Pong C. Yuen

Mang Ye, Xiuwen Fang, Bo Du et al.

Federated learning (FL) has drawn increasing attention owing to its potential use in large-scale industrial applications. Existing federated learning works mainly focus on model homogeneous settings. However, practical federated learning typically faces the heterogeneity of data distributions, model architectures, network environments, and hardware devices among participant clients. Heterogeneous Federated Learning (HFL) is much more challenging, and corresponding solutions are diverse and complex. Therefore, a systematic survey on this topic about the research challenges and state-of-the-art is essential. In this survey, we firstly summarize the various research challenges in HFL from five aspects: statistical heterogeneity, model heterogeneity, communication heterogeneity, device heterogeneity, and additional challenges. In addition, recent advances in HFL are reviewed and a new taxonomy of existing HFL methods is proposed with an in-depth analysis of their pros and cons. We classify existing methods from three different levels according to the HFL procedure: data-level, model-level, and server-level. Finally, several critical and promising future research directions in HFL are discussed, which may facilitate further developments in this field. A periodically updated collection on HFL is available at https://github.com/marswhu/HFL_Survey.

Rui Shao, Pramuditha Perera, Pong C. Yuen et al.

Open-set recognition and adversarial defense study two key aspects of deep learning that are vital for real-world deployment. The objective of open-set recognition is to identify samples from open-set classes during testing, while adversarial defense aims to defend the network against images with imperceptible adversarial perturbations. In this paper, we show that open-set recognition systems are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Furthermore, we show that adversarial defense mechanisms trained on known classes do not generalize well to open-set samples. Motivated by this observation, we emphasize the need of an Open-Set Adversarial Defense (OSAD) mechanism. This paper proposes an Open-Set Defense Network (OSDN) as a solution to the OSAD problem. The proposed network uses an encoder with feature-denoising layers coupled with a classifier to learn a noise-free latent feature representation. Two techniques are employed to obtain an informative latent feature space with the objective of improving open-set performance. First, a decoder is used to ensure that clean images can be reconstructed from the obtained latent features. Then, self-supervision is used to ensure that the latent features are informative enough to carry out an auxiliary task. We introduce a testing protocol to evaluate OSAD performance and show the effectiveness of the proposed method in multiple object classification datasets. The implementation code of the proposed method is available at: https://github.com/rshaojimmy/ECCV2020-OSAD.

Jinpeng Wang, Yiqi Lin, Andy J. Ma et al.

Temporal cues in videos provide important information for recognizing actions accurately. However, temporal-discriminative features can hardly be extracted without using an annotated large-scale video action dataset for training. This paper proposes a novel Video-based Temporal-Discriminative Learning (VTDL) framework in self-supervised manner. Without labelled data for network pretraining, temporal triplet is generated for each anchor video by using segment of the same or different time interval so as to enhance the capacity for temporal feature representation. Measuring temporal information by time derivative, Temporal Consistent Augmentation (TCA) is designed to ensure that the time derivative (in any order) of the augmented positive is invariant except for a scaling constant. Finally, temporal-discriminative features are learnt by minimizing the distance between each anchor and its augmented positive, while the distance between each anchor and its augmented negative as well as other videos saved in the memory bank is maximized to enrich the representation diversity. In the downstream action recognition task, the proposed method significantly outperforms existing related works. Surprisingly, the proposed self-supervised approach is better than fully-supervised methods on UCF101 and HMDB51 when a small-scale video dataset (with only thousands of videos) is used for pre-training. The code has been made publicly available on https://github.com/FingerRec/Self-Supervised-Temporal-Discriminative-Representation-Learning-for-Video-Action-Recognition.

Chuanxing Geng, Qifei Li, Xinrui Wang et al.

Using unlabeled wild data containing both in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) data to improve the safety and reliability of models has recently received increasing attention. Existing methods either design customized losses for labeled ID and unlabeled wild data then perform joint optimization, or first filter out OOD data from the latter then learn an OOD detector. While achieving varying degrees of success, two potential issues remain: (i) Labeled ID data typically dominates the learning of models, inevitably making models tend to fit OOD data as IDs; (ii) The selection of thresholds for identifying OOD data in unlabeled wild data usually faces dilemma due to the unavailability of pure OOD samples. To address these issues, we propose a novel loss-difference OOD detection framework (LoD) by \textit{intentionally label-noisifying} unlabeled wild data. Such operations not only enable labeled ID data and OOD data in unlabeled wild data to jointly dominate the models' learning but also ensure the distinguishability of the losses between ID and OOD samples in unlabeled wild data, allowing the classic clustering technique (e.g., K-means) to filter these OOD samples without requiring thresholds any longer. We also provide theoretical foundation for LoD's viability, and extensive experiments verify its superiority.

Haifeng Yang, Chuanxing Geng, Pong C. Yuen et al.

In open-set recognition, existing methods generally learn statically fixed decision boundaries using known classes to reject unknown classes. Though they have achieved promising results, such decision boundaries are evidently insufficient for universal unknown classes in dynamic and open scenarios as they can potentially appear at any position in the feature space. Moreover, these methods just simply reject unknown class samples during testing without any effective utilization for them. In fact, such samples completely can constitute the true instantiated representation of the unknown classes to further enhance the model's performance. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel dynamic against dynamic idea, i.e., dynamic method against dynamic changing open-set world, where an open-set self-learning (OSSL) framework is correspondingly developed. OSSL starts with a good closed-set classifier trained by known classes and utilizes available test samples for model adaptation during testing, thus gaining the adaptability to changing data distributions. In particular, a novel self-matching module is designed for OSSL, which can achieve the adaptation in automatically identifying known class samples while rejecting unknown class samples which are further utilized to enhance the discriminability of the model as the instantiated representation of unknown classes. Our method establishes new performance milestones respectively in almost all standard and cross-data benchmarks.

Rui Shao, Pramuditha Perera, Pong C. Yuen et al.

Open-set recognition and adversarial defense study two key aspects of deep learning that are vital for real-world deployment. The objective of open-set recognition is to identify samples from open-set classes during testing, while adversarial defense aims to robustify the network against images perturbed by imperceptible adversarial noise. This paper demonstrates that open-set recognition systems are vulnerable to adversarial samples. Furthermore, this paper shows that adversarial defense mechanisms trained on known classes are unable to generalize well to open-set samples. Motivated by these observations, we emphasize the necessity of an Open-Set Adversarial Defense (OSAD) mechanism. This paper proposes an Open-Set Defense Network with Clean-Adversarial Mutual Learning (OSDN-CAML) as a solution to the OSAD problem. The proposed network designs an encoder with dual-attentive feature-denoising layers coupled with a classifier to learn a noise-free latent feature representation, which adaptively removes adversarial noise guided by channel and spatial-wise attentive filters. Several techniques are exploited to learn a noise-free and informative latent feature space with the aim of improving the performance of adversarial defense and open-set recognition. First, we incorporate a decoder to ensure that clean images can be well reconstructed from the obtained latent features. Then, self-supervision is used to ensure that the latent features are informative enough to carry out an auxiliary task. Finally, to exploit more complementary knowledge from clean image classification to facilitate feature denoising and search for a more generalized local minimum for open-set recognition, we further propose clean-adversarial mutual learning, where a peer network (classifying clean images) is further introduced to mutually learn with the classifier (classifying adversarial images).

Rui Shao, Bochao Zhang, Pong C. Yuen et al.

Face presentation attack detection (fPAD) plays a critical role in the modern face recognition pipeline. The generalization ability of face presentation attack detection models to unseen attacks has become a key issue for real-world deployment, which can be improved when models are trained with face images from different input distributions and different types of spoof attacks. In reality, due to legal and privacy issues, training data (both real face images and spoof images) are not allowed to be directly shared between different data sources. In this paper, to circumvent this challenge, we propose a Federated Test-Time Adaptive Face Presentation Attack Detection with Dual-Phase Privacy Preservation framework, with the aim of enhancing the generalization ability of fPAD models in both training and testing phase while preserving data privacy. In the training phase, the proposed framework exploits the federated learning technique, which simultaneously takes advantage of rich fPAD information available at different data sources by aggregating model updates from them without accessing their private data. To further boost the generalization ability, in the testing phase, we explore test-time adaptation by minimizing the entropy of fPAD model prediction on the testing data, which alleviates the domain gap between training and testing data and thus reduces the generalization error of a fPAD model. We introduce the experimental setting to evaluate the proposed framework and carry out extensive experiments to provide various insights about the proposed method for fPAD.

Rui Shao, Pramuditha Perera, Pong C. Yuen et al.

Face presentation attack detection plays a critical role in the modern face recognition pipeline. A face presentation attack detection model with good generalization can be obtained when it is trained with face images from different input distributions and different types of spoof attacks. In reality, training data (both real face images and spoof images) are not directly shared between data owners due to legal and privacy issues. In this paper, with the motivation of circumventing this challenge, we propose a Federated Face Presentation Attack Detection (FedPAD) framework that simultaneously takes advantage of rich fPAD information available at different data owners while preserving data privacy. In the proposed framework, each data center locally trains its own fPAD model. A server learns a global fPAD model by iteratively aggregating model updates from all data centers without accessing private data in each of them. To equip the aggregated fPAD model in the server with better generalization ability to unseen attacks from users, following the basic idea of FedPAD, we further propose a Federated Generalized Face Presentation Attack Detection (FedGPAD) framework. A federated domain disentanglement strategy is introduced in FedGPAD, which treats each data center as one domain and decomposes the fPAD model into domain-invariant and domain-specific parts in each data center. Two parts disentangle the domain-invariant and domain-specific features from images in each local data center, respectively. A server learns a global fPAD model by only aggregating domain-invariant parts of the fPAD models from data centers and thus a more generalized fPAD model can be aggregated in server. We introduce the experimental setting to evaluate the proposed FedPAD and FedGPAD frameworks and carry out extensive experiments to provide various insights about federated learning for fPAD.

Rui Shao, Pramuditha Perera, Pong C. Yuen et al.

Face presentation attack detection (fPAD) plays a critical role in the modern face recognition pipeline. A face presentation attack detection model with good generalization can be obtained when it is trained with face images from different input distributions and different types of spoof attacks. In reality, training data (both real face images and spoof images) are not directly shared between data owners due to legal and privacy issues. In this paper, with the motivation of circumventing this challenge, we propose Federated Face Presentation Attack Detection (FedPAD) framework. FedPAD simultaneously takes advantage of rich fPAD information available at different data owners while preserving data privacy. In the proposed framework, each data owner (referred to as \textit{data centers}) locally trains its own fPAD model. A server learns a global fPAD model by iteratively aggregating model updates from all data centers without accessing private data in each of them. Once the learned global model converges, it is used for fPAD inference. We introduce the experimental setting to evaluate the proposed FedPAD framework and carry out extensive experiments to provide various insights about federated learning for fPAD.

Rui Shao, Xiangyuan Lan, Pong C. Yuen

Face presentation attacks have become an increasingly critical concern when face recognition is widely applied. Many face anti-spoofing methods have been proposed, but most of them ignore the generalization ability to unseen attacks. To overcome the limitation, this work casts face anti-spoofing as a domain generalization (DG) problem, and attempts to address this problem by developing a new meta-learning framework called Regularized Fine-grained Meta-learning. To let our face anti-spoofing model generalize well to unseen attacks, the proposed framework trains our model to perform well in the simulated domain shift scenarios, which is achieved by finding generalized learning directions in the meta-learning process. Specifically, the proposed framework incorporates the domain knowledge of face anti-spoofing as the regularization so that meta-learning is conducted in the feature space regularized by the supervision of domain knowledge. This enables our model more likely to find generalized learning directions with the regularized meta-learning for face anti-spoofing task. Besides, to further enhance the generalization ability of our model, the proposed framework adopts a fine-grained learning strategy that simultaneously conducts meta-learning in a variety of domain shift scenarios in each iteration. Extensive experiments on four public datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Mang Ye, Xu Zhang, Pong C. Yuen et al.

This paper studies the unsupervised embedding learning problem, which requires an effective similarity measurement between samples in low-dimensional embedding space. Motivated by the positive concentrated and negative separated properties observed from category-wise supervised learning, we propose to utilize the instance-wise supervision to approximate these properties, which aims at learning data augmentation invariant and instance spread-out features. To achieve this goal, we propose a novel instance based softmax embedding method, which directly optimizes the `real' instance features on top of the softmax function. It achieves significantly faster learning speed and higher accuracy than all existing methods. The proposed method performs well for both seen and unseen testing categories with cosine similarity. It also achieves competitive performance even without pre-trained network over samples from fine-grained categories.

Guangcan Mai, Kai Cao, Pong C. Yuen et al.

State-of-the-art face recognition systems are based on deep (convolutional) neural networks. Therefore, it is imperative to determine to what extent face templates derived from deep networks can be inverted to obtain the original face image. In this paper, we study the vulnerabilities of a state-of-the-art face recognition system based on template reconstruction attack. We propose a neighborly de-convolutional neural network (\textit{NbNet}) to reconstruct face images from their deep templates. In our experiments, we assumed that no knowledge about the target subject and the deep network are available. To train the \textit{NbNet} reconstruction models, we augmented two benchmark face datasets (VGG-Face and Multi-PIE) with a large collection of images synthesized using a face generator. The proposed reconstruction was evaluated using type-I (comparing the reconstructed images against the original face images used to generate the deep template) and type-II (comparing the reconstructed images against a different face image of the same subject) attacks. Given the images reconstructed from \textit{NbNets}, we show that for verification, we achieve TAR of 95.20\% (58.05\%) on LFW under type-I (type-II) attacks @ FAR of 0.1\%. Besides, 96.58\% (92.84\%) of the images reconstruction from templates of partition \textit{fa} (\textit{fb}) can be identified from partition \textit{fa} in color FERET. Our study demonstrates the need to secure deep templates in face recognition systems.

Ranch Y. Q. Lai, Pong C. Yuen

We propose a Projected Proximal Point Algorithm (ProPPA) for solving a class of optimization problems. The algorithm iteratively computes the proximal point of the last estimated solution projected into an affine space which itself is parallel and approaching to the feasible set. We provide convergence analysis theoretically supporting the general algorithm, and then apply it for solving $\ell_1$-minimization problems and the matrix completion problem. These problems arise in many applications including machine learning, image and signal processing. We compare our algorithm with the existing state-of-the-art algorithms. Experimental results on solving these problems show that our algorithm is very efficient and competitive.

Ranch Y. Q. Lai, Pong C. Yuen, K. W. Lee et al.

Character posing is of interest in computer animation. It is difficult due to its dependence on inverse kinematics (IK) techniques and articulate property of human characters . To solve the IK problem, classical methods that rely on numerical solutions often suffer from the under-determination problem and can not guarantee naturalness. Existing data-driven methods address this problem by learning from motion capture data. When facing a large variety of poses however, these methods may not be able to capture the pose styles or be applicable in real-time environment. Inspired from the low-rank motion de-noising and completion model in \cite{lai2011motion}, we propose a novel model for character posing based on sparse coding. Unlike conventional approaches, our model directly captures the pose styles in Euclidean space to provide intuitive training error measurements and facilitate pose synthesis. A pose dictionary is learned in training stage and based on it natural poses are synthesized to satisfy users' constraints . We compare our model with existing models for tasks of pose de-noising and completion. Experiments show our model obtains lower de-noising and completion error. We also provide User Interface(UI) examples illustrating that our model is effective for interactive character posing.