarchical concepts inspired by the hierarchical cognition process of human beings. To this end, we propose HIerarchical Neuron concepT explainer (HINT) to effectively build bidirectional associations between neurons and hierarchical concepts in a low-cost and scalable manner. HINT enables us to systematically and quantitatively study whether and how the implicit hierarchical relationships of concepts are embedded into neurons, such as identifying collaborative neurons responsible to one concept and multimodal neurons for different concepts, at different semantic levels from concrete concepts (e.g., dog) to more abstract ones (e.g., animal). Finally, we verify the faithfulness of the associations using Weakly Supervised Object Localization, and demonstrate its applicability in various tasks such as discovering saliency regions and explaining adversarial attacks. Code is available on https://github.com/AntonotnaWang/HINT.
While class activation map (CAM) generated by image classification network has been widely used for weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) and semantic segmentation (WSSS), such classifiers usually focus on discriminative object regions. In this paper, we propose Contrastive learning for Class-agnostic Activation Map (C$^2$AM) generation only using unlabeled image data, without the involvement of image-level supervision. The core idea comes from the observation that i) semantic information of foreground objects usually differs from their backgrounds; ii) foreground objects with similar appearance or background with similar color/texture have similar representations in the feature space. We form the positive and negative pairs based on the above relations and force the network to disentangle foreground and background with a class-agnostic activation map using a novel contrastive loss. As the network is guided to discriminate cross-image foreground-background, the class-agnostic activation maps learned by our approach generate more complete object regions. We successfully extracted from C$^2$AM class-agnostic object bounding boxes for object localization and background cues to refine CAM generated by classification network for semantic segmentation. Extensive experiments on CUB-200-2011, ImageNet-1K, and PASCAL VOC2012 datasets show that both WSOL and WSSS can benefit from the proposed C$^2$AM.
For robots to be generally useful, they must be able to find arbitrary objects described by people (i.e., be language-driven) even without expensive navigation training on in-domain data (i.e., perform zero-shot inference). We explore these capabilities in a unified setting: language-driven zero-shot object navigation (L-ZSON). Inspired by the recent success of open-vocabulary models for image classification, we investigate a straightforward framework, CLIP on Wheels (CoW), to adapt open-vocabulary models to this task without fine-tuning. To better evaluate L-ZSON, we introduce the Pasture benchmark, which considers finding uncommon objects, objects described by spatial and appearance attributes, and hidden objects described relative to visible objects. We conduct an in-depth empirical study by directly deploying 21 CoW baselines across Habitat, RoboTHOR, and Pasture. In total, we evaluate over 90k navigation episodes and find that (1) CoW baselines often struggle to leverage language descriptions, but are proficient at finding uncommon objects. (2) A simple CoW, with CLIP-based object localization and classical exploration -- and no additional training -- matches the navigation efficiency of a state-of-the-art ZSON method trained for 500M steps on Habitat MP3D data. This same CoW provides a 15.6 percentage point improvement in success over a state-of-the-art RoboTHOR ZSON model.
Point-based object localization (POL), which pursues high-performance object sensing under low-cost data annotation, has attracted increased attention. However, the point annotation mode inevitably introduces semantic variance for the inconsistency of annotated points. Existing POL methods heavily reply on accurate key-point annotations which are difficult to define. In this study, we propose a POL method using coarse point annotations, relaxing the supervision signals from accurate key points to freely spotted points. To this end, we propose a coarse point refinement (CPR) approach, which to our best knowledge is the first attempt to alleviate semantic variance from the perspective of algorithm. CPR constructs point bags, selects semantic-correlated points, and produces semantic center points through multiple instance learning (MIL). In this way, CPR defines a weakly supervised evolution procedure, which ensures training high-performance object localizer under coarse point supervision. Experimental results on COCO, DOTA and our proposed SeaPerson dataset validate the effectiveness of the CPR approach. The dataset and code will be available at https://github.com/ucas-vg/PointTinyBenchmark/.
This paper proposes a new transformer-based framework to learn class-specific object localization maps as pseudo labels for weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS). Inspired by the fact that the attended regions of the one-class token in the standard vision transformer can be leveraged to form a class-agnostic localization map, we investigate if the transformer model can also effectively capture class-specific attention for more discriminative object localization by learning multiple class tokens within the transformer. To this end, we propose a Multi-class Token Transformer, termed as MCTformer, which uses multiple class tokens to learn interactions between the class tokens and the patch tokens. The proposed MCTformer can successfully produce class-discriminative object localization maps from class-to-patch attentions corresponding to different class tokens. We also propose to use a patch-level pairwise affinity, which is extracted from the patch-to-patch transformer attention, to further refine the localization maps. Moreover, the proposed framework is shown to fully complement the Class Activation Mapping (CAM) method, leading to remarkably superior WSSS results on the PASCAL VOC and MS COCO datasets. These results underline the importance of the class token for WSSS.
Weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) focuses on localizing objects only with the supervision of image-level classification masks. Most previous WSOL methods follow the classification activation map (CAM) that localizes objects based on the classification structure with the multi-instance learning (MIL) mechanism. However, the MIL mechanism makes CAM only activate discriminative object parts rather than the whole object, weakening its performance for localizing objects. To avoid this problem, this work provides a novel perspective that models WSOL as a domain adaption (DA) task, where the score estimator trained on the source/image domain is tested on the target/pixel domain to locate objects. Under this perspective, a DA-WSOL pipeline is designed to better engage DA approaches into WSOL to enhance localization performance. It utilizes a proposed target sampling strategy to select different types of target samples. Based on these types of target samples, domain adaption localization (DAL) loss is elaborated. It aligns the feature distribution between the two domains by DA and makes the estimator perceive target domain cues by Universum regularization. Experiments show that our pipeline outperforms SOTA methods on multi benchmarks. Code are released at \url{https://github.com/zh460045050/DA-WSOL_CVPR2022}.
We propose a reinforcement learning based approach to query object localization, for which an agent is trained to localize objects of interest specified by a small exemplary set. We learn a transferable reward signal formulated using the exemplary set by ordinal metric learning. Our proposed method enables test-time policy adaptation to new environments where the reward signals are not readily available, and outperforms fine-tuning approaches that are limited to annotated images. In addition, the transferable reward allows repurposing the trained agent from one specific class to another class. Experiments on corrupted MNIST, CU-Birds, and COCO datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Recent self-supervised contrastive learning methods greatly benefit from the Siamese structure that aims at minimizing distances between positive pairs. For high performance Siamese representation learning, one of the keys is to design good contrastive pairs. Most previous works simply apply random sampling to make different crops of the same image, which overlooks the semantic information that may degrade the quality of views. In this work, we propose ContrastiveCrop, which could effectively generate better crops for Siamese representation learning. Firstly, a semantic-aware object localization strategy is proposed within the training process in a fully unsupervised manner. This guides us to generate contrastive views which could avoid most false positives (i.e., object vs. background). Moreover, we empirically find that views with similar appearances are trivial for the Siamese model training. Thus, a center-suppressed sampling is further designed to enlarge the variance of crops. Remarkably, our method takes a careful consideration of positive pairs for contrastive learning with negligible extra training overhead. As a plug-and-play and framework-agnostic module, ContrastiveCrop consistently improves SimCLR, MoCo, BYOL, SimSiam by 0.4% ~ 2.0% classification accuracy on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Tiny ImageNet and STL-10. Superior results are also achieved on downstream detection and segmentation tasks when pre-trained on ImageNet-1K.
Audiovisual scenes are pervasive in our daily life. It is commonplace for humans to discriminatively localize different sounding objects but quite challenging for machines to achieve class-aware sounding objects localization without category annotations, i.e., localizing the sounding object and recognizing its category. To address this problem, we propose a two-stage step-by-step learning framework to localize and recognize sounding objects in complex audiovisual scenarios using only the correspondence between audio and vision. First, we propose to determine the sounding area via coarse-grained audiovisual correspondence in the single source cases. Then visual features in the sounding area are leveraged as candidate object representations to establish a category-representation object dictionary for expressive visual character extraction. We generate class-aware object localization maps in cocktail-party scenarios and use audiovisual correspondence to suppress silent areas by referring to this dictionary. Finally, we employ category-level audiovisual consistency as the supervision to achieve fine-grained audio and sounding object distribution alignment. Experiments on both realistic and synthesized videos show that our model is superior in localizing and recognizing objects as well as filtering out silent ones. We also transfer the learned audiovisual network into the unsupervised object detection task, obtaining reasonable performance.
This work presents a simple vision transformer design as a strong baseline for object localization and instance segmentation tasks. Transformers recently demonstrate competitive performance in image classification tasks. To adopt ViT to object detection and dense prediction tasks, many works inherit the multistage design from convolutional networks and highly customized ViT architectures. Behind this design, the goal is to pursue a better trade-off between computational cost and effective aggregation of multiscale global contexts. However, existing works adopt the multistage architectural design as a black-box solution without a clear understanding of its true benefits. In this paper, we comprehensively study three architecture design choices on ViT -- spatial reduction, doubled channels, and multiscale features -- and demonstrate that a vanilla ViT architecture can fulfill this goal without handcrafting multiscale features, maintaining the original ViT design philosophy. We further complete a scaling rule to optimize our model's trade-off on accuracy and computation cost / model size. By leveraging a constant feature resolution and hidden size throughout the encoder blocks, we propose a simple and compact ViT architecture called Universal Vision Transformer (UViT) that achieves strong performance on COCO object detection and instance segmentation tasks.
We propose a new 3D spatial understanding task of 3D Question Answering (3D-QA). In the 3D-QA task, models receive visual information from the entire 3D scene of the rich RGB-D indoor scan and answer the given textual questions about the 3D scene. Unlike the 2D-question answering of VQA, the conventional 2D-QA models suffer from problems with spatial understanding of object alignment and directions and fail the object identification from the textual questions in 3D-QA. We propose a baseline model for 3D-QA, named ScanQA model, where the model learns a fused descriptor from 3D object proposals and encoded sentence embeddings. This learned descriptor correlates the language expressions with the underlying geometric features of the 3D scan and facilitates the regression of 3D bounding boxes to determine described objects in textual questions and outputs correct answers. We collected human-edited question-answer pairs with free-form answers that are grounded to 3D objects in each 3D scene. Our new ScanQA dataset contains over 40K question-answer pairs from the 800 indoor scenes drawn from the ScanNet dataset. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed 3D-QA task is the first large-scale effort to perform object-grounded question-answering in 3D environments.
Weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) aims to localize objects using only image-level labels. Recently a new paradigm has emerged by generating a foreground prediction map (FPM) to achieve localization task. Existing FPM-based methods use cross-entropy (CE) to evaluate the foreground prediction map and to guide the learning of generator. We argue for using activation value to achieve more efficient learning. It is based on the experimental observation that, for a trained network, CE converges to zero when the foreground mask covers only part of the object region. While activation value increases until the mask expands to the object boundary, which indicates that more object areas can be learned by using activation value. In this paper, we propose a Background Activation Suppression (BAS) method. Specifically, an Activation Map Constraint module (AMC) is designed to facilitate the learning of generator by suppressing the background activation value. Meanwhile, by using the foreground region guidance and the area constraint, BAS can learn the whole region of the object. In the inference phase, we consider the prediction maps of different categories together to obtain the final localization results. Extensive experiments show that BAS achieves significant and consistent improvement over the baseline methods on the CUB-200-2011 and ILSVRC datasets. Code and models are available at https://github.com/wpy1999/BAS.
A typical pipeline for multi-object tracking (MOT) is to use a detector for object localization, and following re-identification (re-ID) for object association. This pipeline is partially motivated by recent progress in both object detection and re-ID, and partially motivated by biases in existing tracking datasets, where most objects tend to have distinguishing appearance and re-ID models are sufficient for establishing associations. In response to such bias, we would like to re-emphasize that methods for multi-object tracking should also work when object appearance is not sufficiently discriminative. To this end, we propose a large-scale dataset for multi-human tracking, where humans have similar appearance, diverse motion and extreme articulation. As the dataset contains mostly group dancing videos, we name it "DanceTrack". We expect DanceTrack to provide a better platform to develop more MOT algorithms that rely less on visual discrimination and depend more on motion analysis. We benchmark several state-of-the-art trackers on our dataset and observe a significant performance drop on DanceTrack when compared against existing benchmarks. The dataset, project code and competition server are released at: \url{https://github.com/DanceTrack}.
Attention modules for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are an effective method to enhance performance on multiple computer-vision tasks. While existing methods appropriately model channel-, spatial- and self-attention, they primarily operate in a feedforward bottom-up manner. Consequently, the attention mechanism strongly depends on the local information of a single input feature map and does not incorporate relatively semantically-richer contextual information available at higher layers that can specify "what and where to look" in lower-level feature maps through top-down information flow. Accordingly, in this work, we propose a lightweight top-down attention module (TDAM) that iteratively generates a "visual searchlight" to perform channel and spatial modulation of its inputs and outputs more contextually-relevant feature maps at each computation step. Our experiments indicate that TDAM enhances the performance of CNNs across multiple object-recognition benchmarks and outperforms prominent attention modules while being more parameter and memory efficient. Further, TDAM-based models learn to "shift attention" by localizing individual objects or features at each computation step without any explicit supervision resulting in a 5% improvement for ResNet50 on weakly-supervised object localization. Source code and models are publicly available at: https://github.com/shantanuj/TDAM_Top_down_attention_module .
We propose UniTAB that Unifies Text And Box outputs for grounded vision-language (VL) modeling. Grounded VL tasks such as grounded captioning require the model to generate a text description and align predicted words with object regions. To achieve this, models must generate desired text and box outputs together, and meanwhile indicate the alignments between words and boxes. In contrast to existing solutions that use multiple separate modules for different outputs, UniTAB represents both text and box outputs with a shared token sequence, and introduces a special <obj> token to naturally indicate word-box alignments in the sequence. UniTAB thus could provide a more comprehensive and interpretable image description, by freely grounding generated words to object regions. On grounded captioning, UniTAB presents a simpler solution with a single output head, and significantly outperforms state of the art in both grounding and captioning evaluations. On general VL tasks that have different desired output formats (i.e., text, box, or their combination), UniTAB with a single network achieves better or comparable performance than task-specific state of the art. Experiments cover 7 VL benchmarks, including grounded captioning, visual grounding, image captioning, and visual question answering. Furthermore, UniTAB's unified multi-task network and the task-agnostic output sequence design make the model parameter efficient and generalizable to new tasks.
The visual inspection of aerial drone footage is an integral part of land search and rescue (SAR) operations today. Since this inspection is a slow, tedious and error-prone job for humans, we propose a novel deep learning algorithm to automate this aerial person detection (APD) task. We experiment with model architecture selection, online data augmentation, transfer learning, image tiling and several other techniques to improve the test performance of our method. We present the novel Aerial Inspection RetinaNet (AIR) algorithm as the combination of these contributions. The AIR detector demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on a commonly used SAR test data set in terms of both precision (~21 percentage point increase) and speed. In addition, we provide a new formal definition for the APD problem in SAR missions. That is, we propose a novel evaluation scheme that ranks detectors in terms of real-world SAR localization requirements. Finally, we propose a novel postprocessing method for robust, approximate object localization: the merging of overlapping bounding boxes (MOB) algorithm. This final processing stage used in the AIR detector significantly improves its performance and usability in the face of real-world aerial SAR missions.
In this paper, we consider a different data format for images: vector graphics. In contrast to raster graphics which are widely used in image recognition, vector graphics can be scaled up or down into any resolution without aliasing or information loss, due to the analytic representation of the primitives in the document. Furthermore, vector graphics are able to give extra structural information on how low-level elements group together to form high level shapes or structures. These merits of graphic vectors have not been fully leveraged in existing methods. To explore this data format, we target on the fundamental recognition tasks: object localization and classification. We propose an efficient CNN-free pipeline that does not render the graphic into pixels (i.e. rasterization), and takes textual document of the vector graphics as input, called YOLaT (You Only Look at Text). YOLaT builds multi-graphs to model the structural and spatial information in vector graphics, and a dual-stream graph neural network is proposed to detect objects from the graph. Our experiments show that by directly operating on vector graphics, YOLaT out-performs raster-graphic based object detection baselines in terms of both average precision and efficiency.