Astuti Sharma

Xuan Yang, Liangzhe Yuan, Kimberly Wilber et al. · deepmind

Dense prediction tasks, such as semantic segmentation, depth estimation, and surface normal prediction, can be easily formulated as per-pixel classification (discrete outputs) or regression (continuous outputs). This per-pixel prediction paradigm has remained popular due to the prevalence of fully convolutional networks. However, on the recent frontier of segmentation task, the community has been witnessing a shift of paradigm from per-pixel prediction to cluster-prediction with the emergence of transformer architectures, particularly the mask transformers, which directly predicts a label for a mask instead of a pixel. Despite this shift, methods based on the per-pixel prediction paradigm still dominate the benchmarks on the other dense prediction tasks that require continuous outputs, such as depth estimation and surface normal prediction. Motivated by the success of DORN and AdaBins in depth estimation, achieved by discretizing the continuous output space, we propose to generalize the cluster-prediction based method to general dense prediction tasks. This allows us to unify dense prediction tasks with the mask transformer framework. Remarkably, the resulting model PolyMaX demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on three benchmarks of NYUD-v2 dataset. We hope our simple yet effective design can inspire more research on exploiting mask transformers for more dense prediction tasks. Code and model will be made available.

Sagar M. Waghmare, Kimberly Wilber, Dave Hawkey et al. · deepmind

Vision is essential for human navigation. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 43.3 million people were blind in 2020, and this number is projected to reach 61 million by 2050. Modern scene understanding models could empower these people by assisting them with navigation, obstacle avoidance and visual recognition capabilities. The research community needs high quality datasets for both training and evaluation to build these systems. While datasets for autonomous vehicles are abundant, there is a critical gap in datasets tailored for outdoor human navigation. This gap poses a major obstacle to the development of computer vision based Assistive Technologies. To overcome this obstacle, we present SANPO, a large-scale egocentric video dataset designed for dense prediction in outdoor human navigation environments. SANPO contains 701 stereo videos of 30+ seconds captured in diverse real-world outdoor environments across four geographic locations in the USA. Every frame has a high resolution depth map and 112K frames were annotated with temporally consistent dense video panoptic segmentation labels. The dataset also includes 1961 high-quality synthetic videos with pixel accurate depth and panoptic segmentation annotations to balance the noisy real world annotations with the high precision synthetic annotations. SANPO is already publicly available and is being used by mobile applications like Project Guideline to train mobile models that help low-vision users go running outdoors independently. To preserve anonymization during peer review, we will provide a link to our dataset upon acceptance. SANPO is available here: https://google-research-datasets.github.io/sanpo_dataset/

Tarun Kalluri, Astuti Sharma, Manmohan Chandraker

Practical real world datasets with plentiful categories introduce new challenges for unsupervised domain adaptation like small inter-class discriminability, that existing approaches relying on domain invariance alone cannot handle sufficiently well. In this work we propose MemSAC, which exploits sample level similarity across source and target domains to achieve discriminative transfer, along with architectures that scale to a large number of categories. For this purpose, we first introduce a memory augmented approach to efficiently extract pairwise similarity relations between labeled source and unlabeled target domain instances, suited to handle an arbitrary number of classes. Next, we propose and theoretically justify a novel variant of the contrastive loss to promote local consistency among within-class cross domain samples while enforcing separation between classes, thus preserving discriminative transfer from source to target. We validate the advantages of MemSAC with significant improvements over previous state-of-the-art on multiple challenging transfer tasks designed for large-scale adaptation, such as DomainNet with 345 classes and fine-grained adaptation on Caltech-UCSD birds dataset with 200 classes. We also provide in-depth analysis and insights into the effectiveness of MemSAC.

Astuti Sharma, Tarun Kalluri, Manmohan Chandraker

Domain adaptation deals with training models using large scale labeled data from a specific source domain and then adapting the knowledge to certain target domains that have few or no labels. Many prior works learn domain agnostic feature representations for this purpose using a global distribution alignment objective which does not take into account the finer class specific structure in the source and target domains. We address this issue in our work and propose an instance affinity based criterion for source to target transfer during adaptation, called ILA-DA. We first propose a reliable and efficient method to extract similar and dissimilar samples across source and target, and utilize a multi-sample contrastive loss to drive the domain alignment process. ILA-DA simultaneously accounts for intra-class clustering as well as inter-class separation among the categories, resulting in less noisy classifier boundaries, improved transferability and increased accuracy. We verify the effectiveness of ILA-DA by observing consistent improvements in accuracy over popular domain adaptation approaches on a variety of benchmark datasets and provide insights into the proposed alignment approach. Code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/astuti/ILA-DA.

Apoorva Gokhale, Astuti Sharma, Kaustav Datta et al.

We propose an approach for unsupervised domain adaptation for the task of estimating someone's age from a given face image. In order to avoid the propagation of racial bias in most publicly available face image datasets into the inefficacy of models trained on them, we perform domain adaptation to motivate the predictor to learn features that are invariant to ethnicity, enhancing the generalization performance across faces of people from different ethnic backgrounds. Exploiting the ordinality of age, we also impose ranking constraints on the prediction of the model and design our model such that it takes as input a pair of images, and outputs both the relative age difference and the rank of the first identity with respect to the other in terms of their ages. Furthermore, we implement Multi-Dimensional Scaling to retrieve absolute ages from the predicted age differences from as few as two labeled images from the domain to be adapted to. We experiment with a publicly available dataset with age labels, dividing it into subsets based on the ethnicity labels, and evaluating the performance of our approach on the data from an ethnicity different from the one that the model is trained on. Additionally, we impose a constraint to preserve the sanity of the predictions with respect to relative and absolute ages, and another to ensure the smoothness of the predictions with respect to the input. We experiment extensively and compare various domain adaptation approaches for the task of regression.