Xiaogang Xu

Xin Lai, Zhuotao Tian, Xiaogang Xu et al.

Unsupervised domain adaptation in semantic segmentation has been raised to alleviate the reliance on expensive pixel-wise annotations. It leverages a labeled source domain dataset as well as unlabeled target domain images to learn a segmentation network. In this paper, we observe two main issues of the existing domain-invariant learning framework. (1) Being distracted by the feature distribution alignment, the network cannot focus on the segmentation task. (2) Fitting source domain data well would compromise the target domain performance. To address these issues, we propose DecoupleNet that alleviates source domain overfitting and enables the final model to focus more on the segmentation task. Furthermore, we put forward Self-Discrimination (SD) and introduce an auxiliary classifier to learn more discriminative target domain features with pseudo labels. Finally, we propose Online Enhanced Self-Training (OEST) to contextually enhance the quality of pseudo labels in an online manner. Experiments show our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, and extensive ablation studies verify the effectiveness of each component. Code is available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/DecoupleNet.

Lihe Yang, Xiaogang Xu, Bingyi Kang et al.

Semantic segmentation has witnessed tremendous progress due to the proposal of various advanced network architectures. However, they are extremely hungry for delicate annotations to train, and the acquisition is laborious and unaffordable. Therefore, we present FreeMask in this work, which resorts to synthetic images from generative models to ease the burden of both data collection and annotation procedures. Concretely, we first synthesize abundant training images conditioned on the semantic masks provided by realistic datasets. This yields extra well-aligned image-mask training pairs for semantic segmentation models. We surprisingly observe that, solely trained with synthetic images, we already achieve comparable performance with real ones (e.g., 48.3 vs. 48.5 mIoU on ADE20K, and 49.3 vs. 50.5 on COCO-Stuff). Then, we investigate the role of synthetic images by joint training with real images, or pre-training for real images. Meantime, we design a robust filtering principle to suppress incorrectly synthesized regions. In addition, we propose to inequally treat different semantic masks to prioritize those harder ones and sample more corresponding synthetic images for them. As a result, either jointly trained or pre-trained with our filtered and re-sampled synthesized images, segmentation models can be greatly enhanced, e.g., from 48.7 to 52.0 on ADE20K. Code is available at https://github.com/LiheYoung/FreeMask.

Tao Hu, Xiaogang Xu, Shu Liu et al.

Synthesizing photo-realistic images from a point cloud is challenging because of the sparsity of point cloud representation. Recent Neural Radiance Fields and extensions are proposed to synthesize realistic images from 2D input. In this paper, we present Point2Pix as a novel point renderer to link the 3D sparse point clouds with 2D dense image pixels. Taking advantage of the point cloud 3D prior and NeRF rendering pipeline, our method can synthesize high-quality images from colored point clouds, generally for novel indoor scenes. To improve the efficiency of ray sampling, we propose point-guided sampling, which focuses on valid samples. Also, we present Point Encoding to build Multi-scale Radiance Fields that provide discriminative 3D point features. Finally, we propose Fusion Encoding to efficiently synthesize high-quality images. Extensive experiments on the ScanNet and ArkitScenes datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization.

Tao Hu, Xiaogang Xu, Ruihang Chu et al.

Existing learning-based methods for point cloud rendering adopt various 3D representations and feature querying mechanisms to alleviate the sparsity problem of point clouds. However, artifacts still appear in rendered images, due to the challenges in extracting continuous and discriminative 3D features from point clouds. In this paper, we present a dense while lightweight 3D representation, named TriVol, that can be combined with NeRF to render photo-realistic images from point clouds. Our TriVol consists of triple slim volumes, each of which is encoded from the point cloud. TriVol has two advantages. First, it fuses respective fields at different scales and thus extracts local and non-local features for discriminative representation. Second, since the volume size is greatly reduced, our 3D decoder can be efficiently inferred, allowing us to increase the resolution of the 3D space to render more point details. Extensive experiments on different benchmarks with varying kinds of scenes/objects demonstrate our framework's effectiveness compared with current approaches. Moreover, our framework has excellent generalization ability to render a category of scenes/objects without fine-tuning.

Xiaogang Xu, Ruixing Wang, Chi-Wing Fu et al.

Despite the quality improvement brought by the recent methods, video super-resolution (SR) is still very challenging, especially for videos that are low-light and noisy. The current best solution is to subsequently employ best models of video SR, denoising, and illumination enhancement, but doing so often lowers the image quality, due to the inconsistency between the models. This paper presents a new parametric representation called the Deep Parametric 3D Filters (DP3DF), which incorporates local spatiotemporal information to enable simultaneous denoising, illumination enhancement, and SR efficiently in a single encoder-and-decoder network. Also, a dynamic residual frame is jointly learned with the DP3DF via a shared backbone to further boost the SR quality. We performed extensive experiments, including a large-scale user study, to show our method's effectiveness. Our method consistently surpasses the best state-of-the-art methods on all the challenging real datasets with top PSNR and user ratings, yet having a very fast run time.

Xiaogang Xu, Hengshuang Zhao, Philip Torr et al.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to the black-box adversarial attack that is highly transferable. This threat comes from the distribution gap between adversarial and clean samples in feature space of the target DNNs. In this paper, we use Deep Generative Networks (DGNs) with a novel training mechanism to eliminate the distribution gap. The trained DGNs align the distribution of adversarial samples with clean ones for the target DNNs by translating pixel values. Different from previous work, we propose a more effective pixel level training constraint to make this achievable, thus enhancing robustness on adversarial samples. Further, a class-aware feature-level constraint is formulated for integrated distribution alignment. Our approach is general and applicable to multiple tasks, including image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection. We conduct extensive experiments on different datasets. Our strategy demonstrates its unique effectiveness and generality against black-box attacks.

Xiaogang Xu, Hengshuang Zhao

Existing automatic data augmentation (DA) methods either ignore updating DA's parameters according to the target model's state during training or adopt update strategies that are not effective enough. In this work, we design a novel data augmentation strategy called "Universal Adaptive Data Augmentation" (UADA). Different from existing methods, UADA would adaptively update DA's parameters according to the target model's gradient information during training: given a pre-defined set of DA operations, we randomly decide types and magnitudes of DA operations for every data batch during training, and adaptively update DA's parameters along the gradient direction of the loss concerning DA's parameters. In this way, UADA can increase the training loss of the target networks, and the target networks would learn features from harder samples to improve the generalization. Moreover, UADA is very general and can be utilized in numerous tasks, e.g., image classification, semantic segmentation and object detection. Extensive experiments with various models are conducted on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet, tiny-ImageNet, Cityscapes, and VOC07+12 to prove the significant performance improvements brought by UADA.

Xiaogang Xu, Yitong Yu, Nianjuan Jiang et al.

To facilitate video denoising research, we construct a compelling dataset, namely, "Practical Video Denoising Dataset" (PVDD), containing 200 noisy-clean dynamic video pairs in both sRGB and RAW format. Compared with existing datasets consisting of limited motion information, PVDD covers dynamic scenes with varying and natural motion. Different from datasets using primarily Gaussian or Poisson distributions to synthesize noise in the sRGB domain, PVDD synthesizes realistic noise from the RAW domain with a physically meaningful sensor noise model followed by ISP processing. Moreover, we also propose a new video denoising framework, called Recurrent Video Denoising Transformer (RVDT), which can achieve SOTA performance on PVDD and other current video denoising benchmarks. RVDT consists of both spatial and temporal transformer blocks to conduct denoising with long-range operations on the spatial dimension and long-term propagation on the temporal dimension. Especially, RVDT exploits the attention mechanism to implement the bi-directional feature propagation with both implicit and explicit temporal modeling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that 1) models trained on PVDD achieve superior denoising performance on many challenging real-world videos than on models trained on other existing datasets; 2) trained on the same dataset, our proposed RVDT can have better denoising performance than other types of networks.

Xin Yang, Xiaogang Xu, Yingcong Chen

The fidelity of Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) inversion is impeded by Out-Of-Domain (OOD) areas (e.g., background, accessories) in the image. Detecting the OOD areas beyond the generation ability of the pre-trained model and blending these regions with the input image can enhance fidelity. The "invertibility mask" figures out these OOD areas, and existing methods predict the mask with the reconstruction error. However, the estimated mask is usually inaccurate due to the influence of the reconstruction error in the In-Domain (ID) area. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that enhances the fidelity of human face inversion by designing a new module to decompose the input images to ID and OOD partitions with invertibility masks. Unlike previous works, our invertibility detector is simultaneously learned with a spatial alignment module. We iteratively align the generated features to the input geometry and reduce the reconstruction error in the ID regions. Thus, the OOD areas are more distinguishable and can be precisely predicted. Then, we improve the fidelity of our results by blending the OOD areas from the input image with the ID GAN inversion results. Our method produces photo-realistic results for real-world human face image inversion and manipulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method's superiority over existing methods in the quality of GAN inversion and attribute manipulation.

Shihurong Yao, Yizhan Huang, Xiaogang Xu

In the realm of Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE), existing research primarily focuses on enhancing images globally. However, many applications require local LLIE, where users are allowed to illuminate specific regions using an input mask, such as creating a protagonist stage or spotlight effect. However, this task has received limited attention currently. This paper aims to systematically define the requirements of local LLIE and proposes a novel strategy to convert current existing global LLIE methods into local versions. The image space is divided into three regions: Masked Area A be enlightened to achieve the desired lighting effects; Transition Area B is a smooth transition from the enlightened area (Area A) to the unchanged region (Area C). To achieve the task of local LLIE, we introduce Region-Aware Normalization for Local Enhancement, dubbed as RANLEN. RANLEN uses a dynamically designed mask-based normalization operation, which enhances an image in a spatially varying manner, ensuring that the enhancement results are consistent with the requirements specified by the input mask. Additionally, a set of region-aware loss terms is formulated to facilitate the learning of the local LLIE framework. Our strategy can be applied to existing global LLIE networks with varying structures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach can produce the desired lighting effects compared to global LLIE, all the while offering controllable local enhancement with various mask shapes.

Yunfan Lu, Xiaogang Xu, Pengteng Li et al.

Event cameras offering high dynamic range and low latency have emerged as disruptive technologies in imaging. Despite growing research on leveraging these benefits for different imaging tasks, a comprehensive study of recently advances and challenges are still lacking. This limits the broader understanding of how to utilize events in universal imaging applications. In this survey, we first introduce a physical model and the characteristics of different event sensors as the foundation. Following this, we highlight the advancement and interaction of image/video enhancement tasks with events. Additionally, we explore advanced tasks, which capture richer light information with events, \eg~light field estimation, multi-view generation, and photometric. Finally, we discuss new challenges and open questions offering a perspective for this rapidly evolving field. More continuously updated resources are at this link: https://github.com/yunfanLu/Awesome-Event-Imaging

Fan Yuan, Chi Qin, Xiaogang Xu et al.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown remarkable performance on many visual-language tasks. However, these models still suffer from multimodal hallucination, which means the generation of objects or content that violates the images. Many existing work detects hallucination by directly judging whether an object exists in an image, overlooking the association between the object and semantics. To address this issue, we propose Hierarchical Feedback Learning with Vision-enhanced Penalty Decoding (HELPD). This framework incorporates hallucination feedback at both object and sentence semantic levels. Remarkably, even with a marginal degree of training, this approach can alleviate over 15% of hallucination. Simultaneously, HELPD penalizes the output logits according to the image attention window to avoid being overly affected by generated text. HELPD can be seamlessly integrated with any LVLMs. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework yields favorable results across multiple hallucination benchmarks. It effectively mitigates hallucination for different LVLMs and concurrently improves their text generation quality.

Muzhi Zhu, Chengxiang Fan, Hao Chen et al.

Recently, large-scale language-image generative models have gained widespread attention and many works have utilized generated data from these models to further enhance the performance of perception tasks. However, not all generated data can positively impact downstream models, and these methods do not thoroughly explore how to better select and utilize generated data. On the other hand, there is still a lack of research oriented towards active learning on generated data. In this paper, we explore how to perform active learning specifically for generated data in the long-tailed instance segmentation task. Subsequently, we propose BSGAL, a new algorithm that online estimates the contribution of the generated data based on gradient cache. BSGAL can handle unlimited generated data and complex downstream segmentation tasks effectively. Experiments show that BSGAL outperforms the baseline approach and effectually improves the performance of long-tailed segmentation. Our code can be found at https://github.com/aim-uofa/DiverGen.

Lihe Yang, Bingyi Kang, Zilong Huang et al.

This work presents Depth Anything, a highly practical solution for robust monocular depth estimation. Without pursuing novel technical modules, we aim to build a simple yet powerful foundation model dealing with any images under any circumstances. To this end, we scale up the dataset by designing a data engine to collect and automatically annotate large-scale unlabeled data (~62M), which significantly enlarges the data coverage and thus is able to reduce the generalization error. We investigate two simple yet effective strategies that make data scaling-up promising. First, a more challenging optimization target is created by leveraging data augmentation tools. It compels the model to actively seek extra visual knowledge and acquire robust representations. Second, an auxiliary supervision is developed to enforce the model to inherit rich semantic priors from pre-trained encoders. We evaluate its zero-shot capabilities extensively, including six public datasets and randomly captured photos. It demonstrates impressive generalization ability. Further, through fine-tuning it with metric depth information from NYUv2 and KITTI, new SOTAs are set. Our better depth model also results in a better depth-conditioned ControlNet. Our models are released at https://github.com/LiheYoung/Depth-Anything.

Shengqian Zhu, Chengrong Yu, Qiang Wang et al.

Class incremental medical image segmentation (CIMIS) aims to preserve knowledge of previously learned classes while learning new ones without relying on old-class labels. However, existing methods 1) either adopt one-size-fits-all strategies that treat all spatial regions and feature channels equally, which may hinder the preservation of accurate old knowledge, 2) or focus solely on aligning local prototypes with global ones for old classes while overlooking their local representations in new data, leading to knowledge degradation. To mitigate the above issues, we propose Prototype-Guided Calibration Distillation (PGCD) and Dual-Aligned Prototype Distillation (DAPD) for CIMIS in this paper. Specifically, PGCD exploits prototype-to-feature similarity to calibrate class-specific distillation intensity in different spatial regions, effectively reinforcing reliable old knowledge and suppressing misleading information from old classes. Complementarily, DAPD aligns the local prototypes of old classes extracted from the current model with both global prototypes and local prototypes, further enhancing segmentation performance on old categories. Comprehensive evaluations on two widely used multi-organ segmentation benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods, highlighting its robustness and generalization capabilities.

Xiaogang Xu, Shu Kong, Tao Hu et al.

Pre-trained models with large-scale training data, such as CLIP and Stable Diffusion, have demonstrated remarkable performance in various high-level computer vision tasks such as image understanding and generation from language descriptions. Yet, their potential for low-level tasks such as image restoration remains relatively unexplored. In this paper, we explore such models to enhance image restoration. As off-the-shelf features (OSF) from pre-trained models do not directly serve image restoration, we propose to learn an additional lightweight module called Pre-Train-Guided Refinement Module (PTG-RM) to refine restoration results of a target restoration network with OSF. PTG-RM consists of two components, Pre-Train-Guided Spatial-Varying Enhancement (PTG-SVE), and Pre-Train-Guided Channel-Spatial Attention (PTG-CSA). PTG-SVE enables optimal short- and long-range neural operations, while PTG-CSA enhances spatial-channel attention for restoration-related learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PTG-RM, with its compact size ($<$1M parameters), effectively enhances restoration performance of various models across different tasks, including low-light enhancement, deraining, deblurring, and denoising.

Lichuan Ji, Yingqi Lin, Zhenhua Huang et al.

The development of AI-Generated Content (AIGC) has empowered the creation of remarkably realistic AI-generated videos, such as those involving Sora. However, the widespread adoption of these models raises concerns regarding potential misuse, including face video scams and copyright disputes. Addressing these concerns requires the development of robust tools capable of accurately determining video authenticity. The main challenges lie in the dataset and neural classifier for training. Current datasets lack a varied and comprehensive repository of real and generated content for effective discrimination. In this paper, we first introduce an extensive video dataset designed specifically for AI-Generated Video Detection (GenVidDet). It includes over 2.66 M instances of both real and generated videos, varying in categories, frames per second, resolutions, and lengths. The comprehensiveness of GenVidDet enables the training of a generalizable video detector. We also present the Dual-Branch 3D Transformer (DuB3D), an innovative and effective method for distinguishing between real and generated videos, enhanced by incorporating motion information alongside visual appearance. DuB3D utilizes a dual-branch architecture that adaptively leverages and fuses raw spatio-temporal data and optical flow. We systematically explore the critical factors affecting detection performance, achieving the optimal configuration for DuB3D. Trained on GenVidDet, DuB3D can distinguish between real and generated video content with 96.77% accuracy, and strong generalization capability even for unseen types.

Huiwen Wu, Xiaohan Li, Xiaogang Xu et al.

The development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly advanced various AI applications in commercial and scientific research fields, such as scientific literature summarization, writing assistance, and knowledge graph construction. However, a significant challenge is the high risk of hallucination during LLM inference, which can lead to security concerns like factual inaccuracies, inconsistent information, and fabricated content. To tackle this issue, it is essential to develop effective methods for reducing hallucination while maintaining the original capabilities of the LLM. This paper introduces a novel approach called Iterative Model-level Contrastive Learning (Iter-AHMCL) to address hallucination. This method modifies the representation layers of pre-trained LLMs by using contrastive `positive' and `negative' models, trained on data with and without hallucinations. By leveraging the differences between these two models, we create a more straightforward pathway to eliminate hallucinations, and the iterative nature of contrastive learning further enhances performance. Experimental validation on four pre-trained foundation LLMs (LLaMA2, Alpaca, LLaMA3, and Qwen) finetuning with a specially designed dataset shows that our approach achieves an average improvement of 10.1 points on the TruthfulQA benchmark. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of Iter-AHMCL in reducing hallucination while maintaining the general capabilities of LLMs.

Huiwen Wu, Xiaogang Xu, Deyi Zhang et al.

The success of current Large-Language Models (LLMs) hinges on extensive training data that is collected and stored centrally, called Centralized Learning (CL). However, such a collection manner poses a privacy threat, and one potential solution is Federated Learning (FL), which transfers gradients, not raw data, among clients. Unlike traditional networks, FL for LLMs incurs significant communication costs due to their tremendous parameters. This study introduces an innovative approach to compress gradients to improve communication efficiency during LLM FL, formulating the new FL pipeline named CG-FedLLM. This approach integrates an encoder on the client side to acquire the compressed gradient features and a decoder on the server side to reconstruct the gradients. We also developed a novel training strategy that comprises Temporal-ensemble Gradient-Aware Pre-training (TGAP) to identify characteristic gradients of the target model and Federated AutoEncoder-Involved Fine-tuning (FAF) to compress gradients adaptively. Extensive experiments confirm that our approach reduces communication costs and improves performance (e.g., average 3 points increment compared with traditional CL- and FL-based fine-tuning with LlaMA on a well-recognized benchmark, C-Eval). This improvement is because our encoder-decoder, trained via TGAP and FAF, can filter gradients while selectively preserving critical features. Furthermore, we present a series of experimental analyses focusing on the signal-to-noise ratio, compression rate, and robustness within this privacy-centric framework, providing insight into developing more efficient and secure LLMs.

Jiarong Guo, Xiaogang Xu, Hengshuang Zhao

3D-aware Generative Adversarial Networks (3D-GANs) currently exhibit artifacts in their 3D geometrical modeling, such as mesh imperfections and holes. These shortcomings are primarily attributed to the limited availability of annotated 3D data, leading to a constrained "valid latent area" for satisfactory modeling. To address this, we present a Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) technique tailored as an auxiliary loss for any 3D-GAN, designed to improve its 3D geometrical modeling capabilities. Our approach pioneers an inversion technique for 3D-GANs, integrating an encoder that performs adaptive spatially-varying range operations. Utilizing this inversion, we introduce the Cyclic Generative Constraint (CGC), aiming to densify the valid latent space. The CGC operates via augmented local latent vectors that maintain the same geometric form, and it imposes constraints on the cycle path outputs, specifically the generator-encoder-generator sequence. This SSL methodology seamlessly integrates with the inherent GAN loss, ensuring the integrity of pre-existing 3D-GAN architectures without necessitating alterations. We validate our approach with comprehensive experiments across various datasets and architectures, underscoring its efficacy. Our project website: https://3dgan-ssl.github.io

Jiequan Cui, Beier Zhu, Qingshan Xu et al.

In this paper, we formulate the knowledge distillation (KD) as a conditional generative problem and propose the \textit{Generative Distribution Distillation (GenDD)} framework. A naive \textit{GenDD} baseline encounters two major challenges: the curse of high-dimensional optimization and the lack of semantic supervision from labels. To address these issues, we introduce a \textit{Split Tokenization} strategy, achieving stable and effective unsupervised KD. Additionally, we develop the \textit{Distribution Contraction} technique to integrate label supervision into the reconstruction objective. Our theoretical proof demonstrates that \textit{GenDD} with \textit{Distribution Contraction} serves as a gradient-level surrogate for multi-task learning, realizing efficient supervised training without explicit classification loss on multi-step sampling image representations. To evaluate the effectiveness of our method, we conduct experiments on balanced, imbalanced, and unlabeled data. Experimental results show that \textit{GenDD} performs competitively in the unsupervised setting, significantly surpassing KL baseline by \textbf{16.29\%} on ImageNet validation set. With label supervision, our ResNet-50 achieves \textbf{82.28\%} top-1 accuracy on ImageNet in 600 epochs training, establishing a new state-of-the-art.

Xi Chen, Mingkang Zhu, Shaoteng Liu et al.

This work explores enabling Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to link visual cues across multiple images. A straightforward solution is to adapt rule-based reinforcement learning for Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, such methods typically rely on manually curated question-answer pairs, which can be particularly challenging when dealing with fine grained visual details and complex logic across images. Inspired by self-supervised visual representation learning, we observe that images contain inherent constraints that can serve as supervision. Based on this insight, we construct image triplets comprising two augmented views of the same image and a third, similar but distinct image. During training, the model is prompted to generate a reasoning process to compare these images (i.e., determine same or different). Then we optimize the model with rule-based reinforcement learning. Due to the high visual similarity and the presence of augmentations, the model must attend to subtle visual changes and perform logical reasoning to succeed. Experiments show that, although trained solely on visual comparison tasks, the learned reasoning ability generalizes effectively to a wide range of questions. Without relying on any human-annotated question-answer pairs, our method achieves significant improvements on multi-image reasoning benchmarks and shows strong performance on general vision tasks.

Lihe Yang, Bingyi Kang, Zilong Huang et al.

This work presents Depth Anything V2. Without pursuing fancy techniques, we aim to reveal crucial findings to pave the way towards building a powerful monocular depth estimation model. Notably, compared with V1, this version produces much finer and more robust depth predictions through three key practices: 1) replacing all labeled real images with synthetic images, 2) scaling up the capacity of our teacher model, and 3) teaching student models via the bridge of large-scale pseudo-labeled real images. Compared with the latest models built on Stable Diffusion, our models are significantly more efficient (more than 10x faster) and more accurate. We offer models of different scales (ranging from 25M to 1.3B params) to support extensive scenarios. Benefiting from their strong generalization capability, we fine-tune them with metric depth labels to obtain our metric depth models. In addition to our models, considering the limited diversity and frequent noise in current test sets, we construct a versatile evaluation benchmark with precise annotations and diverse scenes to facilitate future research.

Xiaogang Xu, Ruixing Wang, Jiangbo Lu

This paper proposes a new framework for low-light image enhancement by simultaneously conducting the appearance as well as structure modeling. It employs the structural feature to guide the appearance enhancement, leading to sharp and realistic results. The structure modeling in our framework is implemented as the edge detection in low-light images. It is achieved with a modified generative model via designing a structure-aware feature extractor and generator. The detected edge maps can accurately emphasize the essential structural information, and the edge prediction is robust towards the noises in dark areas. Moreover, to improve the appearance modeling, which is implemented with a simple U-Net, a novel structure-guided enhancement module is proposed with structure-guided feature synthesis layers. The appearance modeling, edge detector, and enhancement module can be trained end-to-end. The experiments are conducted on representative datasets (sRGB and RAW domains), showing that our model consistently achieves SOTA performance on all datasets with the same architecture.

Yiyi Zhang, Zhiwen Ying, Ying Zheng et al.

Plant leaf identification is crucial for biodiversity protection and conservation and has gradually attracted the attention of academia in recent years. Due to the high similarity among different varieties, leaf cultivar recognition is also considered to be an ultra-fine-grained visual classification (UFGVC) task, which is facing a huge challenge. In practice, an instance may be related to multiple varieties to varying degrees, especially in the UFGVC datasets. However, deep learning methods trained on one-hot labels fail to reflect patterns shared across categories and thus perform poorly on this task. To address this issue, we generate soft targets integrated with inter-class similarity information. Specifically, we continuously update the prototypical features for each category and then capture the similarity scores between instances and prototypes accordingly. Original one-hot labels and the similarity scores are incorporated to yield enhanced labels. Prototype-enhanced soft labels not only contain original one-hot label information, but also introduce rich inter-category semantic association information, thus providing more effective supervision for deep model training. Extensive experimental results on public datasets show that our method can significantly improve the performance on the UFGVC task of leaf cultivar identification.

Yiyi Zhang, Ying Zheng, Xiaogang Xu et al.

Cross-domain few-shot learning (CDFSL) remains a largely unsolved problem in the area of computer vision, while self-supervised learning presents a promising solution. Both learning methods attempt to alleviate the dependency of deep networks on the requirement of large-scale labeled data. Although self-supervised methods have recently advanced dramatically, their utility on CDFSL is relatively unexplored. In this paper, we investigate the role of self-supervised representation learning in the context of CDFSL via a thorough evaluation of existing methods. It comes as a surprise that even with shallow architectures or small training datasets, self-supervised methods can perform favorably compared to the existing SOTA methods. Nevertheless, no single self-supervised approach dominates all datasets indicating that existing self-supervised methods are not universally applicable. In addition, we find that representations extracted from self-supervised methods exhibit stronger robustness than the supervised method. Intriguingly, whether self-supervised representations perform well on the source domain has little correlation with their applicability on the target domain. As part of our study, we conduct an objective measurement of the performance for six kinds of representative classifiers. The results suggest Prototypical Classifier as the standard evaluation recipe for CDFSL.

Xiaogang Xu, Yi Wang, Liwei Wang et al.

To synthesize a realistic action sequence based on a single human image, it is crucial to model both motion patterns and diversity in the action video. This paper proposes an Action Conditional Temporal Variational AutoEncoder (ACT-VAE) to improve motion prediction accuracy and capture movement diversity. ACT-VAE predicts pose sequences for an action clips from a single input image. It is implemented as a deep generative model that maintains temporal coherence according to the action category with a novel temporal modeling on latent space. Further, ACT-VAE is a general action sequence prediction framework. When connected with a plug-and-play Pose-to-Image (P2I) network, ACT-VAE can synthesize image sequences. Extensive experiments bear out our approach can predict accurate pose and synthesize realistic image sequences, surpassing state-of-the-art approaches. Compared to existing methods, ACT-VAE improves model accuracy and preserves diversity.