Yang‐Chang Wu

Fan Yang, Yang Wu, Zheng Wang et al.

Although sketch-to-photo retrieval has a wide range of applications, it is costly to obtain paired and rich-labeled ground truth. Differently, photo retrieval data is easier to acquire. Therefore, previous works pre-train their models on rich-labeled photo retrieval data (i.e., source domain) and then fine-tune them on the limited-labeled sketch-to-photo retrieval data (i.e., target domain). However, without co-training source and target data, source domain knowledge might be forgotten during the fine-tuning process, while simply co-training them may cause negative transfer due to domain gaps. Moreover, identity label spaces of source data and target data are generally disjoint and therefore conventional category-level Domain Adaptation (DA) is not directly applicable. To address these issues, we propose an Instance-level Heterogeneous Domain Adaptation (IHDA) framework. We apply the fine-tuning strategy for identity label learning, aiming to transfer the instance-level knowledge in an inductive transfer manner. Meanwhile, labeled attributes from the source data are selected to form a shared label space for source and target domains. Guided by shared attributes, DA is utilized to bridge cross-dataset domain gaps and heterogeneous domain gaps, which transfers instance-level knowledge in a transductive transfer manner. Experiments show that our method has set a new state of the art on three sketch-to-photo image retrieval benchmarks without extra annotations, which opens the door to train more effective models on limited-labeled heterogeneous image retrieval tasks. Related codes are available at https://github.com/fandulu/IHDA.

Renjie Zhang, Yu Fang, Huaxin Song et al.

Cloth changing person re-identification(Re-ID) can work under more complicated scenarios with higher security than normal Re-ID and biometric techniques and is therefore extremely valuable in applications. Meanwhile, higher flexibility in appearance always leads to more similar-looking confusing images, which is the weakness of the widely used retrieval methods. In this work, we shed light on how to handle these similar images. Specifically, we propose a novel retrieval-verification framework. Given an image, the retrieval module can search for similar images quickly. Our proposed verification network will then compare the input image and the candidate images by contrasting those local details and give a similarity score. An innovative ranking strategy is also introduced to take a good balance between retrieval and verification results. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to show the effectiveness of our framework and its capability in improving the state-of-the-art methods remarkably on both synthetic and realistic datasets.

Haoxuan Qu, Qiuchi Xiang, Yujun Cai et al.

Unexploitable example generation aims to transform personal images into their unexploitable (unlearnable) versions before they are uploaded online, thereby preventing unauthorized exploitation of online personal images. Recently, this task has garnered significant research attention due to its critical relevance to personal data privacy. Yet, despite recent progress, existing methods for this task can still suffer from limited practical applicability, as they can fail to generate examples that are broadly unexploitable across different real-world computer vision tasks. To deal with this problem, in this work, we propose a novel Meta Cross-Task Unexploitable Example Generation (MCT-UEG) framework. At the core of our framework, to optimize the unexploitable example generator for effectively producing broadly unexploitable examples, we design a flat-minima-oriented meta training and testing scheme. Extensive experiments show the efficacy of our framework.

Bin Zhang, Yang Wu, Xiaojing Zhang et al.

In the current salient object detection network, the most popular method is using U-shape structure. However, the massive number of parameters leads to more consumption of computing and storage resources which are not feasible to deploy on the limited memory device. Some others shallow layer network will not maintain the same accuracy compared with U-shape structure and the deep network structure with more parameters will not converge to a global minimum loss with great speed. To overcome all of these disadvantages, we proposed a new deep convolution network architecture with three contributions: (1) using smaller convolution neural networks (CNNs) to compress the model in our improved salient object features compression and reinforcement extraction module (ISFCREM) to reduce parameters of the model. (2) introducing channel attention mechanism in ISFCREM to weigh different channels for improving the ability of feature representation. (3) applying a new optimizer to accumulate the long-term gradient information during training to adaptively tune the learning rate. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can compress the model to 1/3 of the original size nearly without losing the accuracy and converging faster and more smoothly on six widely used datasets of salient object detection compared with the others models. Our code is published in https://gitee.com/binzhangbinzhangbin/code-a-novel-attention-based-network-for-fast-salient-object-detection.git

Yang Wu, Shirui Feng, Guanbin Li et al.

An embodied task such as embodied question answering (EmbodiedQA), requires an agent to explore the environment and collect clues to answer a given question that related with specific objects in the scene. The solution of such task usually includes two stages, a navigator and a visual Q&A module. In this paper, we focus on the navigation and solve the problem of existing navigation algorithms lacking experience and common sense, which essentially results in a failure finding target when robot is spawn in unknown environments. Inspired by the human ability to think twice before moving and conceive several feasible paths to seek a goal in unfamiliar scenes, we present a route planning method named Path Estimation and Memory Recalling (PEMR) framework. PEMR includes a "looking ahead" process, \textit{i.e.} a visual feature extractor module that estimates feasible paths for gathering 3D navigational information, which is mimicking the human sense of direction. PEMR contains another process ``looking behind'' process that is a memory recall mechanism aims at fully leveraging past experience collected by the feature extractor. Last but not the least, to encourage the navigator to learn more accurate prior expert experience, we improve the original benchmark dataset and provide a family of evaluation metrics for diagnosing both navigation and question answering modules. We show strong experimental results of PEMR on the EmbodiedQA navigation task.