Chaoqun Wang

Jie Yang, Chaoqun Wang, Zhen Li et al.

This paper presents Scalable Semantic Transfer (SST), a novel training paradigm, to explore how to leverage the mutual benefits of the data from different label domains (i.e. various levels of label granularity) to train a powerful human parsing network. In practice, two common application scenarios are addressed, termed universal parsing and dedicated parsing, where the former aims to learn homogeneous human representations from multiple label domains and switch predictions by only using different segmentation heads, and the latter aims to learn a specific domain prediction while distilling the semantic knowledge from other domains. The proposed SST has the following appealing benefits: (1) it can capably serve as an effective training scheme to embed semantic associations of human body parts from multiple label domains into the human representation learning process; (2) it is an extensible semantic transfer framework without predetermining the overall relations of multiple label domains, which allows continuously adding human parsing datasets to promote the training. (3) the relevant modules are only used for auxiliary training and can be removed during inference, eliminating the extra reasoning cost. Experimental results demonstrate SST can effectively achieve promising universal human parsing performance as well as impressive improvements compared to its counterparts on three human parsing benchmarks (i.e., PASCAL-Person-Part, ATR, and CIHP). Code is available at https://github.com/yangjie-cv/SST.

Chaoqun Wang, Xuejin Chen, Shaobo Min et al.

Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (GZSL) targets recognizing new categories by learning transferable image representations. Existing methods find that, by aligning image representations with corresponding semantic labels, the semantic-aligned representations can be transferred to unseen categories. However, supervised by only seen category labels, the learned semantic knowledge is highly task-specific, which makes image representations biased towards seen categories. In this paper, we propose a novel Dual-Contrastive Embedding Network (DCEN) that simultaneously learns task-specific and task-independent knowledge via semantic alignment and instance discrimination. First, DCEN leverages task labels to cluster representations of the same semantic category by cross-modal contrastive learning and exploring semantic-visual complementarity. Besides task-specific knowledge, DCEN then introduces task-independent knowledge by attracting representations of different views of the same image and repelling representations of different images. Compared to high-level seen category supervision, this instance discrimination supervision encourages DCEN to capture low-level visual knowledge, which is less biased toward seen categories and alleviates the representation bias. Consequently, the task-specific and task-independent knowledge jointly make for transferable representations of DCEN, which obtains averaged 4.1% improvement on four public benchmarks.

Shaobo Min, Hantao Yao, Hongtao Xie et al.

Recent methods focus on learning a unified semantic-aligned visual representation to transfer knowledge between two domains, while ignoring the effect of semantic-free visual representation in alleviating the biased recognition problem. In this paper, we propose a novel Domain-aware Visual Bias Eliminating (DVBE) network that constructs two complementary visual representations, i.e., semantic-free and semantic-aligned, to treat seen and unseen domains separately. Specifically, we explore cross-attentive second-order visual statistics to compact the semantic-free representation, and design an adaptive margin Softmax to maximize inter-class divergences. Thus, the semantic-free representation becomes discriminative enough to not only predict seen class accurately but also filter out unseen images, i.e., domain detection, based on the predicted class entropy. For unseen images, we automatically search an optimal semantic-visual alignment architecture, rather than manual designs, to predict unseen classes. With accurate domain detection, the biased recognition problem towards the seen domain is significantly reduced. Experiments on five benchmarks for classification and segmentation show that DVBE outperforms existing methods by averaged 5.7% improvement.