Yuanqing Lin

Qiang Meng, Feng Zhou, Hainan Ren et al.

The growing public concerns on data privacy in face recognition can be greatly addressed by the federated learning (FL) paradigm. However, conventional FL methods perform poorly due to the uniqueness of the task: broadcasting class centers among clients is crucial for recognition performances but leads to privacy leakage. To resolve the privacy-utility paradox, this work proposes PrivacyFace, a framework largely improves the federated learning face recognition via communicating auxiliary and privacy-agnostic information among clients. PrivacyFace mainly consists of two components: First, a practical Differentially Private Local Clustering (DPLC) mechanism is proposed to distill sanitized clusters from local class centers. Second, a consensus-aware recognition loss subsequently encourages global consensuses among clients, which ergo results in more discriminative features. The proposed framework is mathematically proved to be differentially private, introducing a lightweight overhead as well as yielding prominent performance boosts (\textit{e.g.}, +9.63\% and +10.26\% for TAR@FAR=1e-4 on IJB-B and IJB-C respectively). Extensive experiments and ablation studies on a large-scale dataset have demonstrated the efficacy and practicability of our method.

Qichen Li, Yuanqing Lin, Luofeng Zhou et al.

Creating meta-embeddings for better performance in language modelling has received attention lately, and methods based on concatenation or merely calculating the arithmetic mean of more than one separately trained embeddings to perform meta-embeddings have shown to be beneficial. In this paper, we devise a new meta-embedding model based on the self-attention mechanism, namely the Duo. With less than 0.4M parameters, the Duo mechanism achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in text classification tasks such as 20NG. Additionally, we propose a new meta-embedding sequece-to-sequence model for machine translation, which to the best of our knowledge, is the first machine translation model based on more than one word-embedding. Furthermore, it has turned out that our model outperform the Transformer not only in terms of achieving a better result, but also a faster convergence on recognized benchmarks, such as the WMT 2014 English-to-French translation task.

Peng Wang, Ruigang Yang, Binbin Cao et al.

For applications such as autonomous driving, self-localization/camera pose estimation and scene parsing are crucial technologies. In this paper, we propose a unified framework to tackle these two problems simultaneously. The uniqueness of our design is a sensor fusion scheme which integrates camera videos, motion sensors (GPS/IMU), and a 3D semantic map in order to achieve robustness and efficiency of the system. Specifically, we first have an initial coarse camera pose obtained from consumer-grade GPS/IMU, based on which a label map can be rendered from the 3D semantic map. Then, the rendered label map and the RGB image are jointly fed into a pose CNN, yielding a corrected camera pose. In addition, to incorporate temporal information, a multi-layer recurrent neural network (RNN) is further deployed improve the pose accuracy. Finally, based on the pose from RNN, we render a new label map, which is fed together with the RGB image into a segment CNN which produces per-pixel semantic label. In order to validate our approach, we build a dataset with registered 3D point clouds and video camera images. Both the point clouds and the images are semantically-labeled. Each video frame has ground truth pose from highly accurate motion sensors. We show that practically, pose estimation solely relying on images like PoseNet may fail due to street view confusion, and it is important to fuse multiple sensors. Finally, various ablation studies are performed, which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system. In particular, we show that scene parsing and pose estimation are mutually beneficial to achieve a more robust and accurate system.

Yunlong Bian, Chuang Gan, Xiao Liu et al.

This paper describes our solution for the video recognition task of ActivityNet Kinetics challenge that ranked the 1st place. Most of existing state-of-the-art video recognition approaches are in favor of an end-to-end pipeline. One exception is the framework of DevNet. The merit of DevNet is that they first use the video data to learn a network (i.e. fine-tuning or training from scratch). Instead of directly using the end-to-end classification scores (e.g. softmax scores), they extract the features from the learned network and then fed them into the off-the-shelf machine learning models to conduct video classification. However, the effectiveness of this line work has long-term been ignored and underestimated. In this submission, we extensively use this strategy. Particularly, we investigate four temporal modeling approaches using the learned features: Multi-group Shifting Attention Network, Temporal Xception Network, Multi-stream sequence Model and Fast-Forward Sequence Model. Experiment results on the challenging Kinetics dataset demonstrate that our proposed temporal modeling approaches can significantly improve existing approaches in the large-scale video recognition tasks. Most remarkably, our best single Multi-group Shifting Attention Network can achieve 77.7% in term of top-1 accuracy and 93.2% in term of top-5 accuracy on the validation set.

Jian Wang, Feng Zhou, Shilei Wen et al.

The modern image search system requires semantic understanding of image, and a key yet under-addressed problem is to learn a good metric for measuring the similarity between images. While deep metric learning has yielded impressive performance gains by extracting high level abstractions from image data, a proper objective loss function becomes the central issue to boost the performance. In this paper, we propose a novel angular loss, which takes angle relationship into account, for learning better similarity metric. Whereas previous metric learning methods focus on optimizing the similarity (contrastive loss) or relative similarity (triplet loss) of image pairs, our proposed method aims at constraining the angle at the negative point of triplet triangles. Several favorable properties are observed when compared with conventional methods. First, scale invariance is introduced, improving the robustness of objective against feature variance. Second, a third-order geometric constraint is inherently imposed, capturing additional local structure of triplet triangles than contrastive loss or triplet loss. Third, better convergence has been demonstrated by experiments on three publicly available datasets.

Xiao Liu, Jiang Wang, Shilei Wen et al.

A key challenge in fine-grained recognition is how to find and represent discriminative local regions. Recent attention models are capable of learning discriminative region localizers only from category labels with reinforcement learning. However, not utilizing any explicit part information, they are not able to accurately find multiple distinctive regions. In this work, we introduce an attribute-guided attention localization scheme where the local region localizers are learned under the guidance of part attribute descriptions. By designing a novel reward strategy, we are able to learn to locate regions that are spatially and semantically distinctive with reinforcement learning algorithm. The attribute labeling requirement of the scheme is more amenable than the accurate part location annotation required by traditional part-based fine-grained recognition methods. Experimental results on the CUB-200-2011 dataset demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme on both fine-grained recognition and attribute recognition.

Yu Xiang, Wongun Choi, Yuanqing Lin et al.

In CNN-based object detection methods, region proposal becomes a bottleneck when objects exhibit significant scale variation, occlusion or truncation. In addition, these methods mainly focus on 2D object detection and cannot estimate detailed properties of objects. In this paper, we propose subcategory-aware CNNs for object detection. We introduce a novel region proposal network that uses subcategory information to guide the proposal generating process, and a new detection network for joint detection and subcategory classification. By using subcategories related to object pose, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on both detection and pose estimation on commonly used benchmarks.

Xiao Liu, Tian Xia, Jiang Wang et al.

Fine-grained recognition is challenging due to its subtle local inter-class differences versus large intra-class variations such as poses. A key to address this problem is to localize discriminative parts to extract pose-invariant features. However, ground-truth part annotations can be expensive to acquire. Moreover, it is hard to define parts for many fine-grained classes. This work introduces Fully Convolutional Attention Networks (FCANs), a reinforcement learning framework to optimally glimpse local discriminative regions adaptive to different fine-grained domains. Compared to previous methods, our approach enjoys three advantages: 1) the weakly-supervised reinforcement learning procedure requires no expensive part annotations; 2) the fully-convolutional architecture speeds up both training and testing; 3) the greedy reward strategy accelerates the convergence of the learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with extensive experiments on four challenging fine-grained benchmark datasets, including CUB-200-2011, Stanford Dogs, Stanford Cars and Food-101.

Yin Cui, Feng Zhou, Yuanqing Lin et al.

Existing fine-grained visual categorization methods often suffer from three challenges: lack of training data, large number of fine-grained categories, and high intraclass vs. low inter-class variance. In this work we propose a generic iterative framework for fine-grained categorization and dataset bootstrapping that handles these three challenges. Using deep metric learning with humans in the loop, we learn a low dimensional feature embedding with anchor points on manifolds for each category. These anchor points capture intra-class variances and remain discriminative between classes. In each round, images with high confidence scores from our model are sent to humans for labeling. By comparing with exemplar images, labelers mark each candidate image as either a "true positive" or a "false positive". True positives are added into our current dataset and false positives are regarded as "hard negatives" for our metric learning model. Then the model is retrained with an expanded dataset and hard negatives for the next round. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we bootstrap a fine-grained flower dataset with 620 categories from Instagram images. The proposed deep metric learning scheme is evaluated on both our dataset and the CUB-200-2001 Birds dataset. Experimental evaluations show significant performance gain using dataset bootstrapping and demonstrate state-of-the-art results achieved by the proposed deep metric learning methods.

Xiaofan Zhang, Feng Zhou, Yuanqing Lin et al.

Recent algorithms in convolutional neural networks (CNN) considerably advance the fine-grained image classification, which aims to differentiate subtle differences among subordinate classes. However, previous studies have rarely focused on learning a fined-grained and structured feature representation that is able to locate similar images at different levels of relevance, e.g., discovering cars from the same make or the same model, both of which require high precision. In this paper, we propose two main contributions to tackle this problem. 1) A multi-task learning framework is designed to effectively learn fine-grained feature representations by jointly optimizing both classification and similarity constraints. 2) To model the multi-level relevance, label structures such as hierarchy or shared attributes are seamlessly embedded into the framework by generalizing the triplet loss. Extensive and thorough experiments have been conducted on three fine-grained datasets, i.e., the Stanford car, the car-333, and the food datasets, which contain either hierarchical labels or shared attributes. Our proposed method has achieved very competitive performance, i.e., among state-of-the-art classification accuracy. More importantly, it significantly outperforms previous fine-grained feature representations for image retrieval at different levels of relevance.

Feng Zhou, Yuanqing Lin

Given a food image, can a fine-grained object recognition engine tell "which restaurant which dish" the food belongs to? Such ultra-fine grained image recognition is the key for many applications like search by images, but it is very challenging because it needs to discern subtle difference between classes while dealing with the scarcity of training data. Fortunately, the ultra-fine granularity naturally brings rich relationships among object classes. This paper proposes a novel approach to exploit the rich relationships through bipartite-graph labels (BGL). We show how to model BGL in an overall convolutional neural networks and the resulting system can be optimized through back-propagation. We also show that it is computationally efficient in inference thanks to the bipartite structure. To facilitate the study, we construct a new food benchmark dataset, which consists of 37,885 food images collected from 6 restaurants and totally 975 menus. Experimental results on this new food and three other datasets demonstrates BGL advances previous works in fine-grained object recognition. An online demo is available at http://www.f-zhou.com/fg_demo/.

Xiaoyu Wang, Tianbao Yang, Guobin Chen et al.

This paper proposes to go beyond the state-of-the-art deep convolutional neural network (CNN) by incorporating the information from object detection, focusing on dealing with fine-grained image classification. Unfortunately, CNN suffers from over-fiting when it is trained on existing fine-grained image classification benchmarks, which typically only consist of less than a few tens of thousands training images. Therefore, we first construct a large-scale fine-grained car recognition dataset that consists of 333 car classes with more than 150 thousand training images. With this large-scale dataset, we are able to build a strong baseline for CNN with top-1 classification accuracy of 81.6%. One major challenge in fine-grained image classification is that many classes are very similar to each other while having large within-class variation. One contributing factor to the within-class variation is cluttered image background. However, the existing CNN training takes uniform window sampling over the image, acting as blind on the location of the object of interest. In contrast, this paper proposes an \emph{object-centric sampling} (OCS) scheme that samples image windows based on the object location information. The challenge in using the location information lies in how to design powerful object detector and how to handle the imperfectness of detection results. To that end, we design a saliency-aware object detection approach specific for the setting of fine-grained image classification, and the uncertainty of detection results are naturally handled in our OCS scheme. Our framework is demonstrated to be very effective, improving top-1 accuracy to 89.3% (from 81.6%) on the large-scale fine-grained car classification dataset.

Will Y. Zou, Xiaoyu Wang, Miao Sun et al.

This paper addresses the challenge of establishing a bridge between deep convolutional neural networks and conventional object detection frameworks for accurate and efficient generic object detection. We introduce Dense Neural Patterns, short for DNPs, which are dense local features derived from discriminatively trained deep convolutional neural networks. DNPs can be easily plugged into conventional detection frameworks in the same way as other dense local features(like HOG or LBP). The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated with the Regionlets object detection framework. It achieved 46.1% mean average precision on the PASCAL VOC 2007 dataset, and 44.1% on the PASCAL VOC 2010 dataset, which dramatically improves the original Regionlets approach without DNPs.

Qi Qian, Rong Jin, Shenghuo Zhu et al.

Fine-grained visual categorization (FGVC) is to categorize objects into subordinate classes instead of basic classes. One major challenge in FGVC is the co-occurrence of two issues: 1) many subordinate classes are highly correlated and are difficult to distinguish, and 2) there exists the large intra-class variation (e.g., due to object pose). This paper proposes to explicitly address the above two issues via distance metric learning (DML). DML addresses the first issue by learning an embedding so that data points from the same class will be pulled together while those from different classes should be pushed apart from each other; and it addresses the second issue by allowing the flexibility that only a portion of the neighbors (not all data points) from the same class need to be pulled together. However, feature representation of an image is often high dimensional, and DML is known to have difficulty in dealing with high dimensional feature vectors since it would require $\mathcal{O}(d^2)$ for storage and $\mathcal{O}(d^3)$ for optimization. To this end, we proposed a multi-stage metric learning framework that divides the large-scale high dimensional learning problem to a series of simple subproblems, achieving $\mathcal{O}(d)$ computational complexity. The empirical study with FVGC benchmark datasets verifies that our method is both effective and efficient compared to the state-of-the-art FGVC approaches.

Tianbao Yang, Shenghuo Zhu, Rong Jin et al.

In \citep{Yangnips13}, the author presented distributed stochastic dual coordinate ascent (DisDCA) algorithms for solving large-scale regularized loss minimization. Extraordinary performances have been observed and reported for the well-motivated updates, as referred to the practical updates, compared to the naive updates. However, no serious analysis has been provided to understand the updates and therefore the convergence rates. In the paper, we bridge the gap by providing a theoretical analysis of the convergence rates of the practical DisDCA algorithm. Our analysis helped by empirical studies has shown that it could yield an exponential speed-up in the convergence by increasing the number of dual updates at each iteration. This result justifies the superior performances of the practical DisDCA as compared to the naive variant. As a byproduct, our analysis also reveals the convergence behavior of the one-communication DisDCA.