Yancheng Wang

Yancheng Wang, Ning Xu, Yingzhen Yang

Non-local attention module has been proven to be crucial for image restoration. Conventional non-local attention processes features of each layer separately, so it risks missing correlation between features among different layers. To address this problem, we aim to design attention modules that aggregate information from different layers. Instead of finding correlated key pixels within the same layer, each query pixel is encouraged to attend to key pixels at multiple previous layers of the network. In order to efficiently embed such attention design into neural network backbones, we propose a novel Adaptive Cross-Layer Attention (ACLA) module. Two adaptive designs are proposed for ACLA: (1) adaptively selecting the keys for non-local attention at each layer; (2) automatically searching for the insertion locations for ACLA modules. By these two adaptive designs, ACLA dynamically selects a flexible number of keys to be aggregated for non-local attention at previous layer while maintaining a compact neural network with compelling performance. Extensive experiments on image restoration tasks, including single image super-resolution, image denoising, image demosaicing, and image compression artifacts reduction, validate the effectiveness and efficiency of ACLA. The code of ACLA is available at \url{https://github.com/SDL-ASU/ACLA}.

Yancheng Wang, Yang Xiao, Fu Xiong et al.

To facilitate depth-based 3D action recognition, 3D dynamic voxel (3DV) is proposed as a novel 3D motion representation. With 3D space voxelization, the key idea of 3DV is to encode 3D motion information within depth video into a regular voxel set (i.e., 3DV) compactly, via temporal rank pooling. Each available 3DV voxel intrinsically involves 3D spatial and motion feature jointly. 3DV is then abstracted as a point set and input into PointNet++ for 3D action recognition, in the end-to-end learning way. The intuition for transferring 3DV into the point set form is that, PointNet++ is lightweight and effective for deep feature learning towards point set. Since 3DV may lose appearance clue, a multi-stream 3D action recognition manner is also proposed to learn motion and appearance feature jointly. To extract richer temporal order information of actions, we also divide the depth video into temporal splits and encode this procedure in 3DV integrally. The extensive experiments on 4 well-established benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposition. Impressively, we acquire the accuracy of 82.4% and 93.5% on NTU RGB+D 120 [13] with the cross-subject and crosssetup test setting respectively. 3DV's code is available at https://github.com/3huo/3DV-Action.

Yancheng Wang, Yingzhen Yang

Self-attention and transformer architectures have become foundational components in modern deep learning. Recent efforts have integrated transformer blocks into compact neural architectures for computer vision, giving rise to various efficient vision transformers. In this work, we introduce Transformer with Kernel Complexity Reduction, or KCR-Transformer, a compact transformer block equipped with differentiable channel selection, guided by a novel and sharp theoretical generalization bound. KCR-Transformer performs input/output channel selection in the MLP layers of transformer blocks to reduce the computational cost. Furthermore, we provide a rigorous theoretical analysis establishing a tight generalization bound for networks equipped with KCR-Transformer blocks. Leveraging such strong theoretical results, the channel pruning by KCR-Transformer is conducted in a generalization-aware manner, ensuring that the resulting network retains a provably small generalization error. Our KCR-Transformer is compatible with many popular and compact transformer networks, such as ViT and Swin, and it reduces the FLOPs of the vision transformers while maintaining or even improving the prediction accuracy. In the experiments, we replace all the transformer blocks in the vision transformers with KCR-Transformer blocks, leading to KCR-Transformer networks with different backbones. The resulting TCR-Transformers achieve superior performance on various computer vision tasks, achieving even better performance than the original models with even less FLOPs and parameters.

Fu Xiong, Yang Xiao, Zhiguo Cao et al.

Face verification can be regarded as a 2-class fine-grained visual recognition problem. Enhancing the feature's discriminative power is one of the key problems to improve its performance. Metric learning technology is often applied to address this need, while achieving a good tradeoff between underfitting and overfitting plays the vital role in metric learning. Hence, we propose a novel ensemble cascade metric learning (ECML) mechanism. In particular, hierarchical metric learning is executed in the cascade way to alleviate underfitting. Meanwhile, at each learning level, the features are split into non-overlapping groups. Then, metric learning is executed among the feature groups in the ensemble manner to resist overfitting. Considering the feature distribution characteristics of faces, a robust Mahalanobis metric learning method (RMML) with closed-form solution is additionally proposed. It can avoid the computation failure issue on inverse matrix faced by some well-known metric learning approaches (e.g., KISSME). Embedding RMML into the proposed ECML mechanism, our metric learning paradigm (EC-RMML) can run in the one-pass learning manner. Experimental results demonstrate that EC-RMML is superior to state-of-the-art metric learning methods for face verification. And, the proposed ensemble cascade metric learning mechanism is also applicable to other metric learning approaches.

Yang Xiao, Jun Chen, Yancheng Wang et al.

Dynamic imaging is a recently proposed action description paradigm for simultaneously capturing motion and temporal evolution information, particularly in the context of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Compared with optical flow for motion characterization, dynamic imaging exhibits superior efficiency and compactness. Inspired by the success of dynamic imaging in RGB video, this study extends it to the depth domain. To better exploit three-dimensional (3D) characteristics, multi-view dynamic images are proposed. In particular, the raw depth video is densely projected with respect to different virtual imaging viewpoints by rotating the virtual camera within the 3D space. Subsequently, dynamic images are extracted from the obtained multi-view depth videos and multi-view dynamic images are thus constructed from these images. Accordingly, more view-tolerant visual cues can be involved. A novel CNN model is then proposed to perform feature learning on multi-view dynamic images. Particularly, the dynamic images from different views share the same convolutional layers but correspond to different fully connected layers. This is aimed at enhancing the tuning effectiveness on shallow convolutional layers by alleviating the gradient vanishing problem. Moreover, as the spatial occurrence variation of the actions may impair the CNN, an action proposal approach is also put forth. In experiments, the proposed approach can achieve state-of-the-art performance on three challenging datasets.