Zhishuai Zhang

CV
h-index102
28papers
11,590citations
Novelty55%
AI Score46

28 Papers

SDFeb 8, 2023
Noise2Music: Text-conditioned Music Generation with Diffusion Models

Qingqing Huang, Daniel S. Park, Tao Wang et al.

We introduce Noise2Music, where a series of diffusion models is trained to generate high-quality 30-second music clips from text prompts. Two types of diffusion models, a generator model, which generates an intermediate representation conditioned on text, and a cascader model, which generates high-fidelity audio conditioned on the intermediate representation and possibly the text, are trained and utilized in succession to generate high-fidelity music. We explore two options for the intermediate representation, one using a spectrogram and the other using audio with lower fidelity. We find that the generated audio is not only able to faithfully reflect key elements of the text prompt such as genre, tempo, instruments, mood, and era, but goes beyond to ground fine-grained semantics of the prompt. Pretrained large language models play a key role in this story -- they are used to generate paired text for the audio of the training set and to extract embeddings of the text prompts ingested by the diffusion models. Generated examples: https://google-research.github.io/noise2music

CLJun 22, 2023
AudioPaLM: A Large Language Model That Can Speak and Listen

Paul K. Rubenstein, Chulayuth Asawaroengchai, Duc Dung Nguyen et al.

We introduce AudioPaLM, a large language model for speech understanding and generation. AudioPaLM fuses text-based and speech-based language models, PaLM-2 [Anil et al., 2023] and AudioLM [Borsos et al., 2022], into a unified multimodal architecture that can process and generate text and speech with applications including speech recognition and speech-to-speech translation. AudioPaLM inherits the capability to preserve paralinguistic information such as speaker identity and intonation from AudioLM and the linguistic knowledge present only in text large language models such as PaLM-2. We demonstrate that initializing AudioPaLM with the weights of a text-only large language model improves speech processing, successfully leveraging the larger quantity of text training data used in pretraining to assist with the speech tasks. The resulting model significantly outperforms existing systems for speech translation tasks and has the ability to perform zero-shot speech-to-text translation for many languages for which input/target language combinations were not seen in training. AudioPaLM also demonstrates features of audio language models, such as transferring a voice across languages based on a short spoken prompt. We release examples of our method at https://google-research.github.io/seanet/audiopalm/examples

CVJun 1, 2023
Pedestrian Crossing Action Recognition and Trajectory Prediction with 3D Human Keypoints

Jiachen Li, Xinwei Shi, Feiyu Chen et al.

Accurate understanding and prediction of human behaviors are critical prerequisites for autonomous vehicles, especially in highly dynamic and interactive scenarios such as intersections in dense urban areas. In this work, we aim at identifying crossing pedestrians and predicting their future trajectories. To achieve these goals, we not only need the context information of road geometry and other traffic participants but also need fine-grained information of the human pose, motion and activity, which can be inferred from human keypoints. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-task learning framework for pedestrian crossing action recognition and trajectory prediction, which utilizes 3D human keypoints extracted from raw sensor data to capture rich information on human pose and activity. Moreover, we propose to apply two auxiliary tasks and contrastive learning to enable auxiliary supervisions to improve the learned keypoints representation, which further enhances the performance of major tasks. We validate our approach on a large-scale in-house dataset, as well as a public benchmark dataset, and show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of evaluation metrics. The effectiveness of each model component is validated in a detailed ablation study.

CVNov 1, 2023
De-Diffusion Makes Text a Strong Cross-Modal Interface

Chen Wei, Chenxi Liu, Siyuan Qiao et al.

We demonstrate text as a strong cross-modal interface. Rather than relying on deep embeddings to connect image and language as the interface representation, our approach represents an image as text, from which we enjoy the interpretability and flexibility inherent to natural language. We employ an autoencoder that uses a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model for decoding. The encoder is trained to transform an input image into text, which is then fed into the fixed text-to-image diffusion decoder to reconstruct the original input -- a process we term De-Diffusion. Experiments validate both the precision and comprehensiveness of De-Diffusion text representing images, such that it can be readily ingested by off-the-shelf text-to-image tools and LLMs for diverse multi-modal tasks. For example, a single De-Diffusion model can generalize to provide transferable prompts for different text-to-image tools, and also achieves a new state of the art on open-ended vision-language tasks by simply prompting large language models with few-shot examples.

CLMar 8, 2024
Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context

Gemini Team, Petko Georgiev, Ving Ian Lei et al. · deepmind, mila

In this report, we introduce the Gemini 1.5 family of models, representing the next generation of highly compute-efficient multimodal models capable of recalling and reasoning over fine-grained information from millions of tokens of context, including multiple long documents and hours of video and audio. The family includes two new models: (1) an updated Gemini 1.5 Pro, which exceeds the February version on the great majority of capabilities and benchmarks; (2) Gemini 1.5 Flash, a more lightweight variant designed for efficiency with minimal regression in quality. Gemini 1.5 models achieve near-perfect recall on long-context retrieval tasks across modalities, improve the state-of-the-art in long-document QA, long-video QA and long-context ASR, and match or surpass Gemini 1.0 Ultra's state-of-the-art performance across a broad set of benchmarks. Studying the limits of Gemini 1.5's long-context ability, we find continued improvement in next-token prediction and near-perfect retrieval (>99%) up to at least 10M tokens, a generational leap over existing models such as Claude 3.0 (200k) and GPT-4 Turbo (128k). Finally, we highlight real-world use cases, such as Gemini 1.5 collaborating with professionals on completing their tasks achieving 26 to 75% time savings across 10 different job categories, as well as surprising new capabilities of large language models at the frontier; when given a grammar manual for Kalamang, a language with fewer than 200 speakers worldwide, the model learns to translate English to Kalamang at a similar level to a person who learned from the same content.

AIDec 25, 2025
AMS-IO-Bench and AMS-IO-Agent: Benchmarking and Structured Reasoning for Analog and Mixed-Signal Integrated Circuit Input/Output Design

Zhishuai Zhang, Xintian Li, Shilong Liu et al.

In this paper, we propose AMS-IO-Agent, a domain-specialized LLM-based agent for structure-aware input/output (I/O) subsystem generation in analog and mixed-signal (AMS) integrated circuits (ICs). The central contribution of this work is a framework that connects natural language design intent with industrial-level AMS IC design deliverables. AMS-IO-Agent integrates two key capabilities: (1) a structured domain knowledge base that captures reusable constraints and design conventions; (2) design intent structuring, which converts ambiguous user intent into verifiable logic steps using JSON and Python as intermediate formats. We further introduce AMS-IO-Bench, a benchmark for wirebond-packaged AMS I/O ring automation. On this benchmark, AMS-IO-Agent achieves over 70\% DRC+LVS pass rate and reduces design turnaround time from hours to minutes, outperforming the baseline LLM. Furthermore, an agent-generated I/O ring was fabricated and validated in a 28 nm CMOS tape-out, demonstrating the practical effectiveness of the approach in real AMS IC design flows. To our knowledge, this is the first reported human-agent collaborative AMS IC design in which an LLM-based agent completes a nontrivial subtask with outputs directly used in silicon.

CVDec 9, 2018Code
Learning Transferable Adversarial Examples via Ghost Networks

Yingwei Li, Song Bai, Yuyin Zhou et al.

Recent development of adversarial attacks has proven that ensemble-based methods outperform traditional, non-ensemble ones in black-box attack. However, as it is computationally prohibitive to acquire a family of diverse models, these methods achieve inferior performance constrained by the limited number of models to be ensembled. In this paper, we propose Ghost Networks to improve the transferability of adversarial examples. The critical principle of ghost networks is to apply feature-level perturbations to an existing model to potentially create a huge set of diverse models. After that, models are subsequently fused by longitudinal ensemble. Extensive experimental results suggest that the number of networks is essential for improving the transferability of adversarial examples, but it is less necessary to independently train different networks and ensemble them in an intensive aggregation way. Instead, our work can be used as a computationally cheap and easily applied plug-in to improve adversarial approaches both in single-model and multi-model attack, compatible with residual and non-residual networks. By reproducing the NeurIPS 2017 adversarial competition, our method outperforms the No.1 attack submission by a large margin, demonstrating its effectiveness and efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/LiYingwei/ghost-network.

CVNov 28, 2018Code
Robust Face Detection via Learning Small Faces on Hard Images

Zhishuai Zhang, Wei Shen, Siyuan Qiao et al.

Recent anchor-based deep face detectors have achieved promising performance, but they are still struggling to detect hard faces, such as small, blurred and partially occluded faces. A reason is that they treat all images and faces equally, without putting more effort on hard ones; however, many training images only contain easy faces, which are less helpful to achieve better performance on hard images. In this paper, we propose that the robustness of a face detector against hard faces can be improved by learning small faces on hard images. Our intuitions are (1) hard images are the images which contain at least one hard face, thus they facilitate training robust face detectors; (2) most hard faces are small faces and other types of hard faces can be easily converted to small faces by shrinking. We build an anchor-based deep face detector, which only output a single feature map with small anchors, to specifically learn small faces and train it by a novel hard image mining strategy. Extensive experiments have been conducted on WIDER FACE, FDDB, Pascal Faces, and AFW datasets to show the effectiveness of our method. Our method achieves APs of 95.7, 94.9 and 89.7 on easy, medium and hard WIDER FACE val dataset respectively, which surpass the previous state-of-the-arts, especially on the hard subset. Code and model are available at https://github.com/bairdzhang/smallhardface.

CVMar 19, 2018Code
Improving Transferability of Adversarial Examples with Input Diversity

Cihang Xie, Zhishuai Zhang, Yuyin Zhou et al.

Though CNNs have achieved the state-of-the-art performance on various vision tasks, they are vulnerable to adversarial examples --- crafted by adding human-imperceptible perturbations to clean images. However, most of the existing adversarial attacks only achieve relatively low success rates under the challenging black-box setting, where the attackers have no knowledge of the model structure and parameters. To this end, we propose to improve the transferability of adversarial examples by creating diverse input patterns. Instead of only using the original images to generate adversarial examples, our method applies random transformations to the input images at each iteration. Extensive experiments on ImageNet show that the proposed attack method can generate adversarial examples that transfer much better to different networks than existing baselines. By evaluating our method against top defense solutions and official baselines from NIPS 2017 adversarial competition, the enhanced attack reaches an average success rate of 73.0%, which outperforms the top-1 attack submission in the NIPS competition by a large margin of 6.6%. We hope that our proposed attack strategy can serve as a strong benchmark baseline for evaluating the robustness of networks to adversaries and the effectiveness of different defense methods in the future. Code is available at https://github.com/cihangxie/DI-2-FGSM.

CVNov 6, 2017Code
Mitigating Adversarial Effects Through Randomization

Cihang Xie, Jianyu Wang, Zhishuai Zhang et al.

Convolutional neural networks have demonstrated high accuracy on various tasks in recent years. However, they are extremely vulnerable to adversarial examples. For example, imperceptible perturbations added to clean images can cause convolutional neural networks to fail. In this paper, we propose to utilize randomization at inference time to mitigate adversarial effects. Specifically, we use two randomization operations: random resizing, which resizes the input images to a random size, and random padding, which pads zeros around the input images in a random manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed randomization method is very effective at defending against both single-step and iterative attacks. Our method provides the following advantages: 1) no additional training or fine-tuning, 2) very few additional computations, 3) compatible with other adversarial defense methods. By combining the proposed randomization method with an adversarially trained model, it achieves a normalized score of 0.924 (ranked No.2 among 107 defense teams) in the NIPS 2017 adversarial examples defense challenge, which is far better than using adversarial training alone with a normalized score of 0.773 (ranked No.56). The code is public available at https://github.com/cihangxie/NIPS2017_adv_challenge_defense.

CLDec 19, 2023
Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models

Gemini Team, Rohan Anil, Sebastian Borgeaud et al.

This report introduces a new family of multimodal models, Gemini, that exhibit remarkable capabilities across image, audio, video, and text understanding. The Gemini family consists of Ultra, Pro, and Nano sizes, suitable for applications ranging from complex reasoning tasks to on-device memory-constrained use-cases. Evaluation on a broad range of benchmarks shows that our most-capable Gemini Ultra model advances the state of the art in 30 of 32 of these benchmarks - notably being the first model to achieve human-expert performance on the well-studied exam benchmark MMLU, and improving the state of the art in every one of the 20 multimodal benchmarks we examined. We believe that the new capabilities of the Gemini family in cross-modal reasoning and language understanding will enable a wide variety of use cases. We discuss our approach toward post-training and deploying Gemini models responsibly to users through services including Gemini, Gemini Advanced, Google AI Studio, and Cloud Vertex AI.

CVMar 25, 2021
Learning Part Segmentation through Unsupervised Domain Adaptation from Synthetic Vehicles

Qing Liu, Adam Kortylewski, Zhishuai Zhang et al.

Part segmentations provide a rich and detailed part-level description of objects. However, their annotation requires an enormous amount of work, which makes it difficult to apply standard deep learning methods. In this paper, we propose the idea of learning part segmentation through unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) from synthetic data. We first introduce UDA-Part, a comprehensive part segmentation dataset for vehicles that can serve as an adequate benchmark for UDA (https://qliu24.github.io/udapart). In UDA-Part, we label parts on 3D CAD models which enables us to generate a large set of annotated synthetic images. We also annotate parts on a number of real images to provide a real test set. Secondly, to advance the adaptation of part models trained from the synthetic data to the real images, we introduce a new UDA algorithm that leverages the object's spatial structure to guide the adaptation process. Our experimental results on two real test datasets confirm the superiority of our approach over existing works, and demonstrate the promise of learning part segmentation for general objects from synthetic data. We believe our dataset provides a rich testbed to study UDA for part segmentation and will help to significantly push forward research in this area.

CVDec 1, 2020
Unsupervised Part Discovery via Feature Alignment

Mengqi Guo, Yutong Bai, Zhishuai Zhang et al.

Understanding objects in terms of their individual parts is important, because it enables a precise understanding of the objects' geometrical structure, and enhances object recognition when the object is seen in a novel pose or under partial occlusion. However, the manual annotation of parts in large scale datasets is time consuming and expensive. In this paper, we aim at discovering object parts in an unsupervised manner, i.e., without ground-truth part or keypoint annotations. Our approach builds on the intuition that objects of the same class in a similar pose should have their parts aligned at similar spatial locations. We exploit the property that neural network features are largely invariant to nuisance variables and the main remaining source of variations between images of the same object category is the object pose. Specifically, given a training image, we find a set of similar images that show instances of the same object category in the same pose, through an affine alignment of their corresponding feature maps. The average of the aligned feature maps serves as pseudo ground-truth annotation for a supervised training of the deep network backbone. During inference, part detection is simple and fast, without any extra modules or overheads other than a feed-forward neural network. Our experiments on several datasets from different domains verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. For example, we achieve 37.8 mAP on VehiclePart, which is at least 4.2 better than previous methods.

CVMay 8, 2020
STINet: Spatio-Temporal-Interactive Network for Pedestrian Detection and Trajectory Prediction

Zhishuai Zhang, Jiyang Gao, Junhua Mao et al.

Detecting pedestrians and predicting future trajectories for them are critical tasks for numerous applications, such as autonomous driving. Previous methods either treat the detection and prediction as separate tasks or simply add a trajectory regression head on top of a detector. In this work, we present a novel end-to-end two-stage network: Spatio-Temporal-Interactive Network (STINet). In addition to 3D geometry modeling of pedestrians, we model the temporal information for each of the pedestrians. To do so, our method predicts both current and past locations in the first stage, so that each pedestrian can be linked across frames and the comprehensive spatio-temporal information can be captured in the second stage. Also, we model the interaction among objects with an interaction graph, to gather the information among the neighboring objects. Comprehensive experiments on the Lyft Dataset and the recently released large-scale Waymo Open Dataset for both object detection and future trajectory prediction validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. For the Waymo Open Dataset, we achieve a bird-eyes-view (BEV) detection AP of 80.73 and trajectory prediction average displacement error (ADE) of 33.67cm for pedestrians, which establish the state-of-the-art for both tasks.

CVNov 18, 2019
Localizing Occluders with Compositional Convolutional Networks

Adam Kortylewski, Qing Liu, Huiyu Wang et al.

Compositional convolutional networks are generative compositional models of neural network features, that achieve state of the art results when classifying partially occluded objects, even when they have not been exposed to occluded objects during training. In this work, we study the performance of CompositionalNets at localizing occluders in images. We show that the original model is not able to localize occluders well. We propose to overcome this limitation by modeling the feature activations as a mixture of von-Mises-Fisher distributions, which also allows for an end-to-end training of CompositionalNets. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed extensions increase the model's performance at localizing occluders as well as at classifying partially occluded objects.

IVSep 3, 2019
Hyper-Pairing Network for Multi-Phase Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma Segmentation

Yuyin Zhou, Yingwei Li, Zhishuai Zhang et al.

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is one of the most lethal cancers with an overall five-year survival rate of 8%. Due to subtle texture changes of PDAC, pancreatic dual-phase imaging is recommended for better diagnosis of pancreatic disease. In this study, we aim at enhancing PDAC automatic segmentation by integrating multi-phase information (i.e., arterial phase and venous phase). To this end, we present Hyper-Pairing Network (HPN), a 3D fully convolution neural network which effectively integrates information from different phases. The proposed approach consists of a dual path network where the two parallel streams are interconnected with hyper-connections for intensive information exchange. Additionally, a pairing loss is added to encourage the commonality between high-level feature representations of different phases. Compared to prior arts which use single phase data, HPN reports a significant improvement up to 7.73% (from 56.21% to 63.94%) in terms of DSC.

IVJun 23, 2019
Multi-Scale Attentional Network for Multi-Focal Segmentation of Active Bleed after Pelvic Fractures

Yuyin Zhou, David Dreizin, Yingwei Li et al.

Trauma is the worldwide leading cause of death and disability in those younger than 45 years, and pelvic fractures are a major source of morbidity and mortality. Automated segmentation of multiple foci of arterial bleeding from abdominopelvic trauma CT could provide rapid objective measurements of the total extent of active bleeding, potentially augmenting outcome prediction at the point of care, while improving patient triage, allocation of appropriate resources, and time to definitive intervention. In spite of the importance of active bleeding in the quick tempo of trauma care, the task is still quite challenging due to the variable contrast, intensity, location, size, shape, and multiplicity of bleeding foci. Existing work [4] presents a heuristic rule-based segmentation technique which requires multiple stages and cannot be efficiently optimized end-to-end. To this end, we present, Multi-Scale Attentional Network (MSAN), the first yet reliable end-to-end network, for automated segmentation of active hemorrhage from contrast-enhanced trauma CT scans. MSAN consists of the following components: 1) an encoder which fully integrates the global contextual information from holistic 2D slices; 2) a multi-scale strategy applied both in the training stage and the inference stage to handle the challenges induced by variation of target sizes; 3) an attentional module to further refine the deep features, leading to better segmentation quality; and 4) a multi-view mechanism to fully leverage the 3D information. Our MSAN reports a significant improvement of more than 7% compared to prior arts in terms of DSC.

CVMay 28, 2019
Combining Compositional Models and Deep Networks For Robust Object Classification under Occlusion

Adam Kortylewski, Qing Liu, Huiyu Wang et al.

Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) are powerful models that yield impressive results at object classification. However, recent work has shown that they do not generalize well to partially occluded objects and to mask attacks. In contrast to DCNNs, compositional models are robust to partial occlusion, however, they are not as discriminative as deep models. In this work, we combine DCNNs and compositional object models to retain the best of both approaches: a discriminative model that is robust to partial occlusion and mask attacks. Our model is learned in two steps. First, a standard DCNN is trained for image classification. Subsequently, we cluster the DCNN features into dictionaries. We show that the dictionary components resemble object part detectors and learn the spatial distribution of parts for each object class. We propose mixtures of compositional models to account for large changes in the spatial activation patterns (e.g. due to changes in the 3D pose of an object). At runtime, an image is first classified by the DCNN in a feedforward manner. The prediction uncertainty is used to detect partially occluded objects, which in turn are classified by the compositional model. Our experimental results demonstrate that combining compositional models and DCNNs resolves a fundamental problem of current deep learning approaches to computer vision: The combined model recognizes occluded objects, even when it has not been exposed to occluded objects during training, while at the same time maintaining high discriminative performance for non-occluded objects.

CVMar 31, 2018
Adversarial Attacks and Defences Competition

Alexey Kurakin, Ian Goodfellow, Samy Bengio et al.

To accelerate research on adversarial examples and robustness of machine learning classifiers, Google Brain organized a NIPS 2017 competition that encouraged researchers to develop new methods to generate adversarial examples as well as to develop new ways to defend against them. In this chapter, we describe the structure and organization of the competition and the solutions developed by several of the top-placing teams.

CVMar 15, 2018
Deep Co-Training for Semi-Supervised Image Recognition

Siyuan Qiao, Wei Shen, Zhishuai Zhang et al.

In this paper, we study the problem of semi-supervised image recognition, which is to learn classifiers using both labeled and unlabeled images. We present Deep Co-Training, a deep learning based method inspired by the Co-Training framework. The original Co-Training learns two classifiers on two views which are data from different sources that describe the same instances. To extend this concept to deep learning, Deep Co-Training trains multiple deep neural networks to be the different views and exploits adversarial examples to encourage view difference, in order to prevent the networks from collapsing into each other. As a result, the co-trained networks provide different and complementary information about the data, which is necessary for the Co-Training framework to achieve good results. We test our method on SVHN, CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet datasets, and our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.

CVDec 1, 2017
Single-Shot Object Detection with Enriched Semantics

Zhishuai Zhang, Siyuan Qiao, Cihang Xie et al.

We propose a novel single shot object detection network named Detection with Enriched Semantics (DES). Our motivation is to enrich the semantics of object detection features within a typical deep detector, by a semantic segmentation branch and a global activation module. The segmentation branch is supervised by weak segmentation ground-truth, i.e., no extra annotation is required. In conjunction with that, we employ a global activation module which learns relationship between channels and object classes in a self-supervised manner. Comprehensive experimental results on both PASCAL VOC and MS COCO detection datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. In particular, with a VGG16 based DES, we achieve an mAP of 81.7 on VOC2007 test and an mAP of 32.8 on COCO test-dev with an inference speed of 31.5 milliseconds per image on a Titan Xp GPU. With a lower resolution version, we achieve an mAP of 79.7 on VOC2007 with an inference speed of 13.0 milliseconds per image.

CVNov 25, 2017
Gradually Updated Neural Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition

Siyuan Qiao, Zhishuai Zhang, Wei Shen et al.

Depth is one of the keys that make neural networks succeed in the task of large-scale image recognition. The state-of-the-art network architectures usually increase the depths by cascading convolutional layers or building blocks. In this paper, we present an alternative method to increase the depth. Our method is by introducing computation orderings to the channels within convolutional layers or blocks, based on which we gradually compute the outputs in a channel-wise manner. The added orderings not only increase the depths and the learning capacities of the networks without any additional computation costs, but also eliminate the overlap singularities so that the networks are able to converge faster and perform better. Experiments show that the networks based on our method achieve the state-of-the-art performances on CIFAR and ImageNet datasets.

CVNov 13, 2017
Visual Concepts and Compositional Voting

Jianyu Wang, Zhishuai Zhang, Cihang Xie et al.

It is very attractive to formulate vision in terms of pattern theory \cite{Mumford2010pattern}, where patterns are defined hierarchically by compositions of elementary building blocks. But applying pattern theory to real world images is currently less successful than discriminative methods such as deep networks. Deep networks, however, are black-boxes which are hard to interpret and can easily be fooled by adding occluding objects. It is natural to wonder whether by better understanding deep networks we can extract building blocks which can be used to develop pattern theoretic models. This motivates us to study the internal representations of a deep network using vehicle images from the PASCAL3D+ dataset. We use clustering algorithms to study the population activities of the features and extract a set of visual concepts which we show are visually tight and correspond to semantic parts of vehicles. To analyze this we annotate these vehicles by their semantic parts to create a new dataset, VehicleSemanticParts, and evaluate visual concepts as unsupervised part detectors. We show that visual concepts perform fairly well but are outperformed by supervised discriminative methods such as Support Vector Machines (SVM). We next give a more detailed analysis of visual concepts and how they relate to semantic parts. Following this, we use the visual concepts as building blocks for a simple pattern theoretical model, which we call compositional voting. In this model several visual concepts combine to detect semantic parts. We show that this approach is significantly better than discriminative methods like SVM and deep networks trained specifically for semantic part detection. Finally, we return to studying occlusion by creating an annotated dataset with occlusion, called VehicleOcclusion, and show that compositional voting outperforms even deep networks when the amount of occlusion becomes large.

CVSep 14, 2017
DeepVoting: A Robust and Explainable Deep Network for Semantic Part Detection under Partial Occlusion

Zhishuai Zhang, Cihang Xie, Jianyu Wang et al.

In this paper, we study the task of detecting semantic parts of an object, e.g., a wheel of a car, under partial occlusion. We propose that all models should be trained without seeing occlusions while being able to transfer the learned knowledge to deal with occlusions. This setting alleviates the difficulty in collecting an exponentially large dataset to cover occlusion patterns and is more essential. In this scenario, the proposal-based deep networks, like RCNN-series, often produce unsatisfactory results, because both the proposal extraction and classification stages may be confused by the irrelevant occluders. To address this, [25] proposed a voting mechanism that combines multiple local visual cues to detect semantic parts. The semantic parts can still be detected even though some visual cues are missing due to occlusions. However, this method is manually-designed, thus is hard to be optimized in an end-to-end manner. In this paper, we present DeepVoting, which incorporates the robustness shown by [25] into a deep network, so that the whole pipeline can be jointly optimized. Specifically, it adds two layers after the intermediate features of a deep network, e.g., the pool-4 layer of VGGNet. The first layer extracts the evidence of local visual cues, and the second layer performs a voting mechanism by utilizing the spatial relationship between visual cues and semantic parts. We also propose an improved version DeepVoting+ by learning visual cues from context outside objects. In experiments, DeepVoting achieves significantly better performance than several baseline methods, including Faster-RCNN, for semantic part detection under occlusion. In addition, DeepVoting enjoys explainability as the detection results can be diagnosed via looking up the voting cues.

CVJul 25, 2017
Detecting Semantic Parts on Partially Occluded Objects

Jianyu Wang, Cihang Xie, Zhishuai Zhang et al.

In this paper, we address the task of detecting semantic parts on partially occluded objects. We consider a scenario where the model is trained using non-occluded images but tested on occluded images. The motivation is that there are infinite number of occlusion patterns in real world, which cannot be fully covered in the training data. So the models should be inherently robust and adaptive to occlusions instead of fitting / learning the occlusion patterns in the training data. Our approach detects semantic parts by accumulating the confidence of local visual cues. Specifically, the method uses a simple voting method, based on log-likelihood ratio tests and spatial constraints, to combine the evidence of local cues. These cues are called visual concepts, which are derived by clustering the internal states of deep networks. We evaluate our voting scheme on the VehicleSemanticPart dataset with dense part annotations. We randomly place two, three or four irrelevant objects onto the target object to generate testing images with various occlusions. Experiments show that our algorithm outperforms several competitors in semantic part detection when occlusions are present.

CVMar 24, 2017
Adversarial Examples for Semantic Segmentation and Object Detection

Cihang Xie, Jianyu Wang, Zhishuai Zhang et al.

It has been well demonstrated that adversarial examples, i.e., natural images with visually imperceptible perturbations added, generally exist for deep networks to fail on image classification. In this paper, we extend adversarial examples to semantic segmentation and object detection which are much more difficult. Our observation is that both segmentation and detection are based on classifying multiple targets on an image (e.g., the basic target is a pixel or a receptive field in segmentation, and an object proposal in detection), which inspires us to optimize a loss function over a set of pixels/proposals for generating adversarial perturbations. Based on this idea, we propose a novel algorithm named Dense Adversary Generation (DAG), which generates a large family of adversarial examples, and applies to a wide range of state-of-the-art deep networks for segmentation and detection. We also find that the adversarial perturbations can be transferred across networks with different training data, based on different architectures, and even for different recognition tasks. In particular, the transferability across networks with the same architecture is more significant than in other cases. Besides, summing up heterogeneous perturbations often leads to better transfer performance, which provides an effective method of black-box adversarial attack.

LGOct 3, 2016
Technical Report on the CleverHans v2.1.0 Adversarial Examples Library

Nicolas Papernot, Fartash Faghri, Nicholas Carlini et al.

CleverHans is a software library that provides standardized reference implementations of adversarial example construction techniques and adversarial training. The library may be used to develop more robust machine learning models and to provide standardized benchmarks of models' performance in the adversarial setting. Benchmarks constructed without a standardized implementation of adversarial example construction are not comparable to each other, because a good result may indicate a robust model or it may merely indicate a weak implementation of the adversarial example construction procedure. This technical report is structured as follows. Section 1 provides an overview of adversarial examples in machine learning and of the CleverHans software. Section 2 presents the core functionalities of the library: namely the attacks based on adversarial examples and defenses to improve the robustness of machine learning models to these attacks. Section 3 describes how to report benchmark results using the library. Section 4 describes the versioning system.

LGNov 21, 2015
Unsupervised learning of object semantic parts from internal states of CNNs by population encoding

Jianyu Wang, Zhishuai Zhang, Cihang Xie et al.

We address the key question of how object part representations can be found from the internal states of CNNs that are trained for high-level tasks, such as object classification. This work provides a new unsupervised method to learn semantic parts and gives new understanding of the internal representations of CNNs. Our technique is based on the hypothesis that semantic parts are represented by populations of neurons rather than by single filters. We propose a clustering technique to extract part representations, which we call Visual Concepts. We show that visual concepts are semantically coherent in that they represent semantic parts, and visually coherent in that corresponding image patches appear very similar. Also, visual concepts provide full spatial coverage of the parts of an object, rather than a few sparse parts as is typically found in keypoint annotations. Furthermore, We treat single visual concept as part detector and evaluate it for keypoint detection using the PASCAL3D+ dataset and for part detection using our newly annotated ImageNetPart dataset. The experiments demonstrate that visual concepts can be used to detect parts. We also show that some visual concepts respond to several semantic parts, provided these parts are visually similar. Thus visual concepts have the essential properties: semantic meaning and detection capability. Note that our ImageNetPart dataset gives rich part annotations which cover the whole object, making it useful for other part-related applications.