Shifeng Zhang

Ning Kang, Shanzhao Qiu, Shifeng Zhang et al.

Generative model based image lossless compression algorithms have seen a great success in improving compression ratio. However, the throughput for most of them is less than 1 MB/s even with the most advanced AI accelerated chips, preventing them from most real-world applications, which often require 100 MB/s. In this paper, we propose PILC, an end-to-end image lossless compression framework that achieves 200 MB/s for both compression and decompression with a single NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU, 10 times faster than the most efficient one before. To obtain this result, we first develop an AI codec that combines auto-regressive model and VQ-VAE which performs well in lightweight setting, then we design a low complexity entropy coder that works well with our codec. Experiments show that our framework compresses better than PNG by a margin of 30% in multiple datasets. We believe this is an important step to bring AI compression forward to commercial use.

Tom Ryder, Chen Zhang, Ning Kang et al.

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) have witnessed great success in performing the compression of image datasets. This success, made possible by the bits-back coding framework, has produced competitive compression performance across many benchmarks. However, despite this, VAE architectures are currently limited by a combination of coding practicalities and compression ratios. That is, not only do state-of-the-art methods, such as normalizing flows, often demonstrate out-performance, but the initial bits required in coding makes single and parallel image compression challenging. To remedy this, we introduce Split Hierarchical Variational Compression (SHVC). SHVC introduces two novelties. Firstly, we propose an efficient autoregressive prior, the autoregressive sub-pixel convolution, that allows a generalisation between per-pixel autoregressions and fully factorised probability models. Secondly, we define our coding framework, the autoregressive initial bits, that flexibly supports parallel coding and avoids -- for the first time -- many of the practicalities commonly associated with bits-back coding. In our experiments, we demonstrate SHVC is able to achieve state-of-the-art compression performance across full-resolution lossless image compression tasks, with up to 100x fewer model parameters than competing VAE approaches.

Bowen Li, Yongxin Yang, Steven McDonagh et al.

Image editing affords increased control over the aesthetics and content of generated images. Pre-existing works focus predominantly on text-based instructions to achieve desired image modifications, which limit edit precision and accuracy. In this work, we propose an inference-time editing optimisation, designed to extend beyond textual edits to accommodate multiple editing instruction types (e.g. spatial layout-based; pose, scribbles, edge maps). We propose to disentangle the editing task into two competing subtasks: successful local image modifications and global content consistency preservation, where subtasks are guided through two dedicated loss functions. By allowing to adjust the influence of each loss function, we build a flexible editing solution that can be adjusted to user preferences. We evaluate our method using text, pose and scribble edit conditions, and highlight our ability to achieve complex edits, through both qualitative and quantitative experiments.

Rui Zhu, Shifeng Zhang, Xiaobo Wang et al.

Current state-of-the-art object objectors are fine-tuned from the off-the-shelf networks pretrained on large-scale classification dataset ImageNet, which incurs some additional problems: 1) The classification and detection have different degrees of sensitivity to translation, resulting in the learning objective bias; 2) The architecture is limited by the classification network, leading to the inconvenience of modification. To cope with these problems, training detectors from scratch is a feasible solution. However, the detectors trained from scratch generally perform worse than the pretrained ones, even suffer from the convergence issue in training. In this paper, we explore to train object detectors from scratch robustly. By analysing the previous work on optimization landscape, we find that one of the overlooked points in current trained-from-scratch detector is the BatchNorm. Resorting to the stable and predictable gradient brought by BatchNorm, detectors can be trained from scratch stably while keeping the favourable performance independent to the network architecture. Taking this advantage, we are able to explore various types of networks for object detection, without suffering from the poor convergence. By extensive experiments and analyses on downsampling factor, we propose the Root-ResNet backbone network, which makes full use of the information from original images. Our ScratchDet achieves the state-of-the-art accuracy on PASCAL VOC 2007, 2012 and MS COCO among all the train-from-scratch detectors and even performs better than several one-stage pretrained methods. Codes will be made publicly available at https://github.com/KimSoybean/ScratchDet.

Shifeng Zhang, Longyin Wen, Xiao Bian et al.

For object detection, the two-stage approach (e.g., Faster R-CNN) has been achieving the highest accuracy, whereas the one-stage approach (e.g., SSD) has the advantage of high efficiency. To inherit the merits of both while overcoming their disadvantages, in this paper, we propose a novel single-shot based detector, called RefineDet, that achieves better accuracy than two-stage methods and maintains comparable efficiency of one-stage methods. RefineDet consists of two inter-connected modules, namely, the anchor refinement module and the object detection module. Specifically, the former aims to (1) filter out negative anchors to reduce search space for the classifier, and (2) coarsely adjust the locations and sizes of anchors to provide better initialization for the subsequent regressor. The latter module takes the refined anchors as the input from the former to further improve the regression and predict multi-class label. Meanwhile, we design a transfer connection block to transfer the features in the anchor refinement module to predict locations, sizes and class labels of objects in the object detection module. The multi-task loss function enables us to train the whole network in an end-to-end way. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC 2007, PASCAL VOC 2012, and MS COCO demonstrate that RefineDet achieves state-of-the-art detection accuracy with high efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/sfzhang15/RefineDet

Shifeng Zhang, Xiangyu Zhu, Zhen Lei et al.

Although tremendous strides have been made in face detection, one of the remaining open challenges is to achieve real-time speed on the CPU as well as maintain high performance, since effective models for face detection tend to be computationally prohibitive. To address this challenge, we propose a novel face detector, named FaceBoxes, with superior performance on both speed and accuracy. Specifically, our method has a lightweight yet powerful network structure that consists of the Rapidly Digested Convolutional Layers (RDCL) and the Multiple Scale Convolutional Layers (MSCL). The RDCL is designed to enable FaceBoxes to achieve real-time speed on the CPU. The MSCL aims at enriching the receptive fields and discretizing anchors over different layers to handle faces of various scales. Besides, we propose a new anchor densification strategy to make different types of anchors have the same density on the image, which significantly improves the recall rate of small faces. As a consequence, the proposed detector runs at 20 FPS on a single CPU core and 125 FPS using a GPU for VGA-resolution images. Moreover, the speed of FaceBoxes is invariant to the number of faces. We comprehensively evaluate this method and present state-of-the-art detection performance on several face detection benchmark datasets, including the AFW, PASCAL face, and FDDB. Code is available at https://github.com/sfzhang15/FaceBoxes

Shuchen Xue, Zhaoqiang Liu, Fei Chen et al.

Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have shown remarkable performance in high-resolution image synthesis, but their sampling efficiency is still to be desired due to the typically large number of sampling steps. Recent advancements in high-order numerical ODE solvers for DPMs have enabled the generation of high-quality images with much fewer sampling steps. While this is a significant development, most sampling methods still employ uniform time steps, which is not optimal when using a small number of steps. To address this issue, we propose a general framework for designing an optimization problem that seeks more appropriate time steps for a specific numerical ODE solver for DPMs. This optimization problem aims to minimize the distance between the ground-truth solution to the ODE and an approximate solution corresponding to the numerical solver. It can be efficiently solved using the constrained trust region method, taking less than $15$ seconds. Our extensive experiments on both unconditional and conditional sampling using pixel- and latent-space DPMs demonstrate that, when combined with the state-of-the-art sampling method UniPC, our optimized time steps significantly improve image generation performance in terms of FID scores for datasets such as CIFAR-10 and ImageNet, compared to using uniform time steps.

Weijian Luo, Tianyang Hu, Shifeng Zhang et al.

Due to the ease of training, ability to scale, and high sample quality, diffusion models (DMs) have become the preferred option for generative modeling, with numerous pre-trained models available for a wide variety of datasets. Containing intricate information about data distributions, pre-trained DMs are valuable assets for downstream applications. In this work, we consider learning from pre-trained DMs and transferring their knowledge to other generative models in a data-free fashion. Specifically, we propose a general framework called Diff-Instruct to instruct the training of arbitrary generative models as long as the generated samples are differentiable with respect to the model parameters. Our proposed Diff-Instruct is built on a rigorous mathematical foundation where the instruction process directly corresponds to minimizing a novel divergence we call Integral Kullback-Leibler (IKL) divergence. IKL is tailored for DMs by calculating the integral of the KL divergence along a diffusion process, which we show to be more robust in comparing distributions with misaligned supports. We also reveal non-trivial connections of our method to existing works such as DreamFusion, and generative adversarial training. To demonstrate the effectiveness and universality of Diff-Instruct, we consider two scenarios: distilling pre-trained diffusion models and refining existing GAN models. The experiments on distilling pre-trained diffusion models show that Diff-Instruct results in state-of-the-art single-step diffusion-based models. The experiments on refining GAN models show that the Diff-Instruct can consistently improve the pre-trained generators of GAN models across various settings.

Chen Zhang, Shifeng Zhang, Fabio Maria Carlucci et al.

Explicit deep generative models (DGMs), e.g., VAEs and Normalizing Flows, have shown to offer an effective data modelling alternative for lossless compression. However, DGMs themselves normally require large storage space and thus contaminate the advantage brought by accurate data density estimation. To eliminate the requirement of saving separate models for different target datasets, we propose a novel setting that starts from a pretrained deep generative model and compresses the data batches while adapting the model with a dynamical system for only one epoch. We formalise this setting as that of One-Shot Online Adaptation (OSOA) of DGMs for lossless compression and propose a vanilla algorithm under this setting. Experimental results show that vanilla OSOA can save significant time versus training bespoke models and space versus using one model for all targets. With the same adaptation step number or adaptation time, it is shown vanilla OSOA can exhibit better space efficiency, e.g., $47\%$ less space, than fine-tuning the pretrained model and saving the fine-tuned model. Moreover, we showcase the potential of OSOA and motivate more sophisticated OSOA algorithms by showing further space or time efficiency with multiple updates per batch and early stopping.

Shifeng Zhang, Chen Zhang, Ning Kang et al.

It is nontrivial to store rapidly growing big data nowadays, which demands high-performance lossless compression techniques. Likelihood-based generative models have witnessed their success on lossless compression, where flow based models are desirable in allowing exact data likelihood optimisation with bijective mappings. However, common continuous flows are in contradiction with the discreteness of coding schemes, which requires either 1) imposing strict constraints on flow models that degrades the performance or 2) coding numerous bijective mapping errors which reduces the efficiency. In this paper, we investigate volume preserving flows for lossless compression and show that a bijective mapping without error is possible. We propose Numerical Invertible Volume Preserving Flow (iVPF) which is derived from the general volume preserving flows. By introducing novel computation algorithms on flow models, an exact bijective mapping is achieved without any numerical error. We also propose a lossless compression algorithm based on iVPF. Experiments on various datasets show that the algorithm based on iVPF achieves state-of-the-art compression ratio over lightweight compression algorithms.

Hanwen Liang, Shifeng Zhang, Jiacheng Sun et al.

Recently, there has been a growing interest in automating the process of neural architecture design, and the Differentiable Architecture Search (DARTS) method makes the process available within a few GPU days. However, the performance of DARTS is often observed to collapse when the number of search epochs becomes large. Meanwhile, lots of "{\em skip-connect}s" are found in the selected architectures. In this paper, we claim that the cause of the collapse is that there exists overfitting in the optimization of DARTS. Therefore, we propose a simple and effective algorithm, named "DARTS+", to avoid the collapse and improve the original DARTS, by "early stopping" the search procedure when meeting a certain criterion. We also conduct comprehensive experiments on benchmark datasets and different search spaces and show the effectiveness of our DARTS+ algorithm, and DARTS+ achieves $2.32\%$ test error on CIFAR10, $14.87\%$ on CIFAR100, and $23.7\%$ on ImageNet. We further remark that the idea of "early stopping" is implicitly included in some existing DARTS variants by manually setting a small number of search epochs, while we give an {\em explicit} criterion for "early stopping".

Shifeng Zhang, Cheng Chi, Zhen Lei et al.

Face detection has achieved significant progress in recent years. However, high performance face detection still remains a very challenging problem, especially when there exists many tiny faces. In this paper, we present a single-shot refinement face detector namely RefineFace to achieve high performance. Specifically, it consists of five modules: Selective Two-step Regression (STR), Selective Two-step Classification (STC), Scale-aware Margin Loss (SML), Feature Supervision Module (FSM) and Receptive Field Enhancement (RFE). To enhance the regression ability for high location accuracy, STR coarsely adjusts locations and sizes of anchors from high level detection layers to provide better initialization for subsequent regressor. To improve the classification ability for high recall efficiency, STC first filters out most simple negatives from low level detection layers to reduce search space for subsequent classifier, then SML is applied to better distinguish faces from background at various scales and FSM is introduced to let the backbone learn more discriminative features for classification. Besides, RFE is presented to provide more diverse receptive field to better capture faces in some extreme poses. Extensive experiments conducted on WIDER FACE, AFW, PASCAL Face, FDDB, MAFA demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results and runs at $37.3$ FPS with ResNet-18 for VGA-resolution images.

Shifeng Zhang, Ajian Liu, Jun Wan et al.

Face anti-spoofing is essential to prevent face recognition systems from a security breach. Much of the progresses have been made by the availability of face anti-spoofing benchmark datasets in recent years. However, existing face anti-spoofing benchmarks have limited number of subjects ($\le\negmedspace170$) and modalities ($\leq\negmedspace2$), which hinder the further development of the academic community. To facilitate face anti-spoofing research, we introduce a large-scale multi-modal dataset, namely CASIA-SURF, which is the largest publicly available dataset for face anti-spoofing in terms of both subjects and modalities. Specifically, it consists of $1,000$ subjects with $21,000$ videos and each sample has $3$ modalities (i.e., RGB, Depth and IR). We also provide comprehensive evaluation metrics, diverse evaluation protocols, training/validation/testing subsets and a measurement tool, developing a new benchmark for face anti-spoofing. Moreover, we present a novel multi-modal multi-scale fusion method as a strong baseline, which performs feature re-weighting to select the more informative channel features while suppressing the less useful ones for each modality across different scales. Extensive experiments have been conducted on the proposed dataset to verify its significance and generalization capability. The dataset is available at https://sites.google.com/qq.com/face-anti-spoofing/welcome/challengecvpr2019?authuser=0

Chen Change Loy, Dahua Lin, Wanli Ouyang et al.

This paper presents a review of the 2018 WIDER Challenge on Face and Pedestrian. The challenge focuses on the problem of precise localization of human faces and bodies, and accurate association of identities. It comprises of three tracks: (i) WIDER Face which aims at soliciting new approaches to advance the state-of-the-art in face detection, (ii) WIDER Pedestrian which aims to find effective and efficient approaches to address the problem of pedestrian detection in unconstrained environments, and (iii) WIDER Person Search which presents an exciting challenge of searching persons across 192 movies. In total, 73 teams made valid submissions to the challenge tracks. We summarize the winning solutions for all three tracks. and present discussions on open problems and potential research directions in these topics.

Shifeng Zhang, Jianmin Li, Bo Zhang

With the rapid growth of various types of multimodal data, cross-modal deep hashing has received broad attention for solving cross-modal retrieval problems efficiently. Most cross-modal hashing methods follow the traditional supervised hashing framework in which the $O(n^2)$ data pairs and $O(n^3)$ data triplets are generated for training, but the training procedure is less efficient because the complexity is high for large-scale dataset. To address these issues, we propose a novel and efficient cross-modal hashing algorithm in which the unary loss is introduced. First of all, We introduce the Cross-Modal Unary Loss (CMUL) with $O(n)$ complexity to bridge the traditional triplet loss and classification-based unary loss. A more accurate bound of the triplet loss for structured multilabel data is also proposed in CMUL. Second, we propose the novel Joint Cluster Cross-Modal Hashing (JCCH) algorithm for efficient hash learning, in which the CMUL is involved. The resultant hashcodes form several clusters in which the hashcodes in the same cluster share similar semantic information, and the heterogeneity gap on different modalities is diminished by sharing the clusters. The proposed algorithm is able to be applied to various types of data, and experiments on large-scale datasets show that the proposed method is superior over or comparable with state-of-the-art cross-modal hashing methods, and training with the proposed method is more efficient than others.

Shifeng Zhang, Jianmin Li, Bo Zhang

Hashing method maps similar high-dimensional data to binary hashcodes with smaller hamming distance, and it has received broad attention due to its low storage cost and fast retrieval speed. Pairwise similarity is easily obtained and widely used for retrieval, and most supervised hashing algorithms are carefully designed for the pairwise supervisions. As labeling all data pairs is difficult, semi-supervised hashing is proposed which aims at learning efficient codes with limited labeled pairs and abundant unlabeled ones. Existing methods build graphs to capture the structure of dataset, but they are not working well for complex data as the graph is built based on the data representations and determining the representations of complex data is difficult. In this paper, we propose a novel teacher-student semi-supervised hashing framework in which the student is trained with the pairwise information produced by the teacher network. The network follows the smoothness assumption, which achieves consistent distances for similar data pairs so that the retrieval results are similar for neighborhood queries. Experiments on large-scale datasets show that the proposed method reaches impressive gain over the supervised baselines and is superior to state-of-the-art semi-supervised hashing methods.

Shifeng Zhang, Rui Zhu, Xiaobo Wang et al.

As a long-standing problem in computer vision, face detection has attracted much attention in recent decades for its practical applications. With the availability of face detection benchmark WIDER FACE dataset, much of the progresses have been made by various algorithms in recent years. Among them, the Selective Refinement Network (SRN) face detector introduces the two-step classification and regression operations selectively into an anchor-based face detector to reduce false positives and improve location accuracy simultaneously. Moreover, it designs a receptive field enhancement block to provide more diverse receptive field. In this report, to further improve the performance of SRN, we exploit some existing techniques via extensive experiments, including new data augmentation strategy, improved backbone network, MS COCO pretraining, decoupled classification module, segmentation branch and Squeeze-and-Excitation block. Some of these techniques bring performance improvements, while few of them do not well adapt to our baseline. As a consequence, we present an improved SRN face detector by combining these useful techniques together and obtain the best performance on widely used face detection benchmark WIDER FACE dataset.

Xiaobo Wang, Shuo Wang, Shifeng Zhang et al.

Face recognition has witnessed significant progresses due to the advances of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), the central challenge of which, is feature discrimination. To address it, one group tries to exploit mining-based strategies (\textit{e.g.}, hard example mining and focal loss) to focus on the informative examples. The other group devotes to designing margin-based loss functions (\textit{e.g.}, angular, additive and additive angular margins) to increase the feature margin from the perspective of ground truth class. Both of them have been well-verified to learn discriminative features. However, they suffer from either the ambiguity of hard examples or the lack of discriminative power of other classes. In this paper, we design a novel loss function, namely support vector guided softmax loss (SV-Softmax), which adaptively emphasizes the mis-classified points (support vectors) to guide the discriminative features learning. So the developed SV-Softmax loss is able to eliminate the ambiguity of hard examples as well as absorb the discriminative power of other classes, and thus results in more discrimiantive features. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to inherit the advantages of mining-based and margin-based losses into one framework. Experimental results on several benchmarks have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach over state-of-the-arts.

Shifeng Zhang, Xiaobo Wang, Ajian Liu et al.

Face anti-spoofing is essential to prevent face recognition systems from a security breach. Much of the progresses have been made by the availability of face anti-spoofing benchmark datasets in recent years. However, existing face anti-spoofing benchmarks have limited number of subjects ($\le\negmedspace170$) and modalities ($\leq\negmedspace2$), which hinder the further development of the academic community. To facilitate face anti-spoofing research, we introduce a large-scale multi-modal dataset, namely CASIA-SURF, which is the largest publicly available dataset for face anti-spoofing in terms of both subjects and visual modalities. Specifically, it consists of $1,000$ subjects with $21,000$ videos and each sample has $3$ modalities (i.e., RGB, Depth and IR). We also provide a measurement set, evaluation protocol and training/validation/testing subsets, developing a new benchmark for face anti-spoofing. Moreover, we present a new multi-modal fusion method as baseline, which performs feature re-weighting to select the more informative channel features while suppressing the less useful ones for each modal. Extensive experiments have been conducted on the proposed dataset to verify its significance and generalization capability. The dataset is available at https://sites.google.com/qq.com/chalearnfacespoofingattackdete

Cheng Chi, Shifeng Zhang, Junliang Xing et al.

High performance face detection remains a very challenging problem, especially when there exists many tiny faces. This paper presents a novel single-shot face detector, named Selective Refinement Network (SRN), which introduces novel two-step classification and regression operations selectively into an anchor-based face detector to reduce false positives and improve location accuracy simultaneously. In particular, the SRN consists of two modules: the Selective Two-step Classification (STC) module and the Selective Two-step Regression (STR) module. The STC aims to filter out most simple negative anchors from low level detection layers to reduce the search space for the subsequent classifier, while the STR is designed to coarsely adjust the locations and sizes of anchors from high level detection layers to provide better initialization for the subsequent regressor. Moreover, we design a Receptive Field Enhancement (RFE) block to provide more diverse receptive field, which helps to better capture faces in some extreme poses. As a consequence, the proposed SRN detector achieves state-of-the-art performance on all the widely used face detection benchmarks, including AFW, PASCAL face, FDDB, and WIDER FACE datasets. Codes will be released to facilitate further studies on the face detection problem.

Shifeng Zhang, Xiangyu Zhu, Zhen Lei et al.

This paper presents a real-time face detector, named Single Shot Scale-invariant Face Detector (S$^3$FD), which performs superiorly on various scales of faces with a single deep neural network, especially for small faces. Specifically, we try to solve the common problem that anchor-based detectors deteriorate dramatically as the objects become smaller. We make contributions in the following three aspects: 1) proposing a scale-equitable face detection framework to handle different scales of faces well. We tile anchors on a wide range of layers to ensure that all scales of faces have enough features for detection. Besides, we design anchor scales based on the effective receptive field and a proposed equal proportion interval principle; 2) improving the recall rate of small faces by a scale compensation anchor matching strategy; 3) reducing the false positive rate of small faces via a max-out background label. As a consequence, our method achieves state-of-the-art detection performance on all the common face detection benchmarks, including the AFW, PASCAL face, FDDB and WIDER FACE datasets, and can run at 36 FPS on a Nvidia Titan X (Pascal) for VGA-resolution images.

Shifeng Zhang, Jianmin Li, Jinma Guo et al.

Hashing method maps similar data to binary hashcodes with smaller hamming distance, and it has received a broad attention due to its low storage cost and fast retrieval speed. However, the existing limitations make the present algorithms difficult to deal with large-scale datasets: (1) discrete constraints are involved in the learning of the hash function; (2) pairwise or triplet similarity is adopted to generate efficient hashcodes, resulting both time and space complexity are greater than O(n^2). To address these issues, we propose a novel discrete supervised hash learning framework which can be scalable to large-scale datasets. First, the discrete learning procedure is decomposed into a binary classifier learning scheme and binary codes learning scheme, which makes the learning procedure more efficient. Second, we adopt the Asymmetric Low-rank Matrix Factorization and propose the Fast Clustering-based Batch Coordinate Descent method, such that the time and space complexity is reduced to O(n). The proposed framework also provides a flexible paradigm to incorporate with arbitrary hash function, including deep neural networks and kernel methods. Experiments on large-scale datasets demonstrate that the proposed method is superior or comparable with state-of-the-art hashing algorithms.