Angélique Loesch

Rémi Marsal, Florian Chabot, Angelique Loesch et al.

Self-supervised monocular depth estimation methods aim to be used in critical applications such as autonomous vehicles for environment analysis. To circumvent the potential imperfections of these approaches, a quantification of the prediction confidence is crucial to guide decision-making systems that rely on depth estimation. In this paper, we propose MonoProb, a new unsupervised monocular depth estimation method that returns an interpretable uncertainty, which means that the uncertainty reflects the expected error of the network in its depth predictions. We rethink the stereo or the structure-from-motion paradigms used to train unsupervised monocular depth models as a probabilistic problem. Within a single forward pass inference, this model provides a depth prediction and a measure of its confidence, without increasing the inference time. We then improve the performance on depth and uncertainty with a novel self-distillation loss for which a student is supervised by a pseudo ground truth that is a probability distribution on depth output by a teacher. To quantify the performance of our models we design new metrics that, unlike traditional ones, measure the absolute performance of uncertainty predictions. Our experiments highlight enhancements achieved by our method on standard depth and uncertainty metrics as well as on our tailored metrics. https://github.com/CEA-LIST/MonoProb

Quentin Bouniot, Romaric Audigier, Angélique Loesch et al.

The use of pretrained deep neural networks represents an attractive way to achieve strong results with few data available. When specialized in dense problems such as object detection, learning local rather than global information in images has proven to be more efficient. However, for unsupervised pretraining, the popular contrastive learning requires a large batch size and, therefore, a lot of resources. To address this problem, we are interested in transformer-based object detectors that have recently gained traction in the community with good performance and with the particularity of generating many diverse object proposals. In this work, we present Proposal Selection Contrast (ProSeCo), a novel unsupervised overall pretraining approach that leverages this property. ProSeCo uses the large number of object proposals generated by the detector for contrastive learning, which allows the use of a smaller batch size, combined with object-level features to learn local information in the images. To improve the effectiveness of the contrastive loss, we introduce the object location information in the selection of positive examples to take into account multiple overlapping object proposals. When reusing pretrained backbone, we advocate for consistency in learning local information between the backbone and the detection head. We show that our method outperforms state of the art in unsupervised pretraining for object detection on standard and novel benchmarks in learning with fewer data.

Quentin Bouniot, Angélique Loesch, Romaric Audigier et al.

For specialized and dense downstream tasks such as object detection, labeling data requires expertise and can be very expensive, making few-shot and semi-supervised models much more attractive alternatives. While in the few-shot setup we observe that transformer-based object detectors perform better than convolution-based two-stage models for a similar amount of parameters, they are not as effective when used with recent approaches in the semi-supervised setting. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised method tailored for the current state-of-the-art object detector Deformable DETR in the few-annotation learning setup using a student-teacher architecture, which avoids relying on a sensitive post-processing of the pseudo-labels generated by the teacher model. We evaluate our method on the semi-supervised object detection benchmarks COCO and Pascal VOC, and it outperforms previous methods, especially when annotations are scarce. We believe that our contributions open new possibilities to adapt similar object detection methods in this setup as well.

Yassine Naji, Aleksandr Setkov, Angélique Loesch et al.

Abnormal event detection in videos is a challenging problem, partly due to the multiplicity of abnormal patterns and the lack of their corresponding annotations. In this paper, we propose new constrained pretext tasks to learn object level normality patterns. Our approach consists in learning a mapping between down-scaled visual queries and their corresponding normal appearance and motion characteristics at the original resolution. The proposed tasks are more challenging than reconstruction and future frame prediction tasks which are widely used in the literature, since our model learns to jointly predict spatial and temporal features rather than reconstructing them. We believe that more constrained pretext tasks induce a better learning of normality patterns. Experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach to localize and track anomalies as it outperforms or reaches the current state-of-the-art on spatio-temporal evaluation metrics.

Khalil Bergaoui, Yassine Naji, Aleksandr Setkov et al.

This paper addresses video anomaly detection problem for videosurveillance. Due to the inherent rarity and heterogeneity of abnormal events, the problem is viewed as a normality modeling strategy, in which our model learns object-centric normal patterns without seeing anomalous samples during training. The main contributions consist in coupling pretrained object-level action features prototypes with a cosine distance-based anomaly estimation function, therefore extending previous methods by introducing additional constraints to the mainstream reconstruction-based strategy. Our framework leverages both appearance and motion information to learn object-level behavior and captures prototypical patterns within a memory module. Experiments on several well-known datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method as it outperforms current state-of-the-art on most relevant spatio-temporal evaluation metrics.

Alexis Winter, Jean-Vincent Martini, Romaric Audigier et al.

Object detection models are critical components of automated systems, such as autonomous vehicles and perception-based robots, but their sensitivity to adversarial attacks poses a serious security risk. Progress in defending these models lags behind classification, hindered by a lack of standardized evaluation. It is nearly impossible to thoroughly compare attack or defense methods, as existing work uses different datasets, inconsistent efficiency metrics, and varied measures of perturbation cost. This paper addresses this gap by investigating three key questions: (1) How can we create a fair benchmark to impartially compare attacks? (2) How well do modern attacks transfer across different architectures, especially from Convolutional Neural Networks to Vision Transformers? (3) What is the most effective adversarial training strategy for robust defense? To answer these, we first propose a unified benchmark framework focused on digital, non-patch-based attacks. This framework introduces specific metrics to disentangle localization and classification errors and evaluates attack cost using multiple perceptual metrics. Using this benchmark, we conduct extensive experiments on state-of-the-art attacks and a wide range of detectors. Our findings reveal two major conclusions: first, modern adversarial attacks against object detection models show a significant lack of transferability to transformer-based architectures. Second, we demonstrate that the most robust adversarial training strategy leverages a dataset composed of a mix of high-perturbation attacks with different objectives (e.g., spatial and semantic), which outperforms training on any single attack.

Angelique Loesch, Jaonary Rabarisoa, Romaric Audigier

In video surveillance applications, person search is a challenging task consisting in detecting people and extracting features from their silhouette for re-identification (re-ID) purpose. We propose a new end-to-end model that jointly computes detection and feature extraction steps through a single deep Convolutional Neural Network architecture. Sharing feature maps between the two tasks for jointly describing people commonalities and specificities allows faster runtime, which is valuable in real-world applications. In addition to reaching state-of-the-art accuracy, this multi-task model can be sequentially trained task-by-task, which results in a broader acceptance of input dataset types. Indeed, we show that aggregating more pedestrian detection datasets without costly identity annotations makes the shared feature maps more generic, and improves re-ID precision. Moreover, these boosted shared feature maps result in re-ID features more robust to a cross-dataset scenario.

Angelique Loesch, Romaric Audigier

Several computer vision applications such as person search or online fashion rely on human description. The use of instance-level human parsing (HP) is therefore relevant since it localizes semantic attributes and body parts within a person. But how to characterize these attributes? To our knowledge, only some single-HP datasets describe attributes with some color, size and/or pattern characteristics. There is a lack of dataset for multi-HP in the wild with such characteristics. In this article, we propose the dataset CCIHP based on the multi-HP dataset CIHP, with 20 new labels covering these 3 kinds of characteristics. In addition, we propose HPTR, a new bottom-up multi-task method based on transformers as a fast and scalable baseline. It is the fastest method of multi-HP state of the art while having precision comparable to the most precise bottom-up method. We hope this will encourage research for fast and accurate methods of precise human descriptions.

Fabian Dubourvieux, Romaric Audigier, Angélique Loesch et al.

The use of pseudo-labels prevails in order to tackle Unsupervised Domain Adaptive (UDA) Re-Identification (re-ID) with the best performance. Indeed, this family of approaches has given rise to several UDA re-ID specific frameworks, which are effective. In these works, research directions to improve Pseudo-Labeling UDA re-ID performance are varied and mostly based on intuition and experiments: refining pseudo-labels, reducing the impact of errors in pseudo-labels... It can be hard to deduce from them general good practices, which can be implemented in any Pseudo-Labeling method, to consistently improve its performance. To address this key question, a new theoretical view on Pseudo-Labeling UDA re-ID is proposed. The contributions are threefold: (i) A novel theoretical framework for Pseudo-Labeling UDA re-ID, formalized through a new general learning upper-bound on the UDA re-ID performance. (ii) General good practices for Pseudo-Labeling, directly deduced from the interpretation of the proposed theoretical framework, in order to improve the target re-ID performance. (iii) Extensive experiments on challenging person and vehicle cross-dataset re-ID tasks, showing consistent performance improvements for various state-of-the-art methods and various proposed implementations of good practices.

Fabian Dubourvieux, Angélique Loesch, Romaric Audigier et al.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) for re-identification (re-ID) is a challenging task: to avoid a costly annotation of additional data, it aims at transferring knowledge from a domain with annotated data to a domain of interest with only unlabeled data. Pseudo-labeling approaches have proven to be effective for UDA re-ID. However, the effectiveness of these approaches heavily depends on the choice of some hyperparameters (HP) that affect the generation of pseudo-labels by clustering. The lack of annotation in the domain of interest makes this choice non-trivial. Current approaches simply reuse the same empirical value for all adaptation tasks and regardless of the target data representation that changes through pseudo-labeling training phases. As this simplistic choice may limit their performance, we aim at addressing this issue. We propose new theoretical grounds on HP selection for clustering UDA re-ID as well as method of automatic and cyclic HP tuning for pseudo-labeling UDA clustering: HyPASS. HyPASS consists in incorporating two modules in pseudo-labeling methods: (i) HP selection based on a labeled source validation set and (ii) conditional domain alignment of feature discriminativeness to improve HP selection based on source samples. Experiments on commonly used person re-ID and vehicle re-ID datasets show that our proposed HyPASS consistently improves the best state-of-the-art methods in re-ID compared to the commonly used empirical HP setting.

Quentin Bouniot, Romaric Audigier, Angélique Loesch

Deep learning classifiers are now known to have flaws in the representations of their class. Adversarial attacks can find a human-imperceptible perturbation for a given image that will mislead a trained model. The most effective methods to defend against such attacks trains on generated adversarial examples to learn their distribution. Previous work aimed to align original and adversarial image representations in the same way as domain adaptation to improve robustness. Yet, they partially align the representations using approaches that do not reflect the geometry of space and distribution. In addition, it is difficult to accurately compare robustness between defended models. Until now, they have been evaluated using a fixed perturbation size. However, defended models may react differently to variations of this perturbation size. In this paper, the analogy of domain adaptation is taken a step further by exploiting optimal transport theory. We propose to use a loss between distributions that faithfully reflect the ground distance. This leads to SAT (Sinkhorn Adversarial Training), a more robust defense against adversarial attacks. Then, we propose to quantify more precisely the robustness of a model to adversarial attacks over a wide range of perturbation sizes using a different metric, the Area Under the Accuracy Curve (AUAC). We perform extensive experiments on both CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets and show that our defense is globally more robust than the state-of-the-art.

Thomas Defard, Aleksandr Setkov, Angelique Loesch et al.

We present a new framework for Patch Distribution Modeling, PaDiM, to concurrently detect and localize anomalies in images in a one-class learning setting. PaDiM makes use of a pretrained convolutional neural network (CNN) for patch embedding, and of multivariate Gaussian distributions to get a probabilistic representation of the normal class. It also exploits correlations between the different semantic levels of CNN to better localize anomalies. PaDiM outperforms current state-of-the-art approaches for both anomaly detection and localization on the MVTec AD and STC datasets. To match real-world visual industrial inspection, we extend the evaluation protocol to assess performance of anomaly localization algorithms on non-aligned dataset. The state-of-the-art performance and low complexity of PaDiM make it a good candidate for many industrial applications.

Quentin Bouniot, Ievgen Redko, Romaric Audigier et al.

In this paper, we consider the framework of multi-task representation (MTR) learning where the goal is to use source tasks to learn a representation that reduces the sample complexity of solving a target task. We start by reviewing recent advances in MTR theory and show that they can provide novel insights for popular meta-learning algorithms when analyzed within this framework. In particular, we highlight a fundamental difference between gradient-based and metric-based algorithms in practice and put forward a theoretical analysis to explain it. Finally, we use the derived insights to improve the performance of meta-learning methods via a new spectral-based regularization term and confirm its efficiency through experimental studies on few-shot classification benchmarks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first contribution that puts the most recent learning bounds of MTR theory into practice for the task of few-shot classification.

Fabian Dubourvieux, Romaric Audigier, Angelique Loesch et al.

Person Re-Identification (re-ID) aims at retrieving images of the same person taken by different cameras. A challenge for re-ID is the performance preservation when a model is used on data of interest (target data) which belong to a different domain from the training data domain (source data). Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) is an interesting research direction for this challenge as it avoids a costly annotation of the target data. Pseudo-labeling methods achieve the best results in UDA-based re-ID. Surprisingly, labeled source data are discarded after this initialization step. However, we believe that pseudo-labeling could further leverage the labeled source data in order to improve the post-initialization training steps. In order to improve robustness against erroneous pseudo-labels, we advocate the exploitation of both labeled source data and pseudo-labeled target data during all training iterations. To support our guideline, we introduce a framework which relies on a two-branch architecture optimizing classification and triplet loss based metric learning in source and target domains, respectively, in order to allow \emph{adaptability to the target domain} while ensuring \emph{robustness to noisy pseudo-labels}. Indeed, shared low and mid-level parameters benefit from the source classification and triplet loss signal while high-level parameters of the target branch learn domain-specific features. Our method is simple enough to be easily combined with existing pseudo-labeling UDA approaches. We show experimentally that it is efficient and improves performance when the base method has no mechanism to deal with pseudo-label noise or for hard adaptation tasks. Our approach reaches state-of-the-art performance when evaluated on commonly used datasets, Market-1501 and DukeMTMC-reID, and outperforms the state of the art when targeting the bigger and more challenging dataset MSMT.