Deyin Liu

Lin Wu, Deyin Liu, Wenying Zhang et al. · ibm-research

Person re-identification (re-ID) is of great importance to video surveillance systems by estimating the similarity between a pair of cross-camera person shorts. Current methods for estimating such similarity require a large number of labeled samples for supervised training. In this paper, we present a pseudo-pair based self-similarity learning approach for unsupervised person re-ID without human annotations. Unlike conventional unsupervised re-ID methods that use pseudo labels based on global clustering, we construct patch surrogate classes as initial supervision, and propose to assign pseudo labels to images through the pairwise gradient-guided similarity separation. This can cluster images in pseudo pairs, and the pseudos can be updated during training. Based on pseudo pairs, we propose to improve the generalization of similarity function via a novel self-similarity learning:it learns local discriminative features from individual images via intra-similarity, and discovers the patch correspondence across images via inter-similarity. The intra-similarity learning is based on channel attention to detect diverse local features from an image. The inter-similarity learning employs a deformable convolution with a non-local block to align patches for cross-image similarity. Experimental results on several re-ID benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the state-of-the-arts.

Zhong Ji, Junhua Hu, Deyin Liu et al.

Text-based person search (TBPS) is of significant importance in intelligent surveillance, which aims to retrieve pedestrian images with high semantic relevance to a given text description. This retrieval task is characterized with both modal heterogeneity and fine-grained matching. To implement this task, one needs to extract multi-scale features from both image and text domains, and then perform the cross-modal alignment. However, most existing approaches only consider the alignment confined at their individual scales, e.g., an image-sentence or a region-phrase scale. Such a strategy adopts the presumable alignment in feature extraction, while overlooking the cross-scale alignment, e.g., image-phrase. In this paper, we present a transformer-based model to extract multi-scale representations, and perform Asymmetric Cross-Scale Alignment (ACSA) to precisely align the two modalities. Specifically, ACSA consists of a global-level alignment module and an asymmetric cross-attention module, where the former aligns an image and texts on a global scale, and the latter applies the cross-attention mechanism to dynamically align the cross-modal entities in region/image-phrase scales. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets CUHK-PEDES and RSTPReid demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Codes are available at \href{url}{https://github.com/mul-hjh/ACSA}.

Deyin Liu, Lin Yuanbo Wu, Bo Li et al.

In this paper, we present an end-to-end approach to generate high-resolution person images conditioned on texts only. State-of-the-art text-to-image generation models are mainly designed for center-object generation, e.g., flowers and birds. Unlike center-placed objects with similar shapes and orientation, person image generation is a more challenging task, for which we observe the followings: 1) the generated images for the same person exhibit visual details with identity-consistency, e.g., identity-related textures/clothes/shoes across the images, and 2) those images should be discriminant for being robust against the inter-person variations caused by visual ambiguities. To address the above challenges, we develop an effective generative model to produce person images with two novel mechanisms. In particular, our first mechanism (called T-Person-GAN-ID) is to integrate the one-stream generator with an identity-preserving network such that the representations of generated data are regularized in their feature space to ensure the identity-consistency. The second mechanism (called T-Person-GAN-ID-MM) is based on the manifold mix-up to produce mixed images via the linear interpolation across generated images from different manifold identities, and we further enforce such interpolated images to be linearly classified in the feature space. This amounts to learning a linear classification boundary that can perfectly separate images from two identities. Our proposed method is empirically validated to achieve a remarkable improvement in text-to-person image generation. Our architecture is orthogonal to StackGAN++ , and focuses on person image generation, with all of them together to enrich the spectrum of GANs for the image generation task. Codes are available on \url{https://github.com/linwu-github/Person-Image-Generation.git}.

Deyin Liu, Lin Wu, Haifeng Zhao et al.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are known to be vulnerable to adversarial examples that are crafted with imperceptible perturbations, i.e., a small change in an input image can induce a mis-classification, and thus threatens the reliability of deep learning based deployment systems. Adversarial training (AT) is often adopted to improve robustness through training a mixture of corrupted and clean data. However, most of AT based methods are ineffective in dealing with transferred adversarial examples which are generated to fool a wide spectrum of defense models, and thus cannot satisfy the generalization requirement raised in real-world scenarios. Moreover, adversarially training a defense model in general cannot produce interpretable predictions towards the inputs with perturbations, whilst a highly interpretable robust model is required by different domain experts to understand the behaviour of a DNN. In this work, we propose a novel approach based on Jacobian norm and Selective Input Gradient Regularization (J-SIGR), which suggests the linearized robustness through Jacobian normalization and also regularizes the perturbation-based saliency maps to imitate the model's interpretable predictions. As such, we achieve both the improved defense and high interpretability of DNNs. Finally, we evaluate our method across different architectures against powerful adversarial attacks. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed J-SIGR confers improved robustness against transferred adversarial attacks, and we also show that the predictions from the neural network are easy to interpret.

Feng Xue, Yu Li, Deyin Liu et al.

Lipreading refers to understanding and further translating the speech of a speaker in the video into natural language. State-of-the-art lipreading methods excel in interpreting overlap speakers, i.e., speakers appear in both training and inference sets. However, generalizing these methods to unseen speakers incurs catastrophic performance degradation due to the limited number of speakers in training bank and the evident visual variations caused by the shape/color of lips for different speakers. Therefore, merely depending on the visible changes of lips tends to cause model overfitting. To address this problem, we propose to use multi-modal features across visual and landmarks, which can describe the lip motion irrespective to the speaker identities. Then, we develop a sentence-level lipreading framework based on visual-landmark transformers, namely LipFormer. Specifically, LipFormer consists of a lip motion stream, a facial landmark stream, and a cross-modal fusion. The embeddings from the two streams are produced by self-attention, which are fed to the cross-attention module to achieve the alignment between visuals and landmarks. Finally, the resulting fused features can be decoded to output texts by a cascade seq2seq model. Experiments demonstrate that our method can effectively enhance the model generalization to unseen speakers.

Hanxi Li, Jingqi Wu, Deyin Liu et al.

Recent advancements in industrial anomaly detection (AD) have demonstrated that incorporating a small number of anomalous samples during training can significantly enhance accuracy. However, this improvement often comes at the cost of extensive annotation efforts, which are impractical for many real-world applications. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework, Weak}ly-supervised RESidual Transformer (WeakREST), designed to achieve high anomaly detection accuracy while minimizing the reliance on manual annotations. First, we reformulate the pixel-wise anomaly localization task into a block-wise classification problem. Second, we introduce a residual-based feature representation called Positional Fast Anomaly Residuals (PosFAR) which captures anomalous patterns more effectively. To leverage this feature, we adapt the Swin Transformer for enhanced anomaly detection and localization. Additionally, we propose a weak annotation approach, utilizing bounding boxes and image tags to define anomalous regions. This approach establishes a semi-supervised learning context that reduces the dependency on precise pixel-level labels. To further improve the learning process, we develop a novel ResMixMatch algorithm, capable of handling the interplay between weak labels and residual-based representations. On the benchmark dataset MVTec-AD, our method achieves an Average Precision (AP) of $83.0\%$, surpassing the previous best result of $82.7\%$ in the unsupervised setting. In the supervised AD setting, WeakREST attains an AP of $87.6\%$, outperforming the previous best of $86.0\%$. Notably, even when using weaker annotations such as bounding boxes, WeakREST exceeds the performance of leading methods relying on pixel-wise supervision, achieving an AP of $87.1\%$ compared to the prior best of $86.0\%$ on MVTec-AD.

Hanxi Li, Jingqi Wu, Lin Yuanbo Wu et al.

In the realm of practical Anomaly Detection (AD) tasks, manual labeling of anomalous pixels proves to be a costly endeavor. Consequently, many AD methods are crafted as one-class classifiers, tailored for training sets completely devoid of anomalies, ensuring a more cost-effective approach. While some pioneering work has demonstrated heightened AD accuracy by incorporating real anomaly samples in training, this enhancement comes at the price of labor-intensive labeling processes. This paper strikes the balance between AD accuracy and labeling expenses by introducing ADClick, a novel Interactive Image Segmentation (IIS) algorithm. ADClick efficiently generates "ground-truth" anomaly masks for real defective images, leveraging innovative residual features and meticulously crafted language prompts. Notably, ADClick showcases a significantly elevated generalization capacity compared to existing state-of-the-art IIS approaches. Functioning as an anomaly labeling tool, ADClick generates high-quality anomaly labels (AP $= 94.1\%$ on MVTec AD) based on only $3$ to $5$ manual click annotations per training image. Furthermore, we extend the capabilities of ADClick into ADClick-Seg, an enhanced model designed for anomaly detection and localization. By fine-tuning the ADClick-Seg model using the weak labels inferred by ADClick, we establish the state-of-the-art performances in supervised AD tasks (AP $= 86.4\%$ on MVTec AD and AP $= 78.4\%$, PRO $= 98.6\%$ on KSDD2).

Hanxi Li, Zhengxun Zhang, Hao Chen et al.

Effectively addressing the challenge of industrial Anomaly Detection (AD) necessitates an ample supply of defective samples, a constraint often hindered by their scarcity in industrial contexts. This paper introduces a novel algorithm designed to augment defective samples, thereby enhancing AD performance. The proposed method tailors the blended latent diffusion model for defect sample generation, employing a diffusion model to generate defective samples in the latent space. A feature editing process, controlled by a ``trimap" mask and text prompts, refines the generated samples. The image generation inference process is structured into three stages: a free diffusion stage, an editing diffusion stage, and an online decoder adaptation stage. This sophisticated inference strategy yields high-quality synthetic defective samples with diverse pattern variations, leading to significantly improved AD accuracies based on the augmented training set. Specifically, on the widely recognized MVTec AD dataset, the proposed method elevates the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance of AD with augmented data by 1.5%, 1.9%, and 3.1% for AD metrics AP, IAP, and IAP90, respectively. The implementation code of this work can be found at the GitHub repository https://github.com/GrandpaXun242/AdaBLDM.git

Deyin Liu, Lin Yuanbo Wu, Xianghua Xie

Due to lack of fully publicly available text-to-video models, current video editing methods tend to build on pre-trained text-to-image generation models, however, they still face grand challenges in dealing with the local editing of video with temporal information. First, although existing methods attempt to focus on local area editing by a pre-defined mask, the preservation of the outside-area background is non-ideal due to the spatially entire generation of each frame. In addition, specially providing a mask by user is an additional costly undertaking, so an autonomous masking strategy integrated into the editing process is desirable. Last but not least, image-level pretrained model hasn't learned temporal information across frames of a video which is vital for expressing the motion and dynamics. In this paper, we propose to adapt a image-level blended latent diffusion model to perform local video editing tasks. Specifically, we leverage DDIM inversion to acquire the latents as background latents instead of the randomly noised ones to better preserve the background information of the input video. We further introduce an autonomous mask manufacture mechanism derived from cross-attention maps in diffusion steps. Finally, we enhance the temporal consistency across video frames by transforming the self-attention blocks of U-Net into temporal-spatial blocks. Through extensive experiments, our proposed approach demonstrates effectiveness in different real-world video editing tasks.

Zhiyan Wang, Deyin Liu, Lin Yuanbo Wu et al.

Semantic segmentation is a fundamental task in multimedia processing, which can be used for analyzing, understanding, editing contents of images and videos, among others. To accelerate the analysis of multimedia data, existing segmentation researches tend to extract semantic information by progressively reducing the spatial resolutions of feature maps. However, this approach introduces a misalignment problem when restoring the resolution of high-level feature maps. In this paper, we design a Semantic Refinement Module (SRM) to address this issue within the segmentation network. Specifically, SRM is designed to learn a transformation offset for each pixel in the upsampled feature maps, guided by high-resolution feature maps and neighboring offsets. By applying these offsets to the upsampled feature maps, SRM enhances the semantic representation of the segmentation network, particularly for pixels around object boundaries. Furthermore, a Contextual Refinement Module (CRM) is presented to capture global context information across both spatial and channel dimensions. To balance dimensions between channel and space, we aggregate the semantic maps from all four stages of the backbone to enrich channel context information. The efficacy of these proposed modules is validated on three widely used datasets-Cityscapes, Bdd100K, and ADE20K-demonstrating superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, this paper extends these modules to a lightweight segmentation network, achieving an mIoU of 82.5% on the Cityscapes validation set with only 137.9 GFLOPs.

Jingqi Wu, Hanxi Li, Lin Yuanbo Wu et al.

Industrial product inspection is often performed using Anomaly Detection (AD) frameworks trained solely on non-defective samples. Although defective samples can be collected during production, leveraging them usually requires pixel-level annotations, limiting scalability. To address this, we propose ADClick, an Interactive Image Segmentation (IIS) algorithm for industrial anomaly detection. ADClick generates pixel-wise anomaly annotations from only a few user clicks and a brief textual description, enabling precise and efficient labeling that significantly improves AD model performance (e.g., AP = 96.1\% on MVTec AD). We further introduce ADClick-Seg, a cross-modal framework that aligns visual features and textual prompts via a prototype-based approach for anomaly detection and localization. By combining pixel-level priors with language-guided cues, ADClick-Seg achieves state-of-the-art results on the challenging ``Multi-class'' AD task (AP = 80.0\%, PRO = 97.5\%, Pixel-AUROC = 99.1\% on MVTec AD).

Chengyuan Zhang, Yilin Zhang, Lei Zhu et al.

This paper introduces a novel framework for unified incremental few-shot object detection (iFSOD) and instance segmentation (iFSIS) using the Transformer architecture. Our goal is to create an optimal solution for situations where only a few examples of novel object classes are available, with no access to training data for base or old classes, while maintaining high performance across both base and novel classes. To achieve this, We extend Mask-DINO into a two-stage incremental learning framework. Stage 1 focuses on optimizing the model using the base dataset, while Stage 2 involves fine-tuning the model on novel classes. Besides, we incorporate a classifier selection strategy that assigns appropriate classifiers to the encoder and decoder according to their distinct functions. Empirical evidence indicates that this approach effectively mitigates the over-fitting on novel classes learning. Furthermore, we implement knowledge distillation to prevent catastrophic forgetting of base classes. Comprehensive evaluations on the COCO and LVIS datasets for both iFSIS and iFSOD tasks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.

Bingrui Zhao, Lin Yuanbo Wu, Xiangtian Fan et al.

Referring Video Object Segmentation (RVOS) aims to segment an object of interest throughout a video based on a language description. The prominent challenge lies in aligning static text with dynamic visual content, particularly when objects exhibiting similar appearances with inconsistent motion and poses. However, current methods often rely on a holistic visual-language fusion that struggles with complex, compositional descriptions. In this paper, we propose \textbf{PARSE-VOS}, a novel, training-free framework powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), for a hierarchical, coarse-to-fine reasoning across text and video domains. Our approach begins by parsing the natural language query into structured semantic commands. Next, we introduce a spatio-temporal grounding module that generates all candidate trajectories for all potential target objects, guided by the parsed semantics. Finally, a hierarchical identification module select the correct target through a two-stage reasoning process: it first performs coarse-grained motion reasoning with an LLM to narrow down candidates; if ambiguity remains, a fine-grained pose verification stage is conditionally triggered to disambiguate. The final output is an accurate segmentation mask for the target object. \textbf{PARSE-VOS} achieved state-of-the-art performance on three major benchmarks: Ref-YouTube-VOS, Ref-DAVIS17, and MeViS.

Hanxi Li, Jingqi Wu, Lin Yuanbo Wu et al.

In this paper, we propose Self-Navigated Residual Mamba (SNARM), a novel framework for universal industrial anomaly detection that leverages ``self-referential learning'' within test images to enhance anomaly discrimination. Unlike conventional methods that depend solely on pre-trained features from normal training data, SNARM dynamically refines anomaly detection by iteratively comparing test patches against adaptively selected in-image references. Specifically, we first compute the ``inter-residuals'' features by contrasting test image patches with the training feature bank. Patches exhibiting small-norm residuals (indicating high normality) are then utilized as self-generated reference patches to compute ``intra-residuals'', amplifying discriminative signals. These inter- and intra-residual features are concatenated and fed into a novel Mamba module with multiple heads, which are dynamically navigated by residual properties to focus on anomalous regions. Finally, AD results are obtained by aggregating the outputs of a self-navigated Mamba in an ensemble learning paradigm. Extensive experiments on MVTec AD, MVTec 3D, and VisA benchmarks demonstrate that SNARM achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, with notable improvements in all metrics, including Image-AUROC, Pixel-AURC, PRO, and AP.

Deyin Liu, Xu Chen, Zhi Zhou et al.

Nowadays, deep neural networks (DNNs) are the core enablers for many emerging edge AI applications. Conventional approaches to training DNNs are generally implemented at central servers or cloud centers for centralized learning, which is typically time-consuming and resource-demanding due to the transmission of a large amount of data samples from the device to the remote cloud. To overcome these disadvantages, we consider accelerating the learning process of DNNs on the Mobile-Edge-Cloud Computing (MECC) paradigm. In this paper, we propose HierTrain, a hierarchical edge AI learning framework, which efficiently deploys the DNN training task over the hierarchical MECC architecture. We develop a novel \textit{hybrid parallelism} method, which is the key to HierTrain, to adaptively assign the DNN model layers and the data samples across the three levels of edge device, edge server and cloud center. We then formulate the problem of scheduling the DNN training tasks at both layer-granularity and sample-granularity. Solving this optimization problem enables us to achieve the minimum training time. We further implement a hardware prototype consisting of an edge device, an edge server and a cloud server, and conduct extensive experiments on it. Experimental results demonstrate that HierTrain can achieve up to 6.9x speedup compared to the cloud-based hierarchical training approach.

Deyin Liu, Lin Wu, Xue Li

In this paper, we present an effective deep prediction framework based on robust recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to predict the likely therapeutic classes of medications a patient is taking, given a sequence of diagnostic billing codes in their record. Accurately capturing the list of medications currently taken by a given patient is extremely challenging due to undefined errors and omissions. We present a general robust framework that explicitly models the possible contamination through overtime decay mechanism on the input billing codes and noise injection into the recurrent hidden states, respectively. By doing this, billing codes are reformulated into its temporal patterns with decay rates on each medical variable, and the hidden states of RNNs are regularised by random noises which serve as dropout to improved RNNs robustness towards data variability in terms of missing values and multiple errors. The proposed method is extensively evaluated on real health care data to demonstrate its effectiveness in suggesting medication orders from contaminated values.