Yonghao Dang

Shaojie Zhang, Jianqin Yin, Yonghao Dang et al.

Graph convolution networks (GCNs) have achieved remarkable performance in skeleton-based action recognition. However, previous GCN-based methods rely on elaborate human priors excessively and construct complex feature aggregation mechanisms, which limits the generalizability and effectiveness of networks. To solve these problems, we propose a novel Spatial Topology Gating Unit (STGU), an MLP-based variant without extra priors, to capture the co-occurrence topology features that encode the spatial dependency across all joints. In STGU, to learn the point-wise topology features, a new gate-based feature interaction mechanism is introduced to activate the features point-to-point by the attention map generated from the input sample. Based on the STGU, we propose the first MLP-based model, SiT-MLP, for skeleton-based action recognition in this work. Compared with previous methods on three large-scale datasets, SiT-MLP achieves competitive performance. In addition, SiT-MLP reduces the parameters significantly with favorable results. The code will be available at https://github.com/BUPTSJZhang/SiT?MLP.

Yuanyuan Jiang, Jianqin Yin, Yonghao Dang

Audio-visual event (AVE) localization has attracted much attention in recent years. Most existing methods are often limited to independently encoding and classifying each video segment separated from the full video (which can be regarded as the segment-level representations of events). However, they ignore the semantic consistency of the event within the same full video (which can be considered as the video-level representations of events). In contrast to existing methods, we propose a novel video-level semantic consistency guidance network for the AVE localization task. Specifically, we propose an event semantic consistency modeling (ESCM) module to explore video-level semantic information for semantic consistency modeling. It consists of two components: a cross-modal event representation extractor (CERE) and an intra-modal semantic consistency enhancer (ISCE). CERE is proposed to obtain the event semantic information at the video level. Furthermore, ISCE takes video-level event semantics as prior knowledge to guide the model to focus on the semantic continuity of an event within each modality. Moreover, we propose a new negative pair filter loss to encourage the network to filter out the irrelevant segment pairs and a new smooth loss to further increase the gap between different categories of events in the weakly-supervised setting. We perform extensive experiments on the public AVE dataset and outperform the state-of-the-art methods in both fully- and weakly-supervised settings, thus verifying the effectiveness of our method.The code is available at https://github.com/Bravo5542/VSCG.

Yonghao Dang, Jianqin Yin, Shaojie Zhang et al.

Estimating human poses from videos is critical in human-computer interaction. Joints cooperate rather than move independently during human movement. There are both spatial and temporal correlations between joints. Despite the positive results of previous approaches, most focus on modeling the spatial correlation between joints while only straightforwardly integrating features along the temporal dimension, ignoring the temporal correlation between joints. In this work, we propose a plug-and-play kinematics modeling module (KMM) to explicitly model temporal correlations between joints across different frames by calculating their temporal similarity. In this way, KMM can capture motion cues of the current joint relative to all joints in different time. Besides, we formulate video-based human pose estimation as a Markov Decision Process and design a novel kinematics modeling network (KIMNet) to simulate the Markov Chain, allowing KIMNet to locate joints recursively. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on two challenging benchmarks. In particular, KIMNet shows robustness to the occlusion. The code will be released at https://github.com/YHDang/KIMNet.

Meng Chen, Jiawei Tu, Chao Qi et al.

The significant advancements in embodied vision navigation have raised concerns about its susceptibility to adversarial attacks exploiting deep neural networks. Investigating the adversarial robustness of embodied vision navigation is crucial, especially given the threat of 3D physical attacks that could pose risks to human safety. However, existing attack methods for embodied vision navigation often lack physical feasibility due to challenges in transferring digital perturbations into the physical world. Moreover, current physical attacks for object detection struggle to achieve both multi-view effectiveness and visual naturalness in navigation scenarios. To address this, we propose a practical attack method for embodied navigation by attaching adversarial patches to objects, where both opacity and textures are learnable. Specifically, to ensure effectiveness across varying viewpoints, we employ a multi-view optimization strategy based on object-aware sampling, which optimizes the patch's texture based on feedback from the vision-based perception model used in navigation. To make the patch inconspicuous to human observers, we introduce a two-stage opacity optimization mechanism, in which opacity is fine-tuned after texture optimization. Experimental results demonstrate that our adversarial patches decrease the navigation success rate by an average of 22.39%, outperforming previous methods in practicality, effectiveness, and naturalness. Code is available at: https://github.com/chen37058/Physical-Attacks-in-Embodied-Nav

Jiajun Fu, Yonghao Dang, Ruoqi Yin et al.

This technical report describes our first-place solution to the pose estimation challenge at ECCV 2022 Visual Perception for Navigation in Human Environments Workshop. In this challenge, we aim to estimate human poses from in-the-wild stitched panoramic images. Our method is built based on Faster R-CNN for human detection, and HRNet for human pose estimation. We describe technical details for the JRDB-Pose dataset, together with some experimental results. In the competition, we achieved 0.303 $\text{OSPA}_{\text{IOU}}$ and 64.047\% $\text{AP}_{\text{0.5}}$ on the test set of JRDB-Pose.

Yonghao Dang, Jianqin Yin, Liyuan Liu et al.

Multi-person pose estimation (MPPE) presents a formidable yet crucial challenge in computer vision. Most existing methods predominantly concentrate on isolated interaction either between instances or joints, which is inadequate for scenarios demanding concurrent localization of both instances and joints. This paper introduces a novel CNN-based single-stage method, named Dual-path Hierarchical Relation Network (DHRNet), to extract instance-to-joint and joint-to-instance interactions concurrently. Specifically, we design a dual-path interaction modeling module (DIM) that strategically organizes cross-instance and cross-joint interaction modeling modules in two complementary orders, enriching interaction information by integrating merits from different correlation modeling branches. Notably, DHRNet excels in joint localization by leveraging information from other instances and joints. Extensive evaluations on challenging datasets, including COCO, CrowdPose, and OCHuman datasets, showcase DHRNet's state-of-the-art performance. The code will be released at https://github.com/YHDang/dhrnet-multi-pose-estimation.

Guoliang Xu, Jianqin Yin, Feng Zhou et al.

Previous methods usually only extract the image modality's information to recognize group activity. However, mining image information is approaching saturation, making it difficult to extract richer information. Therefore, extracting complementary information from other modalities to supplement image information has become increasingly important. In fact, action labels provide clear text information to express the action's semantics, which existing methods often overlook. Thus, we propose ActivityCLIP, a plug-and-play method for mining the text information contained in the action labels to supplement the image information for enhancing group activity recognition. ActivityCLIP consists of text and image branches, where the text branch is plugged into the image branch (The off-the-shelf image-based method). The text branch includes Image2Text and relation modeling modules. Specifically, we propose the knowledge transfer module, Image2Text, which adapts image information into text information extracted by CLIP via knowledge distillation. Further, to keep our method convenient, we add fewer trainable parameters based on the relation module of the image branch to model interaction relation in the text branch. To show our method's generality, we replicate three representative methods by ActivityCLIP, which adds only limited trainable parameters, achieving favorable performance improvements for each method. We also conduct extensive ablation studies and compare our method with state-of-the-art methods to demonstrate the effectiveness of ActivityCLIP.

Chengxu Duan, Zhicheng Zhang, Xiaoli Liu et al.

Human motion prediction has achieved a brilliant performance with the help of convolution-based neural networks. However, currently, there is no work evaluating the potential risk in human motion prediction when facing adversarial attacks. The adversarial attack will encounter problems against human motion prediction in naturalness and data scale. To solve the problems above, we propose a new adversarial attack method that generates the worst-case perturbation by maximizing the human motion predictor's prediction error with physical constraints. Specifically, we introduce a novel adaptable scheme that facilitates the attack to suit the scale of the target pose and two physical constraints to enhance the naturalness of the adversarial example. The evaluating experiments on three datasets show that the prediction errors of all target models are enlarged significantly, which means current convolution-based human motion prediction models are vulnerable to the proposed attack. Based on the experimental results, we provide insights on how to enhance the adversarial robustness of the human motion predictor and how to improve the adversarial attack against human motion prediction.

Zhicheng Zhang, Xueyao Sun, Yonghao Dang et al.

Human Pose Estimation (HPE) plays a crucial role in computer vision applications. However, it is difficult to deploy state-of-the-art models on resouce-limited devices due to the high computational costs of the networks. In this work, a binary human pose estimator named BiHRNet(Binary HRNet) is proposed, whose weights and activations are expressed as $\pm$1. BiHRNet retains the keypoint extraction ability of HRNet, while using fewer computing resources by adapting binary neural network (BNN). In order to reduce the accuracy drop caused by network binarization, two categories of techniques are proposed in this work. For optimizing the training process for binary pose estimator, we propose a new loss function combining KL divergence loss with AWing loss, which makes the binary network obtain more comprehensive output distribution from its real-valued counterpart to reduce information loss caused by binarization. For designing more binarization-friendly structures, we propose a new information reconstruction bottleneck called IR Bottleneck to retain more information in the initial stage of the network. In addition, we also propose a multi-scale basic block called MS-Block for information retention. Our work has less computation cost with few precision drop. Experimental results demonstrate that BiHRNet achieves a PCKh of 87.9 on the MPII dataset, which outperforms all binary pose estimation networks. On the challenging of COCO dataset, the proposed method enables the binary neural network to achieve 70.8 mAP, which is better than most tested lightweight full-precision networks.

Huilai Li, Yonghao Dang, Ying Xing et al.

Dense audio-visual event localization (DAVE) aims to identify event categories and locate the temporal boundaries in untrimmed videos. Most studies only employ event-related semantic constraints on the final outputs, lacking cross-modal semantic bridging in intermediate layers. This causes modality semantic gap for further fusion, making it difficult to distinguish between event-related content and irrelevant background content. Moreover, they rarely consider the correlations between events, which limits the model to infer concurrent events among complex scenarios. In this paper, we incorporate multi-stage semantic guidance and multi-event relationship modeling, which respectively enable hierarchical semantic understanding of audio-visual events and adaptive extraction of event dependencies, thereby better focusing on event-related information. Specifically, our eventaware semantic guided network (ESG-Net) includes a early semantics interaction (ESI) module and a mixture of dependency experts (MoDE) module. ESI applys multi-stage semantic guidance to explicitly constrain the model in learning semantic information through multi-modal early fusion and several classification loss functions, ensuring hierarchical understanding of event-related content. MoDE promotes the extraction of multi-event dependencies through multiple serial mixture of experts with adaptive weight allocation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly surpasses the state-of-the-art methods, while greatly reducing parameters and computational load. Our code will be released on https://github.com/uchiha99999/ESG-Net.

Shaojie Zhang, Jianqin Yin, Yonghao Dang

Skeleton-based action recognition is a central task in computer vision and human-robot interaction. However, most previous methods suffer from overlooking the explicit exploitation of the latent data distributions (i.e., the intra-class variations and inter-class relations), thereby leading to confusion about ambiguous samples and sub-optimum solutions of the skeleton encoders. To mitigate this, we propose a Contrastive Spatiotemporal Representation Enhancement (CSRE) framework to obtain more discriminative representations from the sequences, which can be incorporated into various previous skeleton encoders and can be removed when testing. Specifically, we decompose the representation into spatial- and temporal-specific features to explore fine-grained motion patterns along the corresponding dimensions. Furthermore, to explicitly exploit the latent data distributions, we employ the attentive features to contrastive learning, which models the cross-sequence semantic relations by pulling together the features from the positive pairs and pushing away the negative pairs. Extensive experiments show that CSRE with five various skeleton encoders (HCN, 2S-AGCN, CTR-GCN, Hyperformer, and BlockGCN) achieves solid improvements on five benchmarks. The code will be released at https://github.com/zhshj0110/CSRE.

Yonghao Dang, Jianqin Yin, Shaojie Zhang

Video-based human pose estimation (VHPE) is a vital yet challenging task. While deep learning methods have made significant progress for the VHPE, most approaches to this task implicitly model the long-range interaction between joints by enlarging the receptive field of the convolution. Unlike prior methods, we design a lightweight and plug-and-play joint relation extractor (JRE) to model the associative relationship between joints explicitly and automatically. The JRE takes the pseudo heatmaps of joints as input and calculates the similarity between pseudo heatmaps. In this way, the JRE flexibly learns the relationship between any two joints, allowing it to learn the rich spatial configuration of human poses. Moreover, the JRE can infer invisible joints according to the relationship between joints, which is beneficial for the model to locate occluded joints. Then, combined with temporal semantic continuity modeling, we propose a Relation-based Pose Semantics Transfer Network (RPSTN) for video-based human pose estimation. Specifically, to capture the temporal dynamics of poses, the pose semantic information of the current frame is transferred to the next with a joint relation guided pose semantics propagator (JRPSP). The proposed model can transfer the pose semantic features from the non-occluded frame to the occluded frame, making our method robust to the occlusion. Furthermore, the proposed JRE module is also suitable for image-based human pose estimation. The proposed RPSTN achieves state-of-the-art results on the video-based Penn Action dataset, Sub-JHMDB dataset, and PoseTrack2018 dataset. Moreover, the proposed JRE improves the performance of backbones on the image-based COCO2017 dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/YHDang/pose-estimation.

Xinyang Tong, Pengxiang Ding, Yiguo Fan et al.

This paper addresses the inherent inference latency challenges associated with deploying multimodal large language models (MLLM) in quadruped vision-language-action (QUAR-VLA) tasks. Our investigation reveals that conventional parameter reduction techniques ultimately impair the performance of the language foundation model during the action instruction tuning phase, making them unsuitable for this purpose. We introduce a novel latency-free quadruped MLLM model, dubbed QUART-Online, designed to enhance inference efficiency without degrading the performance of the language foundation model. By incorporating Action Chunk Discretization (ACD), we compress the original action representation space, mapping continuous action values onto a smaller set of discrete representative vectors while preserving critical information. Subsequently, we fine-tune the MLLM to integrate vision, language, and compressed actions into a unified semantic space. Experimental results demonstrate that QUART-Online operates in tandem with the existing MLLM system, achieving real-time inference in sync with the underlying controller frequency, significantly boosting the success rate across various tasks by 65%. Our project page is https://quart-online.github.io.

Yonghao Dang, Liyuan Liu, Hui Kang et al.

Real-time 2D keypoint detection plays an essential role in computer vision. Although CNN-based and Transformer-based methods have achieved breakthrough progress, they often fail to deliver superior performance and real-time speed. This paper introduces MamKPD, the first efficient yet effective mamba-based pose estimation framework for 2D keypoint detection. The conventional Mamba module exhibits limited information interaction between patches. To address this, we propose a lightweight contextual modeling module (CMM) that uses depth-wise convolutions to model inter-patch dependencies and linear layers to distill the pose cues within each patch. Subsequently, by combining Mamba for global modeling across all patches, MamKPD effectively extracts instances' pose information. We conduct extensive experiments on human and animal pose estimation datasets to validate the effectiveness of MamKPD. Our MamKPD-L achieves 77.3% AP on the COCO dataset with 1492 FPS on an NVIDIA GTX 4090 GPU. Moreover, MamKPD achieves state-of-the-art results on the MPII dataset and competitive results on the AP-10K dataset while saving 85% of the parameters compared to ViTPose. Our project page is available at https://mamkpd.github.io/.

Wei Wei, Shaojie Zhang, Yonghao Dang et al.

Human action recognition is a crucial task for intelligent robotics, particularly within the context of human-robot collaboration research. In self-supervised skeleton-based action recognition, the mask-based reconstruction paradigm learns the spatial structure and motion patterns of the skeleton by masking joints and reconstructing the target from unlabeled data. However, existing methods focus on a limited set of joints and low-order motion patterns, limiting the model's ability to understand complex motion patterns. To address this issue, we introduce MaskSem, a novel semantic-guided masking method for learning 3D hybrid high-order motion representations. This novel framework leverages Grad-CAM based on relative motion to guide the masking of joints, which can be represented as the most semantically rich temporal orgions. The semantic-guided masking process can encourage the model to explore more discriminative features. Furthermore, we propose using hybrid high-order motion as the reconstruction target, enabling the model to learn multi-order motion patterns. Specifically, low-order motion velocity and high-order motion acceleration are used together as the reconstruction target. This approach offers a more comprehensive description of the dynamic motion process, enhancing the model's understanding of motion patterns. Experiments on the NTU60, NTU120, and PKU-MMD datasets show that MaskSem, combined with a vanilla transformer, improves skeleton-based action recognition, making it more suitable for applications in human-robot interaction.

Yixun Zhang, Lizhi Wang, Junjun Zhao et al.

Camera-based object detection systems play a vital role in autonomous driving, yet they remain vulnerable to adversarial threats in real-world environments. Existing 2D and 3D physical attacks, due to their focus on texture optimization, often struggle to balance physical realism and attack robustness. In this work, we propose 3D Gaussian-based Adversarial Attack (3DGAA), a novel adversarial object generation framework that leverages the full 14-dimensional parameterization of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) to jointly optimize geometry and appearance in physically realizable ways. Unlike prior works that rely on patches or texture optimization, 3DGAA jointly perturbs both geometric attributes (shape, scale, rotation) and appearance attributes (color, opacity) to produce physically realistic and transferable adversarial objects. We further introduce a physical filtering module that filters outliers to preserve geometric fidelity, and a physical augmentation module that simulates complex physical scenarios to enhance attack generalization under real-world conditions. We evaluate 3DGAA on both virtual benchmarks and physical-world setups using miniature vehicle models. Experimental results show that 3DGAA achieves to reduce the detection mAP from 87.21\% to 7.38\%, significantly outperforming existing 3D physical attacks. Moreover, our method maintains high transferability across different physical conditions, demonstrating a new state-of-the-art in physically realizable adversarial attacks.

Jianqin Yin, Yanchun Wu, Huaping Liu et al.

Action repetition counting is to estimate the occurrence times of the repetitive motion in one action, which is a relatively new, important but challenging measurement problem. To solve this problem, we propose a new method superior to the traditional ways in two aspects, without preprocessing and applicable for arbitrary periodicity actions. Without preprocessing, the proposed model makes our method convenient for real applications; processing the arbitrary periodicity action makes our model more suitable for the actual circumstance. In terms of methodology, firstly, we analyze the movement patterns of the repetitive actions based on the spatial and temporal features of actions extracted by deep ConvNets; Secondly, the Principal Component Analysis algorithm is used to generate the intuitive periodic information from the chaotic high-dimensional deep features; Thirdly, the periodicity is mined based on the high-energy rule using Fourier transform; Finally, the inverse Fourier transform with a multi-stage threshold filter is proposed to improve the quality of the mined periodicity, and peak detection is introduced to finish the repetition counting. Our work features two-fold: 1) An important insight that deep features extracted for action recognition can well model the self-similarity periodicity of the repetitive action is presented. 2) A high-energy based periodicity mining rule using deep features is presented, which can process arbitrary actions without preprocessing. Experimental results show that our method achieves comparable results on the public datasets YT Segments and QUVA.

Yonghao Dang, Fuxing Yang, Jianqin Yin

We propose in this paper a deep-wide network (DWnet) which combines the deep structure with the broad learning system (BLS) to recognize actions. Compared with the deep structure, the novel model saves lots of testing time and almost achieves real-time testing. Furthermore, the DWnet can capture better features than broad learning system can. In terms of methodology, we use pruned hierarchical co-occurrence network (PruHCN) to learn local and global spatial-temporal features. To obtain sufficient global information, BLS is used to expand features extracted by PruHCN. Experiments on two common skeletal datasets demonstrate the advantage of the proposed model on testing time and the effectiveness of the novel model to recognize the action.