Yanwei Fu

CV
h-index98
241papers
15,282citations
Novelty53%
AI Score63

241 Papers

CVMar 2, 2022Code
Incremental Transformer Structure Enhanced Image Inpainting with Masking Positional Encoding

Qiaole Dong, Chenjie Cao, Yanwei Fu

Image inpainting has made significant advances in recent years. However, it is still challenging to recover corrupted images with both vivid textures and reasonable structures. Some specific methods only tackle regular textures while losing holistic structures due to the limited receptive fields of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). On the other hand, attention-based models can learn better long-range dependency for the structure recovery, but they are limited by the heavy computation for inference with large image sizes. To address these issues, we propose to leverage an additional structure restorer to facilitate the image inpainting incrementally. The proposed model restores holistic image structures with a powerful attention-based transformer model in a fixed low-resolution sketch space. Such a grayscale space is easy to be upsampled to larger scales to convey correct structural information. Our structure restorer can be integrated with other pretrained inpainting models efficiently with the zero-initialized residual addition. Furthermore, a masking positional encoding strategy is utilized to improve the performance with large irregular masks. Extensive experiments on various datasets validate the efficacy of our model compared with other competitors. Our codes are released in https://github.com/DQiaole/ZITS_inpainting.

CVApr 13Code
The Second Challenge on Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection at NTIRE 2026: Methods and Results

Xingyu Qiu, Yuqian Fu, Jiawei Geng et al.

Cross-domain few-shot object detection (CD-FSOD) remains a challenging problem for existing object detectors and few-shot learning approaches, particularly when generalizing across distinct domains. As part of NTIRE 2026, we hosted the second CD-FSOD Challenge to systematically evaluate and promote progress in detecting objects in unseen target domains under limited annotation conditions. The challenge received strong community interest, with 128 registered participants and a total of 696 submissions. Among them, 31 teams actively participated, and 19 teams submitted valid final results. Participants explored a wide range of strategies, introducing innovative methods that push the performance frontier under both open-source and closed-source tracks. This report presents a detailed overview of the NTIRE 2026 CD-FSOD Challenge, including a summary of the submitted approaches and an analysis of the final results across all participating teams. Challenge Codes: https://github.com/ohMargin/NTIRE2026_CDFSOD.

CVFeb 18, 2023Code
StyleAdv: Meta Style Adversarial Training for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning

Yuqian Fu, Yu Xie, Yanwei Fu et al.

Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning (CD-FSL) is a recently emerging task that tackles few-shot learning across different domains. It aims at transferring prior knowledge learned on the source dataset to novel target datasets. The CD-FSL task is especially challenged by the huge domain gap between different datasets. Critically, such a domain gap actually comes from the changes of visual styles, and wave-SAN empirically shows that spanning the style distribution of the source data helps alleviate this issue. However, wave-SAN simply swaps styles of two images. Such a vanilla operation makes the generated styles ``real'' and ``easy'', which still fall into the original set of the source styles. Thus, inspired by vanilla adversarial learning, a novel model-agnostic meta Style Adversarial training (StyleAdv) method together with a novel style adversarial attack method is proposed for CD-FSL. Particularly, our style attack method synthesizes both ``virtual'' and ``hard'' adversarial styles for model training. This is achieved by perturbing the original style with the signed style gradients. By continually attacking styles and forcing the model to recognize these challenging adversarial styles, our model is gradually robust to the visual styles, thus boosting the generalization ability for novel target datasets. Besides the typical CNN-based backbone, we also employ our StyleAdv method on large-scale pretrained vision transformer. Extensive experiments conducted on eight various target datasets show the effectiveness of our method. Whether built upon ResNet or ViT, we achieve the new state of the art for CD-FSL. Code is available at https://github.com/lovelyqian/StyleAdv-CDFSL.

CVMar 15, 2023Code
Rethinking Optical Flow from Geometric Matching Consistent Perspective

Qiaole Dong, Chenjie Cao, Yanwei Fu

Optical flow estimation is a challenging problem remaining unsolved. Recent deep learning based optical flow models have achieved considerable success. However, these models often train networks from the scratch on standard optical flow data, which restricts their ability to robustly and geometrically match image features. In this paper, we propose a rethinking to previous optical flow estimation. We particularly leverage Geometric Image Matching (GIM) as a pre-training task for the optical flow estimation (MatchFlow) with better feature representations, as GIM shares some common challenges as optical flow estimation, and with massive labeled real-world data. Thus, matching static scenes helps to learn more fundamental feature correlations of objects and scenes with consistent displacements. Specifically, the proposed MatchFlow model employs a QuadTree attention-based network pre-trained on MegaDepth to extract coarse features for further flow regression. Extensive experiments show that our model has great cross-dataset generalization. Our method achieves 11.5% and 10.1% error reduction from GMA on Sintel clean pass and KITTI test set. At the time of anonymous submission, our MatchFlow(G) enjoys state-of-the-art performance on Sintel clean and final pass compared to published approaches with comparable computation and memory footprint. Codes and models will be released in https://github.com/DQiaole/MatchFlow.

CVOct 12, 2022Code
ZITS++: Image Inpainting by Improving the Incremental Transformer on Structural Priors

Chenjie Cao, Qiaole Dong, Yanwei Fu

Image inpainting involves filling missing areas of a corrupted image. Despite impressive results have been achieved recently, restoring images with both vivid textures and reasonable structures remains a significant challenge. Previous methods have primarily addressed regular textures while disregarding holistic structures due to the limited receptive fields of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). To this end, we study learning a Zero-initialized residual addition based Incremental Transformer on Structural priors (ZITS++), an improved model upon our conference work, ZITS. Specifically, given one corrupt image, we present the Transformer Structure Restorer (TSR) module to restore holistic structural priors at low image resolution, which are further upsampled by Simple Structure Upsampler (SSU) module to higher image resolution. To recover image texture details, we use the Fourier CNN Texture Restoration (FTR) module, which is strengthened by Fourier and large-kernel attention convolutions. Furthermore, to enhance the FTR, the upsampled structural priors from TSR are further processed by Structure Feature Encoder (SFE) and optimized with the Zero-initialized Residual Addition (ZeroRA) incrementally. Besides, a new masking positional encoding is proposed to encode the large irregular masks. Compared with ZITS, ZITS++ improves the FTR's stability and inpainting ability with several techniques. More importantly, we comprehensively explore the effects of various image priors for inpainting and investigate how to utilize them to address high-resolution image inpainting with extensive experiments. This investigation is orthogonal to most inpainting approaches and can thus significantly benefit the community. Codes and models will be released in https://github.com/ewrfcas/ZITS-PlusPlus.

CVNov 28, 2022Code
RankDNN: Learning to Rank for Few-shot Learning

Qianyu Guo, Hongtong Gong, Xujun Wei et al.

This paper introduces a new few-shot learning pipeline that casts relevance ranking for image retrieval as binary ranking relation classification. In comparison to image classification, ranking relation classification is sample efficient and domain agnostic. Besides, it provides a new perspective on few-shot learning and is complementary to state-of-the-art methods. The core component of our deep neural network is a simple MLP, which takes as input an image triplet encoded as the difference between two vector-Kronecker products, and outputs a binary relevance ranking order. The proposed RankMLP can be built on top of any state-of-the-art feature extractors, and our entire deep neural network is called the ranking deep neural network, or RankDNN. Meanwhile, RankDNN can be flexibly fused with other post-processing methods. During the meta test, RankDNN ranks support images according to their similarity with the query samples, and each query sample is assigned the class label of its nearest neighbor. Experiments demonstrate that RankDNN can effectively improve the performance of its baselines based on a variety of backbones and it outperforms previous state-of-the-art algorithms on multiple few-shot learning benchmarks, including miniImageNet, tieredImageNet, Caltech-UCSD Birds, and CIFAR-FS. Furthermore, experiments on the cross-domain challenge demonstrate the superior transferability of RankDNN.The code is available at: https://github.com/guoqianyu-alberta/RankDNN.

CVAug 3, 2022Code
Learning Prior Feature and Attention Enhanced Image Inpainting

Chenjie Cao, Qiaole Dong, Yanwei Fu

Many recent inpainting works have achieved impressive results by leveraging Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to model various prior information for image restoration. Unfortunately, the performance of these methods is largely limited by the representation ability of vanilla Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) backbones.On the other hand, Vision Transformers (ViT) with self-supervised pre-training have shown great potential for many visual recognition and object detection tasks. A natural question is whether the inpainting task can be greatly benefited from the ViT backbone? However, it is nontrivial to directly replace the new backbones in inpainting networks, as the inpainting is an inverse problem fundamentally different from the recognition tasks. To this end, this paper incorporates the pre-training based Masked AutoEncoder (MAE) into the inpainting model, which enjoys richer informative priors to enhance the inpainting process. Moreover, we propose to use attention priors from MAE to make the inpainting model learn more long-distance dependencies between masked and unmasked regions. Sufficient ablations have been discussed about the inpainting and the self-supervised pre-training models in this paper. Besides, experiments on both Places2 and FFHQ demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model. Codes and pre-trained models are released in https://github.com/ewrfcas/MAE-FAR.

LGMar 15, 2022Code
Scalable Penalized Regression for Noise Detection in Learning with Noisy Labels

Yikai Wang, Xinwei Sun, Yanwei Fu

Noisy training set usually leads to the degradation of generalization and robustness of neural networks. In this paper, we propose using a theoretically guaranteed noisy label detection framework to detect and remove noisy data for Learning with Noisy Labels (LNL). Specifically, we design a penalized regression to model the linear relation between network features and one-hot labels, where the noisy data are identified by the non-zero mean shift parameters solved in the regression model. To make the framework scalable to datasets that contain a large number of categories and training data, we propose a split algorithm to divide the whole training set into small pieces that can be solved by the penalized regression in parallel, leading to the Scalable Penalized Regression (SPR) framework. We provide the non-asymptotic probabilistic condition for SPR to correctly identify the noisy data. While SPR can be regarded as a sample selection module for standard supervised training pipeline, we further combine it with semi-supervised algorithm to further exploit the support of noisy data as unlabeled data. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets and real-world noisy datasets show the effectiveness of our framework. Our code and pretrained models are released at https://github.com/Yikai-Wang/SPR-LNL.

LGJan 2, 2023Code
Knockoffs-SPR: Clean Sample Selection in Learning with Noisy Labels

Yikai Wang, Yanwei Fu, Xinwei Sun

A noisy training set usually leads to the degradation of the generalization and robustness of neural networks. In this paper, we propose a novel theoretically guaranteed clean sample selection framework for learning with noisy labels. Specifically, we first present a Scalable Penalized Regression (SPR) method, to model the linear relation between network features and one-hot labels. In SPR, the clean data are identified by the zero mean-shift parameters solved in the regression model. We theoretically show that SPR can recover clean data under some conditions. Under general scenarios, the conditions may be no longer satisfied; and some noisy data are falsely selected as clean data. To solve this problem, we propose a data-adaptive method for Scalable Penalized Regression with Knockoff filters (Knockoffs-SPR), which is provable to control the False-Selection-Rate (FSR) in the selected clean data. To improve the efficiency, we further present a split algorithm that divides the whole training set into small pieces that can be solved in parallel to make the framework scalable to large datasets. While Knockoffs-SPR can be regarded as a sample selection module for a standard supervised training pipeline, we further combine it with a semi-supervised algorithm to exploit the support of noisy data as unlabeled data. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets and real-world noisy datasets show the effectiveness of our framework and validate the theoretical results of Knockoffs-SPR. Our code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/Yikai-Wang/Knockoffs-SPR.

CVSep 18, 2023
Unsupervised Open-Vocabulary Object Localization in Videos

Ke Fan, Zechen Bai, Tianjun Xiao et al. · eth-zurich

In this paper, we show that recent advances in video representation learning and pre-trained vision-language models allow for substantial improvements in self-supervised video object localization. We propose a method that first localizes objects in videos via an object-centric approach with slot attention and then assigns text to the obtained slots. The latter is achieved by an unsupervised way to read localized semantic information from the pre-trained CLIP model. The resulting video object localization is entirely unsupervised apart from the implicit annotation contained in CLIP, and it is effectively the first unsupervised approach that yields good results on regular video benchmarks.

CVFeb 22, 2023Code
Entity-Level Text-Guided Image Manipulation

Yikai Wang, Jianan Wang, Guansong Lu et al.

Existing text-guided image manipulation methods aim to modify the appearance of the image or to edit a few objects in a virtual or simple scenario, which is far from practical applications. In this work, we study a novel task on text-guided image manipulation on the entity level in the real world (eL-TGIM). The task imposes three basic requirements, (1) to edit the entity consistent with the text descriptions, (2) to preserve the entity-irrelevant regions, and (3) to merge the manipulated entity into the image naturally. To this end, we propose an elegant framework, dubbed as SeMani, forming the Semantic Manipulation of real-world images that can not only edit the appearance of entities but also generate new entities corresponding to the text guidance. To solve eL-TGIM, SeMani decomposes the task into two phases: the semantic alignment phase and the image manipulation phase. In the semantic alignment phase, SeMani incorporates a semantic alignment module to locate the entity-relevant region to be manipulated. In the image manipulation phase, SeMani adopts a generative model to synthesize new images conditioned on the entity-irrelevant regions and target text descriptions. We discuss and propose two popular generation processes that can be utilized in SeMani, the discrete auto-regressive generation with transformers and the continuous denoising generation with diffusion models, yielding SeMani-Trans and SeMani-Diff, respectively. We conduct extensive experiments on the real datasets CUB, Oxford, and COCO datasets to verify that SeMani can distinguish the entity-relevant and -irrelevant regions and achieve more precise and flexible manipulation in a zero-shot manner compared with baseline methods. Our codes and models will be released at https://github.com/Yikai-Wang/SeMani.

CVOct 11, 2022Code
ME-D2N: Multi-Expert Domain Decompositional Network for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning

Yuqian Fu, Yu Xie, Yanwei Fu et al.

Recently, Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning (CD-FSL) which aims at addressing the Few-Shot Learning (FSL) problem across different domains has attracted rising attention. The core challenge of CD-FSL lies in the domain gap between the source and novel target datasets. Though many attempts have been made for CD-FSL without any target data during model training, the huge domain gap makes it still hard for existing CD-FSL methods to achieve very satisfactory results. Alternatively, learning CD-FSL models with few labeled target domain data which is more realistic and promising is advocated in previous work~\cite{fu2021meta}. Thus, in this paper, we stick to this setting and technically contribute a novel Multi-Expert Domain Decompositional Network (ME-D2N). Concretely, to solve the data imbalance problem between the source data with sufficient examples and the auxiliary target data with limited examples, we build our model under the umbrella of multi-expert learning. Two teacher models which can be considered to be experts in their corresponding domain are first trained on the source and the auxiliary target sets, respectively. Then, the knowledge distillation technique is introduced to transfer the knowledge from two teachers to a unified student model. Taking a step further, to help our student model learn knowledge from different domain teachers simultaneously, we further present a novel domain decomposition module that learns to decompose the student model into two domain-related sub parts. This is achieved by a novel domain-specific gate that learns to assign each filter to only one specific domain in a learnable way. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/lovelyqian/ME-D2N_for_CDFSL.

LGMay 29
Conformal Reliability: A New Evaluation Metric for Conditional Generation

Yachen Gao, Xinwei Sun, Yikai Wang et al.

Conditional generative models have recently achieved remarkable success in various applications. However, a suitable metric for evaluating the reliability of these models, which takes into account their inherent uncertainty, is still lacking. Existing metrics, which typically assess a single output, may fail to capture the variability or potential risks in generation. In this paper, we propose a novel evaluation metric called reliability score based on conformal prediction, which measures the worst-case performance within the prediction set at a pre-specified confidence level. However, computing this score is challenging due to the high-dimensional nature of the output space and the nonconvexity of both the metric function and the prediction set. To efficiently compute this score, we introduce Conformal ReLiability (CReL), a framework that can (i) construct the prediction set with desired coverage; and (ii) accurately optimize the reliability score within the constructed prediction set. We provide theoretical results on coverage and demonstrate empirically that our method produces more informative prediction sets than existing approaches. Experiments on synthetic data and the image-to-text and text-to-image tasks further demonstrate the interpretability of our new metric, and the validity and effectiveness of our computational framework. Source code can be found at https://ggc29.github.io/CReL/.

CVSep 23, 2023Code
Rethinking Amodal Video Segmentation from Learning Supervised Signals with Object-centric Representation

Ke Fan, Jingshi Lei, Xuelin Qian et al.

Video amodal segmentation is a particularly challenging task in computer vision, which requires to deduce the full shape of an object from the visible parts of it. Recently, some studies have achieved promising performance by using motion flow to integrate information across frames under a self-supervised setting. However, motion flow has a clear limitation by the two factors of moving cameras and object deformation. This paper presents a rethinking to previous works. We particularly leverage the supervised signals with object-centric representation in \textit{real-world scenarios}. The underlying idea is the supervision signal of the specific object and the features from different views can mutually benefit the deduction of the full mask in any specific frame. We thus propose an Efficient object-centric Representation amodal Segmentation (EoRaS). Specially, beyond solely relying on supervision signals, we design a translation module to project image features into the Bird's-Eye View (BEV), which introduces 3D information to improve current feature quality. Furthermore, we propose a multi-view fusion layer based temporal module which is equipped with a set of object slots and interacts with features from different views by attention mechanism to fulfill sufficient object representation completion. As a result, the full mask of the object can be decoded from image features updated by object slots. Extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Our code will be released at \url{https://github.com/kfan21/EoRaS}.

CVAug 21, 2023Code
Exploring Fine-Grained Representation and Recomposition for Cloth-Changing Person Re-Identification

Qizao Wang, Xuelin Qian, Bin Li et al.

Cloth-changing person Re-IDentification (Re-ID) is a particularly challenging task, suffering from two limitations of inferior discriminative features and limited training samples. Existing methods mainly leverage auxiliary information to facilitate identity-relevant feature learning, including soft-biometrics features of shapes or gaits, and additional labels of clothing. However, this information may be unavailable in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a novel FIne-grained Representation and Recomposition (FIRe$^{2}$) framework to tackle both limitations without any auxiliary annotation or data. Specifically, we first design a Fine-grained Feature Mining (FFM) module to separately cluster images of each person. Images with similar so-called fine-grained attributes (e.g., clothes and viewpoints) are encouraged to cluster together. An attribute-aware classification loss is introduced to perform fine-grained learning based on cluster labels, which are not shared among different people, promoting the model to learn identity-relevant features. Furthermore, to take full advantage of fine-grained attributes, we present a Fine-grained Attribute Recomposition (FAR) module by recomposing image features with different attributes in the latent space. It significantly enhances robust feature learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FIRe$^{2}$ can achieve state-of-the-art performance on five widely-used cloth-changing person Re-ID benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/QizaoWang/FIRe-CCReID.

CVApr 27, 2022
Density-preserving Deep Point Cloud Compression

Yun He, Xinlin Ren, Danhang Tang et al.

Local density of point clouds is crucial for representing local details, but has been overlooked by existing point cloud compression methods. To address this, we propose a novel deep point cloud compression method that preserves local density information. Our method works in an auto-encoder fashion: the encoder downsamples the points and learns point-wise features, while the decoder upsamples the points using these features. Specifically, we propose to encode local geometry and density with three embeddings: density embedding, local position embedding and ancestor embedding. During the decoding, we explicitly predict the upsampling factor for each point, and the directions and scales of the upsampled points. To mitigate the clustered points issue in existing methods, we design a novel sub-point convolution layer, and an upsampling block with adaptive scale. Furthermore, our method can also compress point-wise attributes, such as normal. Extensive qualitative and quantitative results on SemanticKITTI and ShapeNet demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art rate-distortion trade-off.

CVAug 4, 2022
MVSFormer: Multi-View Stereo by Learning Robust Image Features and Temperature-based Depth

Chenjie Cao, Xinlin Ren, Yanwei Fu

Feature representation learning is the key recipe for learning-based Multi-View Stereo (MVS). As the common feature extractor of learning-based MVS, vanilla Feature Pyramid Networks (FPNs) suffer from discouraged feature representations for reflection and texture-less areas, which limits the generalization of MVS. Even FPNs worked with pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) fail to tackle these issues. On the other hand, Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved prominent success in many 2D vision tasks. Thus we ask whether ViTs can facilitate feature learning in MVS? In this paper, we propose a pre-trained ViT enhanced MVS network called MVSFormer, which can learn more reliable feature representations benefited by informative priors from ViT. The finetuned MVSFormer with hierarchical ViTs of efficient attention mechanisms can achieve prominent improvement based on FPNs. Besides, the alternative MVSFormer with frozen ViT weights is further proposed. This largely alleviates the training cost with competitive performance strengthened by the attention map from the self-distillation pre-training. MVSFormer can be generalized to various input resolutions with efficient multi-scale training strengthened by gradient accumulation. Moreover, we discuss the merits and drawbacks of classification and regression-based MVS methods, and further propose to unify them with a temperature-based strategy. MVSFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance on the DTU dataset. Particularly, MVSFormer ranks as Top-1 on both intermediate and advanced sets of the highly competitive Tanks-and-Temples leaderboard.

CVApr 30, 2022
ONCE-3DLanes: Building Monocular 3D Lane Detection

Fan Yan, Ming Nie, Xinyue Cai et al.

We present ONCE-3DLanes, a real-world autonomous driving dataset with lane layout annotation in 3D space. Conventional 2D lane detection from a monocular image yields poor performance of following planning and control tasks in autonomous driving due to the case of uneven road. Predicting the 3D lane layout is thus necessary and enables effective and safe driving. However, existing 3D lane detection datasets are either unpublished or synthesized from a simulated environment, severely hampering the development of this field. In this paper, we take steps towards addressing these issues. By exploiting the explicit relationship between point clouds and image pixels, a dataset annotation pipeline is designed to automatically generate high-quality 3D lane locations from 2D lane annotations in 211K road scenes. In addition, we present an extrinsic-free, anchor-free method, called SALAD, regressing the 3D coordinates of lanes in image view without converting the feature map into the bird's-eye view (BEV). To facilitate future research on 3D lane detection, we benchmark the dataset and provide a novel evaluation metric, performing extensive experiments of both existing approaches and our proposed method. The aim of our work is to revive the interest of 3D lane detection in a real-world scenario. We believe our work can lead to the expected and unexpected innovations in both academia and industry.

CVApr 24, 2023
Grad-PU: Arbitrary-Scale Point Cloud Upsampling via Gradient Descent with Learned Distance Functions

Yun He, Danhang Tang, Yinda Zhang et al.

Most existing point cloud upsampling methods have roughly three steps: feature extraction, feature expansion and 3D coordinate prediction. However,they usually suffer from two critical issues: (1)fixed upsampling rate after one-time training, since the feature expansion unit is customized for each upsampling rate; (2)outliers or shrinkage artifact caused by the difficulty of precisely predicting 3D coordinates or residuals of upsampled points. To adress them, we propose a new framework for accurate point cloud upsampling that supports arbitrary upsampling rates. Our method first interpolates the low-res point cloud according to a given upsampling rate. And then refine the positions of the interpolated points with an iterative optimization process, guided by a trained model estimating the difference between the current point cloud and the high-res target. Extensive quantitative and qualitative results on benchmarks and downstream tasks demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art accuracy and efficiency.

ROMay 31
$τ_0$-WM: A Unified Video-Action World Model for Robotic Manipulation

Pengfei Zhou, Shengcong Chen, Di Chen et al.

Robotic manipulation requires models that generate executable actions while anticipating and evaluating their future consequences before physical execution. We present $τ_0$-World Model ($τ_0$-WM), a unified video-action world model that integrates policy learning, video prediction, and action evaluation within a single future-predictive framework. Built on a shared video diffusion backbone, $τ_0$-WM provides two complementary interfaces. First, a video action model jointly predicts future visual latents and continuous action chunks from multi-view observations, language instructions, and robot state. Second, an action-conditioned video simulator rolls out candidate action chunks into multi-view futures and predicts dense task-progress scores. The model is trained on approximately $27{,}300$ hours of real-robot teleoperation, UMI-style interaction, egocentric human videos, and rollout or failure trajectories using modality-specific supervision masks. At inference time, $τ_0$-WM uses test-time computation to sample action candidates, rank them with re-denoising consistency, and invoke simulator-based rectification for low-quality candidates. On challenging long-horizon and fine-grained robotic manipulation tasks, $τ_0$-WM shows superior performance over other relevant baselines.

CVMar 27, 2022
Recent Few-Shot Object Detection Algorithms: A Survey with Performance Comparison

Tianying Liu, Lu Zhang, Yang Wang et al.

The generic object detection (GOD) task has been successfully tackled by recent deep neural networks, trained by an avalanche of annotated training samples from some common classes. However, it is still non-trivial to generalize these object detectors to the novel long-tailed object classes, which have only few labeled training samples. To this end, the Few-Shot Object Detection (FSOD) has been topical recently, as it mimics the humans' ability of learning to learn, and intelligently transfers the learned generic object knowledge from the common heavy-tailed, to the novel long-tailed object classes. Especially, the research in this emerging field has been flourishing in recent years with various benchmarks, backbones, and methodologies proposed. To review these FSOD works, there are several insightful FSOD survey articles [58, 59, 74, 78] that systematically study and compare them as the groups of fine-tuning/transfer learning, and meta-learning methods. In contrast, we review the existing FSOD algorithms from a new perspective under a new taxonomy based on their contributions, i.e., data-oriented, model-oriented, and algorithm-oriented. Thus, a comprehensive survey with performance comparison is conducted on recent achievements of FSOD. Furthermore, we also analyze the technical challenges, the merits and demerits of these methods, and envision the future directions of FSOD. Specifically, we give an overview of FSOD, including the problem definition, common datasets, and evaluation protocols. The taxonomy is then proposed that groups FSOD methods into three types. Following this taxonomy, we provide a systematic review of the advances in FSOD. Finally, further discussions on performance, challenges, and future directions are presented.

CVJul 19, 2022
RCLane: Relay Chain Prediction for Lane Detection

Shenghua Xu, Xinyue Cai, Bin Zhao et al.

Lane detection is an important component of many real-world autonomous systems. Despite a wide variety of lane detection approaches have been proposed, reporting steady benchmark improvements over time, lane detection remains a largely unsolved problem. This is because most of the existing lane detection methods either treat the lane detection as a dense prediction or a detection task, few of them consider the unique topologies (Y-shape, Fork-shape, nearly horizontal lane) of the lane markers, which leads to sub-optimal solution. In this paper, we present a new method for lane detection based on relay chain prediction. Specifically, our model predicts a segmentation map to classify the foreground and background region. For each pixel point in the foreground region, we go through the forward branch and backward branch to recover the whole lane. Each branch decodes a transfer map and a distance map to produce the direction moving to the next point, and how many steps to progressively predict a relay station (next point). As such, our model is able to capture the keypoints along the lanes. Despite its simplicity, our strategy allows us to establish new state-of-the-art on four major benchmarks including TuSimple, CULane, CurveLanes and LLAMAS.

CVApr 21, 2022
Pixel2Mesh++: 3D Mesh Generation and Refinement from Multi-View Images

Chao Wen, Yinda Zhang, Chenjie Cao et al.

We study the problem of shape generation in 3D mesh representation from a small number of color images with or without camera poses. While many previous works learn to hallucinate the shape directly from priors, we adopt to further improve the shape quality by leveraging cross-view information with a graph convolution network. Instead of building a direct mapping function from images to 3D shape, our model learns to predict series of deformations to improve a coarse shape iteratively. Inspired by traditional multiple view geometry methods, our network samples nearby area around the initial mesh's vertex locations and reasons an optimal deformation using perceptual feature statistics built from multiple input images. Extensive experiments show that our model produces accurate 3D shapes that are not only visually plausible from the input perspectives, but also well aligned to arbitrary viewpoints. With the help of physically driven architecture, our model also exhibits generalization capability across different semantic categories, and the number of input images. Model analysis experiments show that our model is robust to the quality of the initial mesh and the error of camera pose, and can be combined with a differentiable renderer for test-time optimization.

CVAug 31, 2023
Coarse-to-Fine Amodal Segmentation with Shape Prior

Jianxiong Gao, Xuelin Qian, Yikai Wang et al.

Amodal object segmentation is a challenging task that involves segmenting both visible and occluded parts of an object. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, called Coarse-to-Fine Segmentation (C2F-Seg), that addresses this problem by progressively modeling the amodal segmentation. C2F-Seg initially reduces the learning space from the pixel-level image space to the vector-quantized latent space. This enables us to better handle long-range dependencies and learn a coarse-grained amodal segment from visual features and visible segments. However, this latent space lacks detailed information about the object, which makes it difficult to provide a precise segmentation directly. To address this issue, we propose a convolution refine module to inject fine-grained information and provide a more precise amodal object segmentation based on visual features and coarse-predicted segmentation. To help the studies of amodal object segmentation, we create a synthetic amodal dataset, named as MOViD-Amodal (MOViD-A), which can be used for both image and video amodal object segmentation. We extensively evaluate our model on two benchmark datasets: KINS and COCO-A. Our empirical results demonstrate the superiority of C2F-Seg. Moreover, we exhibit the potential of our approach for video amodal object segmentation tasks on FISHBOWL and our proposed MOViD-A. Project page at: http://jianxgao.github.io/C2F-Seg.

CVApr 3, 2022
DST: Dynamic Substitute Training for Data-free Black-box Attack

Wenxuan Wang, Xuelin Qian, Yanwei Fu et al.

With the wide applications of deep neural network models in various computer vision tasks, more and more works study the model vulnerability to adversarial examples. For data-free black box attack scenario, existing methods are inspired by the knowledge distillation, and thus usually train a substitute model to learn knowledge from the target model using generated data as input. However, the substitute model always has a static network structure, which limits the attack ability for various target models and tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic substitute training attack method to encourage substitute model to learn better and faster from the target model. Specifically, a dynamic substitute structure learning strategy is proposed to adaptively generate optimal substitute model structure via a dynamic gate according to different target models and tasks. Moreover, we introduce a task-driven graph-based structure information learning constrain to improve the quality of generated training data, and facilitate the substitute model learning structural relationships from the target model multiple outputs. Extensive experiments have been conducted to verify the efficacy of the proposed attack method, which can achieve better performance compared with the state-of-the-art competitors on several datasets.

CVMar 2, 2022
H4D: Human 4D Modeling by Learning Neural Compositional Representation

Boyan Jiang, Yinda Zhang, Xingkui Wei et al.

Despite the impressive results achieved by deep learning based 3D reconstruction, the techniques of directly learning to model 4D human captures with detailed geometry have been less studied. This work presents a novel framework that can effectively learn a compact and compositional representation for dynamic human by exploiting the human body prior from the widely used SMPL parametric model. Particularly, our representation, named H4D, represents a dynamic 3D human over a temporal span with the SMPL parameters of shape and initial pose, and latent codes encoding motion and auxiliary information. A simple yet effective linear motion model is proposed to provide a rough and regularized motion estimation, followed by per-frame compensation for pose and geometry details with the residual encoded in the auxiliary code. Technically, we introduce novel GRU-based architectures to facilitate learning and improve the representation capability. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method is not only efficacy in recovering dynamic human with accurate motion and detailed geometry, but also amenable to various 4D human related tasks, including motion retargeting, motion completion and future prediction. Please check out the project page for video and code: https://boyanjiang.github.io/H4D/.

CVJan 3, 2023
Vocabulary-informed Zero-shot and Open-set Learning

Yanwei Fu, Xiaomei Wang, Hanze Dong et al.

Despite significant progress in object categorization, in recent years, a number of important challenges remain; mainly, the ability to learn from limited labeled data and to recognize object classes within large, potentially open, set of labels. Zero-shot learning is one way of addressing these challenges, but it has only been shown to work with limited sized class vocabularies and typically requires separation between supervised and unsupervised classes, allowing former to inform the latter but not vice versa. We propose the notion of vocabulary-informed learning to alleviate the above mentioned challenges and address problems of supervised, zero-shot, generalized zero-shot and open set recognition using a unified framework. Specifically, we propose a weighted maximum margin framework for semantic manifold-based recognition that incorporates distance constraints from (both supervised and unsupervised) vocabulary atoms. Distance constraints ensure that labeled samples are projected closer to their correct prototypes, in the embedding space, than to others. We illustrate that resulting model shows improvements in supervised, zero-shot, generalized zero-shot, and large open set recognition, with up to 310K class vocabulary on Animal with Attributes and ImageNet datasets.

ROMay 9, 2022
Learning 6-DoF Object Poses to Grasp Category-level Objects by Language Instructions

Chilam Cheang, Haitao Lin, Yanwei Fu et al.

This paper studies the task of any objects grasping from the known categories by free-form language instructions. This task demands the technique in computer vision, natural language processing, and robotics. We bring these disciplines together on this open challenge, which is essential to human-robot interaction. Critically, the key challenge lies in inferring the category of objects from linguistic instructions and accurately estimating the 6-DoF information of unseen objects from the known classes. In contrast, previous works focus on inferring the pose of object candidates at the instance level. This significantly limits its applications in real-world scenarios.In this paper, we propose a language-guided 6-DoF category-level object localization model to achieve robotic grasping by comprehending human intention. To this end, we propose a novel two-stage method. Particularly, the first stage grounds the target in the RGB image through language description of names, attributes, and spatial relations of objects. The second stage extracts and segments point clouds from the cropped depth image and estimates the full 6-DoF object pose at category-level. Under such a manner, our approach can locate the specific object by following human instructions, and estimate the full 6-DoF pose of a category-known but unseen instance which is not utilized for training the model. Extensive experimental results show that our method is competitive with the state-of-the-art language-conditioned grasp method. Importantly, we deploy our approach on a physical robot to validate the usability of our framework in real-world applications. Please refer to the supplementary for the demo videos of our robot experiments.

CVMar 15, 2022
Wave-SAN: Wavelet based Style Augmentation Network for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning

Yuqian Fu, Yu Xie, Yanwei Fu et al.

Previous few-shot learning (FSL) works mostly are limited to natural images of general concepts and categories. These works assume very high visual similarity between the source and target classes. In contrast, the recently proposed cross-domain few-shot learning (CD-FSL) aims at transferring knowledge from general nature images of many labeled examples to novel domain-specific target categories of only a few labeled examples. The key challenge of CD-FSL lies in the huge data shift between source and target domains, which is typically in the form of totally different visual styles. This makes it very nontrivial to directly extend the classical FSL methods to address the CD-FSL task. To this end, this paper studies the problem of CD-FSL by spanning the style distributions of the source dataset. Particularly, wavelet transform is introduced to enable the decomposition of visual representations into low-frequency components such as shape and style and high-frequency components e.g., texture. To make our model robust to visual styles, the source images are augmented by swapping the styles of their low-frequency components with each other. We propose a novel Style Augmentation (StyleAug) module to implement this idea. Furthermore, we present a Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) module to ensure the predictions of style-augmented images are semantically similar to the unchanged ones. This avoids the potential semantic drift problem in exchanging the styles. Extensive experiments on two CD-FSL benchmarks show the effectiveness of our method. Our codes and models will be released.

CVNov 29, 2022
PatchMix Augmentation to Identify Causal Features in Few-shot Learning

Chengming Xu, Chen Liu, Xinwei Sun et al.

The task of Few-shot learning (FSL) aims to transfer the knowledge learned from base categories with sufficient labelled data to novel categories with scarce known information. It is currently an important research question and has great practical values in the real-world applications. Despite extensive previous efforts are made on few-shot learning tasks, we emphasize that most existing methods did not take into account the distributional shift caused by sample selection bias in the FSL scenario. Such a selection bias can induce spurious correlation between the semantic causal features, that are causally and semantically related to the class label, and the other non-causal features. Critically, the former ones should be invariant across changes in distributions, highly related to the classes of interest, and thus well generalizable to novel classes, while the latter ones are not stable to changes in the distribution. To resolve this problem, we propose a novel data augmentation strategy dubbed as PatchMix that can break this spurious dependency by replacing the patch-level information and supervision of the query images with random gallery images from different classes from the query ones. We theoretically show that such an augmentation mechanism, different from existing ones, is able to identify the causal features. To further make these features to be discriminative enough for classification, we propose Correlation-guided Reconstruction (CGR) and Hardness-Aware module for instance discrimination and easier discrimination between similar classes. Moreover, such a framework can be adapted to the unsupervised FSL scenario.

CVMar 6, 2023
Improving Transformer-based Image Matching by Cascaded Capturing Spatially Informative Keypoints

Chenjie Cao, Yanwei Fu

Learning robust local image feature matching is a fundamental low-level vision task, which has been widely explored in the past few years. Recently, detector-free local feature matchers based on transformers have shown promising results, which largely outperform pure Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based ones. But correlations produced by transformer-based methods are spatially limited to the center of source views' coarse patches, because of the costly attention learning. In this work, we rethink this issue and find that such matching formulation degrades pose estimation, especially for low-resolution images. So we propose a transformer-based cascade matching model -- Cascade feature Matching TRansformer (CasMTR), to efficiently learn dense feature correlations, which allows us to choose more reliable matching pairs for the relative pose estimation. Instead of re-training a new detector, we use a simple yet effective Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) post-process to filter keypoints through the confidence map, and largely improve the matching precision. CasMTR achieves state-of-the-art performance in indoor and outdoor pose estimation as well as visual localization. Moreover, thorough ablations show the efficacy of the proposed components and techniques.

CVApr 22, 2022
Reinforcing Generated Images via Meta-learning for One-Shot Fine-Grained Visual Recognition

Satoshi Tsutsui, Yanwei Fu, David Crandall

One-shot fine-grained visual recognition often suffers from the problem of having few training examples for new fine-grained classes. To alleviate this problem, off-the-shelf image generation techniques based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can potentially create additional training images. However, these GAN-generated images are often not helpful for actually improving the accuracy of one-shot fine-grained recognition. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning framework to combine generated images with original images, so that the resulting "hybrid" training images improve one-shot learning. Specifically, the generic image generator is updated by a few training instances of novel classes, and a Meta Image Reinforcing Network (MetaIRNet) is proposed to conduct one-shot fine-grained recognition as well as image reinforcement. Our experiments demonstrate consistent improvement over baselines on one-shot fine-grained image classification benchmarks. Furthermore, our analysis shows that the reinforced images have more diversity compared to the original and GAN-generated images.

CVApr 9, 2022
ManiTrans: Entity-Level Text-Guided Image Manipulation via Token-wise Semantic Alignment and Generation

Jianan Wang, Guansong Lu, Hang Xu et al.

Existing text-guided image manipulation methods aim to modify the appearance of the image or to edit a few objects in a virtual or simple scenario, which is far from practical application. In this work, we study a novel task on text-guided image manipulation on the entity level in the real world. The task imposes three basic requirements, (1) to edit the entity consistent with the text descriptions, (2) to preserve the text-irrelevant regions, and (3) to merge the manipulated entity into the image naturally. To this end, we propose a new transformer-based framework based on the two-stage image synthesis method, namely \textbf{ManiTrans}, which can not only edit the appearance of entities but also generate new entities corresponding to the text guidance. Our framework incorporates a semantic alignment module to locate the image regions to be manipulated, and a semantic loss to help align the relationship between the vision and language. We conduct extensive experiments on the real datasets, CUB, Oxford, and COCO datasets to verify that our method can distinguish the relevant and irrelevant regions and achieve more precise and flexible manipulation compared with baseline methods. The project homepage is \url{https://jawang19.github.io/manitrans}.

CVOct 23, 2022
Self-supervised Amodal Video Object Segmentation

Jian Yao, Yuxin Hong, Chiyu Wang et al.

Amodal perception requires inferring the full shape of an object that is partially occluded. This task is particularly challenging on two levels: (1) it requires more information than what is contained in the instant retina or imaging sensor, (2) it is difficult to obtain enough well-annotated amodal labels for supervision. To this end, this paper develops a new framework of Self-supervised amodal Video object segmentation (SaVos). Our method efficiently leverages the visual information of video temporal sequences to infer the amodal mask of objects. The key intuition is that the occluded part of an object can be explained away if that part is visible in other frames, possibly deformed as long as the deformation can be reasonably learned. Accordingly, we derive a novel self-supervised learning paradigm that efficiently utilizes the visible object parts as the supervision to guide the training on videos. In addition to learning type prior to complete masks for known types, SaVos also learns the spatiotemporal prior, which is also useful for the amodal task and could generalize to unseen types. The proposed framework achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the synthetic amodal segmentation benchmark FISHBOWL and the real world benchmark KINS-Video-Car. Further, it lends itself well to being transferred to novel distributions using test-time adaptation, outperforming existing models even after the transfer to a new distribution.

CVJul 19, 2022
Vision Transformers: From Semantic Segmentation to Dense Prediction

Li Zhang, Jiachen Lu, Sixiao Zheng et al.

The emergence of vision transformers (ViTs) in image classification has shifted the methodologies for visual representation learning. In particular, ViTs learn visual representation at full receptive field per layer across all the image patches, in comparison to the increasing receptive fields of CNNs across layers and other alternatives (e.g., large kernels and atrous convolution). In this work, for the first time we explore the global context learning potentials of ViTs for dense visual prediction (e.g., semantic segmentation). Our motivation is that through learning global context at full receptive field layer by layer, ViTs may capture stronger long-range dependency information, critical for dense prediction tasks. We first demonstrate that encoding an image as a sequence of patches, a vanilla ViT without local convolution and resolution reduction can yield stronger visual representation for semantic segmentation. For example, our model, termed as SEgmentation TRansformer (SETR), excels on ADE20K (50.28% mIoU, the first position in the test leaderboard on the day of submission) and performs competitively on Cityscapes. However, the basic ViT architecture falls short in broader dense prediction applications, such as object detection and instance segmentation, due to its lack of a pyramidal structure, high computational demand, and insufficient local context. For tackling general dense visual prediction tasks in a cost-effective manner, we further formulate a family of Hierarchical Local-Global (HLG) Transformers, characterized by local attention within windows and global-attention across windows in a pyramidal architecture. Extensive experiments show that our methods achieve appealing performance on a variety of dense prediction tasks (e.g., object detection and instance segmentation and semantic segmentation) as well as image classification.

CVSep 17, 2024Code
MinD-3D++: Advancing fMRI-Based 3D Reconstruction with High-Quality Textured Mesh Generation and a Comprehensive Dataset

Jianxiong Gao, Yanwei Fu, Yuqian Fu et al.

Reconstructing 3D visuals from functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data, introduced as Recon3DMind, is of significant interest to both cognitive neuroscience and computer vision. To advance this task, we present the fMRI-3D dataset, which includes data from 15 participants and showcases a total of 4,768 3D objects. The dataset consists of two components: fMRI-Shape, previously introduced and available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Fudan-fMRI/fMRI-Shape, and fMRI-Objaverse, proposed in this paper and available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Fudan-fMRI/fMRI-Objaverse. fMRI-Objaverse includes data from 5 subjects, 4 of whom are also part of the core set in fMRI-Shape. Each subject views 3,142 3D objects across 117 categories, all accompanied by text captions. This significantly enhances the diversity and potential applications of the dataset. Moreover, we propose MinD-3D++, a novel framework for decoding textured 3D visual information from fMRI signals. The framework evaluates the feasibility of not only reconstructing 3D objects from the human mind but also generating, for the first time, 3D textured meshes with detailed textures from fMRI data. We establish new benchmarks by designing metrics at the semantic, structural, and textured levels to evaluate model performance. Furthermore, we assess the model's effectiveness in out-of-distribution settings and analyze the attribution of the proposed 3D pari fMRI dataset in visual regions of interest (ROIs) in fMRI signals. Our experiments demonstrate that MinD-3D++ not only reconstructs 3D objects with high semantic and spatial accuracy but also provides deeper insights into how the human brain processes 3D visual information. Project page: https://jianxgao.github.io/MinD-3D.

CVOct 7, 2022
Specialized Re-Ranking: A Novel Retrieval-Verification Framework for Cloth Changing Person Re-Identification

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.

CVJul 25, 2024Code
Unified Lexical Representation for Interpretable Visual-Language Alignment

Yifan Li, Yikai Wang, Yanwei Fu et al.

Visual-Language Alignment (VLA) has gained a lot of attention since CLIP's groundbreaking work. Although CLIP performs well, the typical direct latent feature alignment lacks clarity in its representation and similarity scores. On the other hand, lexical representation, a vector whose element represents the similarity between the sample and a word from the vocabulary, is a natural sparse representation and interpretable, providing exact matches for individual words. However, lexical representations are difficult to learn due to no ground-truth supervision and false-discovery issues, and thus requires complex design to train effectively. In this paper, we introduce LexVLA, a more interpretable VLA framework by learning a unified lexical representation for both modalities without complex design. We use DINOv2 as our visual model for its local-inclined features and Llama 2, a generative language model, to leverage its in-context lexical prediction ability. To avoid the false discovery, we propose an overuse penalty to refrain the lexical representation from falsely frequently activating meaningless words. We demonstrate that these two pre-trained uni-modal models can be well-aligned by fine-tuning on the modest multi-modal dataset and avoid intricate training configurations. On cross-modal retrieval benchmarks, LexVLA, trained on the CC-12M multi-modal dataset, outperforms baselines fine-tuned on larger datasets (e.g., YFCC15M) and those trained from scratch on even bigger datasets (e.g., 1.1B data, including CC-12M). We conduct extensive experiments to analyze LexVLA. Codes are available at https://github.com/Clementine24/LexVLA.

CVJun 20, 2023
Pushing the Limits of 3D Shape Generation at Scale

Yu Wang, Xuelin Qian, Jingyang Huo et al.

We present a significant breakthrough in 3D shape generation by scaling it to unprecedented dimensions. Through the adaptation of the Auto-Regressive model and the utilization of large language models, we have developed a remarkable model with an astounding 3.6 billion trainable parameters, establishing it as the largest 3D shape generation model to date, named Argus-3D. Our approach addresses the limitations of existing methods by enhancing the quality and diversity of generated 3D shapes. To tackle the challenges of high-resolution 3D shape generation, our model incorporates tri-plane features as latent representations, effectively reducing computational complexity. Additionally, we introduce a discrete codebook for efficient quantization of these representations. Leveraging the power of transformers, we enable multi-modal conditional generation, facilitating the production of diverse and visually impressive 3D shapes. To train our expansive model, we leverage an ensemble of publicly-available 3D datasets, consisting of a comprehensive collection of approximately 900,000 objects from renowned repositories such as ModelNet40, ShapeNet, Pix3D, 3D-Future, and Objaverse. This diverse dataset empowers our model to learn from a wide range of object variations, bolstering its ability to generate high-quality and diverse 3D shapes. Extensive experimentation demonstrate the remarkable efficacy of our approach in significantly improving the visual quality of generated 3D shapes. By pushing the boundaries of 3D generation, introducing novel methods for latent representation learning, and harnessing the power of transformers for multi-modal conditional generation, our contributions pave the way for substantial advancements in the field. Our work unlocks new possibilities for applications in gaming, virtual reality, product design, and other domains that demand high-quality and diverse 3D objects.

ROAug 30, 2023
WALL-E: Embodied Robotic WAiter Load Lifting with Large Language Model

Tianyu Wang, Yifan Li, Haitao Lin et al.

Enabling robots to understand language instructions and react accordingly to visual perception has been a long-standing goal in the robotics research community. Achieving this goal requires cutting-edge advances in natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics engineering. Thus, this paper mainly investigates the potential of integrating the most recent Large Language Models (LLMs) and existing visual grounding and robotic grasping system to enhance the effectiveness of the human-robot interaction. We introduce the WALL-E (Embodied Robotic WAiter load lifting with Large Language model) as an example of this integration. The system utilizes the LLM of ChatGPT to summarize the preference object of the users as a target instruction via the multi-round interactive dialogue. The target instruction is then forwarded to a visual grounding system for object pose and size estimation, following which the robot grasps the object accordingly. We deploy this LLM-empowered system on the physical robot to provide a more user-friendly interface for the instruction-guided grasping task. The further experimental results on various real-world scenarios demonstrated the feasibility and efficacy of our proposed framework. See the project website at: https://star-uu-wang.github.io/WALL-E/

CVAug 21, 2023
Rethinking Person Re-identification from a Projection-on-Prototypes Perspective

Qizao Wang, Xuelin Qian, Bin Li et al.

Person Re-IDentification (Re-ID) as a retrieval task, has achieved tremendous development over the past decade. Existing state-of-the-art methods follow an analogous framework to first extract features from the input images and then categorize them with a classifier. However, since there is no identity overlap between training and testing sets, the classifier is often discarded during inference. Only the extracted features are used for person retrieval via distance metrics. In this paper, we rethink the role of the classifier in person Re-ID, and advocate a new perspective to conceive the classifier as a projection from image features to class prototypes. These prototypes are exactly the learned parameters of the classifier. In this light, we describe the identity of input images as similarities to all prototypes, which are then utilized as more discriminative features to perform person Re-ID. We thereby propose a new baseline ProNet, which innovatively reserves the function of the classifier at the inference stage. To facilitate the learning of class prototypes, both triplet loss and identity classification loss are applied to features that undergo the projection by the classifier. An improved version of ProNet++ is presented by further incorporating multi-granularity designs. Experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed ProNet is simple yet effective, and significantly beats previous baselines. ProNet++ also achieves competitive or even better results than transformer-based competitors.

ROMay 9, 2022
I Know What You Draw: Learning Grasp Detection Conditioned on a Few Freehand Sketches

Haitao Lin, Chilam Cheang, Yanwei Fu et al.

In this paper, we are interested in the problem of generating target grasps by understanding freehand sketches. The sketch is useful for the persons who cannot formulate language and the cases where a textual description is not available on the fly. However, very few works are aware of the usability of this novel interactive way between humans and robots. To this end, we propose a method to generate a potential grasp configuration relevant to the sketch-depicted objects. Due to the inherent ambiguity of sketches with abstract details, we take the advantage of the graph by incorporating the structure of the sketch to enhance the representation ability. This graph-represented sketch is further validated to improve the generalization of the network, capable of learning the sketch-queried grasp detection by using a small collection (around 100 samples) of hand-drawn sketches. Additionally, our model is trained and tested in an end-to-end manner which is easy to be implemented in real-world applications. Experiments on the multi-object VMRD and GraspNet-1Billion datasets demonstrate the good generalization of the proposed method. The physical robot experiments confirm the utility of our method in object-cluttered scenes.

CVAug 18, 2022
LoRD: Local 4D Implicit Representation for High-Fidelity Dynamic Human Modeling

Boyan Jiang, Xinlin Ren, Mingsong Dou et al.

Recent progress in 4D implicit representation focuses on globally controlling the shape and motion with low dimensional latent vectors, which is prone to missing surface details and accumulating tracking error. While many deep local representations have shown promising results for 3D shape modeling, their 4D counterpart does not exist yet. In this paper, we fill this blank by proposing a novel Local 4D implicit Representation for Dynamic clothed human, named LoRD, which has the merits of both 4D human modeling and local representation, and enables high-fidelity reconstruction with detailed surface deformations, such as clothing wrinkles. Particularly, our key insight is to encourage the network to learn the latent codes of local part-level representation, capable of explaining the local geometry and temporal deformations. To make the inference at test-time, we first estimate the inner body skeleton motion to track local parts at each time step, and then optimize the latent codes for each part via auto-decoding based on different types of observed data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method has strong capability for representing 4D human, and outperforms state-of-the-art methods on practical applications, including 4D reconstruction from sparse points, non-rigid depth fusion, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

CVJul 13, 2024Code
ContextualStory: Consistent Visual Storytelling with Spatially-Enhanced and Storyline Context

Sixiao Zheng, Yanwei Fu

Visual storytelling involves generating a sequence of coherent frames from a textual storyline while maintaining consistency in characters and scenes. Existing autoregressive methods, which rely on previous frame-sentence pairs, struggle with high memory usage, slow generation speeds, and limited context integration. To address these issues, we propose ContextualStory, a novel framework designed to generate coherent story frames and extend frames for visual storytelling. ContextualStory utilizes Spatially-Enhanced Temporal Attention to capture spatial and temporal dependencies, handling significant character movements effectively. Additionally, we introduce a Storyline Contextualizer to enrich context in storyline embedding, and a StoryFlow Adapter to measure scene changes between frames for guiding the model. Extensive experiments on PororoSV and FlintstonesSV datasets demonstrate that ContextualStory significantly outperforms existing SOTA methods in both story visualization and continuation. Code is available at https://github.com/sixiaozheng/ContextualStory.

CVMar 26, 2023
Joint fMRI Decoding and Encoding with Latent Embedding Alignment

Xuelin Qian, Yikai Wang, Yanwei Fu et al.

The connection between brain activity and corresponding visual stimuli is crucial in comprehending the human brain. While deep generative models have exhibited advancement in recovering brain recordings by generating images conditioned on fMRI signals, accomplishing high-quality generation with consistent semantics continues to pose challenges. Moreover, the prediction of brain activity from visual stimuli remains a formidable undertaking. In this paper, we introduce a unified framework that addresses both fMRI decoding and encoding. Commencing with the establishment of two latent spaces capable of representing and reconstructing fMRI signals and visual images, respectively, we proceed to align the fMRI signals and visual images within the latent space, thereby enabling a bidirectional transformation between the two domains. Our Latent Embedding Alignment (LEA) model concurrently recovers visual stimuli from fMRI signals and predicts brain activity from images within a unified framework. The performance of LEA surpasses that of existing methods on multiple benchmark fMRI decoding and encoding datasets. By integrating fMRI decoding and encoding, LEA offers a comprehensive solution for modeling the intricate relationship between brain activity and visual stimuli.

CVJul 17, 2022
A Simple Test-Time Method for Out-of-Distribution Detection

Ke Fan, Yikai Wang, Qian Yu et al.

Neural networks are known to produce over-confident predictions on input images, even when these images are out-of-distribution (OOD) samples. This limits the applications of neural network models in real-world scenarios, where OOD samples exist. Many existing approaches identify the OOD instances via exploiting various cues, such as finding irregular patterns in the feature space, logits space, gradient space or the raw space of images. In contrast, this paper proposes a simple Test-time Linear Training (ETLT) method for OOD detection. Empirically, we find that the probabilities of input images being out-of-distribution are surprisingly linearly correlated to the features extracted by neural networks. To be specific, many state-of-the-art OOD algorithms, although designed to measure reliability in different ways, actually lead to OOD scores mostly linearly related to their image features. Thus, by simply learning a linear regression model trained from the paired image features and inferred OOD scores at test-time, we can make a more precise OOD prediction for the test instances. We further propose an online variant of the proposed method, which achieves promising performance and is more practical in real-world applications. Remarkably, we improve FPR95 from $51.37\%$ to $12.30\%$ on CIFAR-10 datasets with maximum softmax probability as the base OOD detector. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets show the efficacy of ETLT for OOD detection task.

CVNov 30, 2022
Split-PU: Hardness-aware Training Strategy for Positive-Unlabeled Learning

Chengming Xu, Chen Liu, Siqian Yang et al.

Positive-Unlabeled (PU) learning aims to learn a model with rare positive samples and abundant unlabeled samples. Compared with classical binary classification, the task of PU learning is much more challenging due to the existence of many incompletely-annotated data instances. Since only part of the most confident positive samples are available and evidence is not enough to categorize the rest samples, many of these unlabeled data may also be the positive samples. Research on this topic is particularly useful and essential to many real-world tasks which demand very expensive labelling cost. For example, the recognition tasks in disease diagnosis, recommendation system and satellite image recognition may only have few positive samples that can be annotated by the experts. These methods mainly omit the intrinsic hardness of some unlabeled data, which can result in sub-optimal performance as a consequence of fitting the easy noisy data and not sufficiently utilizing the hard data. In this paper, we focus on improving the commonly-used nnPU with a novel training pipeline. We highlight the intrinsic difference of hardness of samples in the dataset and the proper learning strategies for easy and hard data. By considering this fact, we propose first splitting the unlabeled dataset with an early-stop strategy. The samples that have inconsistent predictions between the temporary and base model are considered as hard samples. Then the model utilizes a noise-tolerant Jensen-Shannon divergence loss for easy data; and a dual-source consistency regularization for hard data which includes a cross-consistency between student and base model for low-level features and self-consistency for high-level features and predictions, respectively.

CVAug 6, 2023
Local Consensus Enhanced Siamese Network with Reciprocal Loss for Two-view Correspondence Learning

Linbo Wang, Jing Wu, Xianyong Fang et al.

Recent studies of two-view correspondence learning usually establish an end-to-end network to jointly predict correspondence reliability and relative pose. We improve such a framework from two aspects. First, we propose a Local Feature Consensus (LFC) plugin block to augment the features of existing models. Given a correspondence feature, the block augments its neighboring features with mutual neighborhood consensus and aggregates them to produce an enhanced feature. As inliers obey a uniform cross-view transformation and share more consistent learned features than outliers, feature consensus strengthens inlier correlation and suppresses outlier distraction, which makes output features more discriminative for classifying inliers/outliers. Second, existing approaches supervise network training with the ground truth correspondences and essential matrix projecting one image to the other for an input image pair, without considering the information from the reverse mapping. We extend existing models to a Siamese network with a reciprocal loss that exploits the supervision of mutual projection, which considerably promotes the matching performance without introducing additional model parameters. Building upon MSA-Net, we implement the two proposals and experimentally achieve state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets.

CVMar 22, 2022
QS-Craft: Learning to Quantize, Scrabble and Craft for Conditional Human Motion Animation

Yuxin Hong, Xuelin Qian, Simian Luo et al.

This paper studies the task of conditional Human Motion Animation (cHMA). Given a source image and a driving video, the model should animate the new frame sequence, in which the person in the source image should perform a similar motion as the pose sequence from the driving video. Despite the success of Generative Adversarial Network (GANs) methods in image and video synthesis, it is still very challenging to conduct cHMA due to the difficulty in efficiently utilizing the conditional guided information such as images or poses, and generating images of good visual quality. To this end, this paper proposes a novel model of learning to Quantize, Scrabble, and Craft (QS-Craft) for conditional human motion animation. The key novelties come from the newly introduced three key steps: quantize, scrabble and craft. Particularly, our QS-Craft employs transformer in its structure to utilize the attention architectures. The guided information is represented as a pose coordinate sequence extracted from the driving videos. Extensive experiments on human motion datasets validate the efficacy of our model.

CVMar 26, 2023
Learning Versatile 3D Shape Generation with Improved AR Models

Simian Luo, Xuelin Qian, Yanwei Fu et al.

Auto-Regressive (AR) models have achieved impressive results in 2D image generation by modeling joint distributions in the grid space. While this approach has been extended to the 3D domain for powerful shape generation, it still has two limitations: expensive computations on volumetric grids and ambiguous auto-regressive order along grid dimensions. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Improved Auto-regressive Model (ImAM) for 3D shape generation, which applies discrete representation learning based on a latent vector instead of volumetric grids. Our approach not only reduces computational costs but also preserves essential geometric details by learning the joint distribution in a more tractable order. Moreover, thanks to the simplicity of our model architecture, we can naturally extend it from unconditional to conditional generation by concatenating various conditioning inputs, such as point clouds, categories, images, and texts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ImAM can synthesize diverse and faithful shapes of multiple categories, achieving state-of-the-art performance.