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Designing effective graph neural networks (GNNs) with message passing has two fundamental challenges, i.e., determining optimal message-passing pathways and designing local aggregators. Previous methods of designing optimal pathways are limited with information loss on the input features. On the other hand, existing local aggregators generally fail to extract multi-scale features and approximate diverse operators under limited parameter scales. In contrast to these methods, Euclidean convolution has been proven as an expressive aggregator, making it a perfect candidate for GNN construction. However, the challenges of generalizing Euclidean convolution to graphs arise from the irregular structure of graphs. To bridge the gap between Euclidean space and graph topology, we propose a differentiable method that applies permutations to calibrate input graphs for Euclidean convolution. The permutations constrain all nodes in a row regardless of their input order and therefore enable the flexible generalization of Euclidean convolution to graphs. Based on the graph calibration, we propose the Compressed Convolution Network (CoCN) for hierarchical graph representation learning. CoCN follows local feature-learning and global parameter-sharing mechanisms of convolution neural networks. The whole model can be trained end-to-end, with compressed convolution applied to learn individual node features and their corresponding structure features. CoCN can further borrow successful practices from Euclidean convolution, including residual connection and inception mechanism. We validate CoCN on both node-level and graph-level benchmarks. CoCN achieves superior performance over competitive GNN baselines. Codes are available at https://github.com/sunjss/CoCN.

Recent years have seen massive time-series data generated in many areas. This different scenario brings new challenges, particularly in terms of data ingestion, where existing technologies struggle to handle such massive time-series data, leading to low loading speed and poor timeliness. To address these challenges, this paper presents MatrixGate, a new and efficient data ingestion approach for massive time-series data. MatrixGate implements both single-instance and multi-instance parallel procedures, which is based on its unique ingestion strategies. First, MatrixGate uses policies to tune the slots that are synchronized with segments to ingest data, which eliminates the cost of starting transactions and enhance the efficiency. Second, multi-coroutines are responsible for transfer data, which can increase the degree of parallelism significantly. Third, lock-free queues are used to enable direct data transfer without the need for disk storage or lodging in the master instance. Experiment results on multiple datasets show that MatrixGate outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 3 to 100 times in loading speed, and cuts down about 80% query latency. Furthermore, MatrixGate scales out efficiently under distributed architecture, achieving scalability of 86%.

Video activity anticipation aims to predict what will happen in the future, embracing a broad application prospect ranging from robot vision and autonomous driving. Despite the recent progress, the data uncertainty issue, reflected as the content evolution process and dynamic correlation in event labels, has been somehow ignored. This reduces the model generalization ability and deep understanding on video content, leading to serious error accumulation and degraded performance. In this paper, we address the uncertainty learning problem and propose an uncertainty-boosted robust video activity anticipation framework, which generates uncertainty values to indicate the credibility of the anticipation results. The uncertainty value is used to derive a temperature parameter in the softmax function to modulate the predicted target activity distribution. To guarantee the distribution adjustment, we construct a reasonable target activity label representation by incorporating the activity evolution from the temporal class correlation and the semantic relationship. Moreover, we quantify the uncertainty into relative values by comparing the uncertainty among sample pairs and their temporal-lengths. This relative strategy provides a more accessible way in uncertainty modeling than quantifying the absolute uncertainty values on the whole dataset. Experiments on multiple backbones and benchmarks show our framework achieves promising performance and better robustness/interpretability. Source codes are available at https://github.com/qzhb/UbRV2A., Comment: Accepted by T-PAMI

In this paper, we address unsupervised domain adaptation under noisy environments, which is more challenging and practical than traditional domain adaptation. In this scenario, the model is prone to overfitting noisy labels, resulting in a more pronounced domain shift and a notable decline in the overall model performance. Previous methods employed prototype methods for domain adaptation on robust feature spaces. However, these approaches struggle to effectively classify classes with similar features under noisy environments. To address this issue, we propose a new method to detect and correct confusing class pair. We first divide classes into easy and hard classes based on the small loss criterion. We then leverage the top-2 predictions for each sample after aligning the source and target domain to find the confusing pair in the hard classes. We apply label correction to the noisy samples within the confusing pair. With the proposed label correction method, we can train our model with more accurate labels. Extensive experiments confirm the effectiveness of our method and demonstrate its favorable performance compared with existing state-of-the-art methods. Our codes are publicly available at https://github.com/Hehxcf/CPC/., Comment: AAAI 2024

Three-Dimensional (3D) dense captioning is an emerging vision-language bridging task that aims to generate multiple detailed and accurate descriptions for 3D scenes. It presents significant potential and challenges due to its closer representation of the real world compared to 2D visual captioning, as well as complexities in data collection and processing of 3D point cloud sources. Despite the popularity and success of existing methods, there is a lack of comprehensive surveys summarizing the advancements in this field, which hinders its progress. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of 3D dense captioning, covering task definition, architecture classification, dataset analysis, evaluation metrics, and in-depth prosperity discussions. Based on a synthesis of previous literature, we refine a standard pipeline that serves as a common paradigm for existing methods. We also introduce a clear taxonomy of existing models, summarize technologies involved in different modules, and conduct detailed experiment analysis. Instead of a chronological order introduction, we categorize the methods into different classes to facilitate exploration and analysis of the differences and connections among existing techniques. We also provide a reading guideline to assist readers with different backgrounds and purposes in reading efficiently. Furthermore, we propose a series of promising future directions for 3D dense captioning by identifying challenges and aligning them with the development of related tasks, offering valuable insights and inspiring future research in this field. Our aim is to provide a comprehensive understanding of 3D dense captioning, foster further investigations, and contribute to the development of novel applications in multimedia and related domains.

Temporal Sentence Grounding in Video (TSGV) is troubled by dataset bias issue, which is caused by the uneven temporal distribution of the target moments for samples with similar semantic components in input videos or query texts. Existing methods resort to utilizing prior knowledge about bias to artificially break this uneven distribution, which only removes a limited amount of significant language biases. In this work, we propose the bias-conflict sample synthesis and adversarial removal debias strategy (BSSARD), which dynamically generates bias-conflict samples by explicitly leveraging potentially spurious correlations between single-modality features and the temporal position of the target moments. Through adversarial training, its bias generators continuously introduce biases and generate bias-conflict samples to deceive its grounding model. Meanwhile, the grounding model continuously eliminates the introduced biases, which requires it to model multi-modality alignment information. BSSARD will cover most kinds of coupling relationships and disrupt language and visual biases simultaneously. Extensive experiments on Charades-CD and ActivityNet-CD demonstrate the promising debiasing capability of BSSARD. Source codes are available at https://github.com/qzhb/BSSARD., Comment: accepted by AAAI 2024

Recent text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress in generating high-quality images given text-prompts as input. However, these models fail to convey appropriate spatial composition specified by a layout instruction. In this work, we probe into zero-shot grounded T2I generation with diffusion models, that is, generating images corresponding to the input layout information without training auxiliary modules or finetuning diffusion models. We propose a Region and Boundary (R&B) aware cross-attention guidance approach that gradually modulates the attention maps of diffusion model during generative process, and assists the model to synthesize images (1) with high fidelity, (2) highly compatible with textual input, and (3) interpreting layout instructions accurately. Specifically, we leverage the discrete sampling to bridge the gap between consecutive attention maps and discrete layout constraints, and design a region-aware loss to refine the generative layout during diffusion process. We further propose a boundary-aware loss to strengthen object discriminability within the corresponding regions. Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art zero-shot grounded T2I generation methods by a large margin both qualitatively and quantitatively on several benchmarks., Comment: Preprint. Under review. Project page: https://sagileo.github.io/Region-and-Boundary

Given an image and an associated textual question, the purpose of Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) is to provide a correct answer to the question with the aid of external knowledge bases. Prior KB-VQA models are usually formulated as a retriever-classifier framework, where a pre-trained retriever extracts textual or visual information from knowledge graphs and then makes a prediction among the candidates. Despite promising progress, there are two drawbacks with existing models. Firstly, modeling question-answering as multi-class classification limits the answer space to a preset corpus and lacks the ability of flexible reasoning. Secondly, the classifier merely consider "what is the answer" without "how to get the answer", which cannot ground the answer to explicit reasoning paths. In this paper, we confront the challenge of \emph{explainable open-set} KB-VQA, where the system is required to answer questions with entities at wild and retain an explainable reasoning path. To resolve the aforementioned issues, we propose a new retriever-ranker paradigm of KB-VQA, Graph pATH rankER (GATHER for brevity). Specifically, it contains graph constructing, pruning, and path-level ranking, which not only retrieves accurate answers but also provides inference paths that explain the reasoning process. To comprehensively evaluate our model, we reformulate the benchmark dataset OK-VQA with manually corrected entity-level annotations and release it as ConceptVQA. Extensive experiments on real-world questions demonstrate that our framework is not only able to perform open-set question answering across the whole knowledge base but provide explicit reasoning path.

Current research on cross-modal retrieval is mostly English-oriented, as the availability of a large number of English-oriented human-labeled vision-language corpora. In order to break the limit of non-English labeled data, cross-lingual cross-modal retrieval (CCR) has attracted increasing attention. Most CCR methods construct pseudo-parallel vision-language corpora via Machine Translation (MT) to achieve cross-lingual transfer. However, the translated sentences from MT are generally imperfect in describing the corresponding visual contents. Improperly assuming the pseudo-parallel data are correctly correlated will make the networks overfit to the noisy correspondence. Therefore, we propose Dual-view Curricular Optimal Transport (DCOT) to learn with noisy correspondence in CCR. In particular, we quantify the confidence of the sample pair correlation with optimal transport theory from both the cross-lingual and cross-modal views, and design dual-view curriculum learning to dynamically model the transportation costs according to the learning stage of the two views. Extensive experiments are conducted on two multilingual image-text datasets and one video-text dataset, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method. Besides, our proposed method also shows a good expansibility to cross-lingual image-text baselines and a decent generalization on out-of-domain data.

Zero-shot video recognition (ZSVR) is a task that aims to recognize video categories that have not been seen during the model training process. Recently, vision-language models (VLMs) pre-trained on large-scale image-text pairs have demonstrated impressive transferability for ZSVR. To make VLMs applicable to the video domain, existing methods often use an additional temporal learning module after the image-level encoder to learn the temporal relationships among video frames. Unfortunately, for video from unseen categories, we observe an abnormal phenomenon where the model that uses spatial-temporal feature performs much worse than the model that removes temporal learning module and uses only spatial feature. We conjecture that improper temporal modeling on video disrupts the spatial feature of the video. To verify our hypothesis, we propose Feature Factorization to retain the orthogonal temporal feature of the video and use interpolation to construct refined spatial-temporal feature. The model using appropriately refined spatial-temporal feature performs better than the one using only spatial feature, which verifies the effectiveness of the orthogonal temporal feature for the ZSVR task. Therefore, an Orthogonal Temporal Interpolation module is designed to learn a better refined spatial-temporal video feature during training. Additionally, a Matching Loss is introduced to improve the quality of the orthogonal temporal feature. We propose a model called OTI for ZSVR by employing orthogonal temporal interpolation and the matching loss based on VLMs. The ZSVR accuracies on popular video datasets (i.e., Kinetics-600, UCF101 and HMDB51) show that OTI outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method by a clear margin.

DeepFakes have raised serious societal concerns, leading to a great surge in detection-based forensics methods in recent years. Face forgery recognition is a standard detection method that usually follows a two-phase pipeline. While those methods perform well in ideal experimental environment, they face challenges when dealing with DeepFakes in the wild involving complex background and multiple faces of varying sizes. Moreover, most face forgery recognition methods can only process one face at a time. One straightforward way to address this issue is to simultaneous process multi-face by integrating face extraction and forgery detection in an end-to-end fashion by adapting advanced object detection architectures. However, as these object detection architectures are designed to capture the discriminative features of different object categories rather than the subtle forgery traces among the faces, the direct adaptation suffers from limited representation ability. In this paper, we propose COMICS, an end-to-end framework for multi-face forgery detection. COMICS integrates face extraction and forgery detection in a seamless manner and adapts to advanced object detection architectures. The proposed bi-grained contrastive learning approach explores face forgery traces at both the coarse- and fine-grained levels. Specifically, coarse-grained level contrastive learning captures the discriminative features among positive and negative proposal pairs at multiple layers produced by the proposal generator, and fine-grained level contrastive learning captures the pixel-wise discrepancy between the forged and original areas of the same face and the pixel-wise content inconsistency among different faces. Extensive experiments on the OpenForensics and FFIW datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms other counterparts and shows great potential for being integrated into various architectures.

Recent studies have shown that higher accuracy on ImageNet usually leads to better robustness against different corruptions. Therefore, in this paper, instead of following the traditional research paradigm that investigates new out-of-distribution corruptions or perturbations deep models may encounter, we conduct model debugging in in-distribution data to explore which object attributes a model may be sensitive to. To achieve this goal, we create a toolkit for object editing with controls of backgrounds, sizes, positions, and directions, and create a rigorous benchmark named ImageNet-E(diting) for evaluating the image classifier robustness in terms of object attributes. With our ImageNet-E, we evaluate the performance of current deep learning models, including both convolutional neural networks and vision transformers. We find that most models are quite sensitive to attribute changes. A small change in the background can lead to an average of 9.23\% drop on top-1 accuracy. We also evaluate some robust models including both adversarially trained models and other robust trained models and find that some models show worse robustness against attribute changes than vanilla models. Based on these findings, we discover ways to enhance attribute robustness with preprocessing, architecture designs, and training strategies. We hope this work can provide some insights to the community and open up a new avenue for research in robust computer vision. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/alibaba/easyrobust., Comment: Accepted by CVPR2023

Few-shot image generation aims to generate data of an unseen category based on only a few samples. Apart from basic content generation, a bunch of downstream applications hopefully benefit from this task, such as low-data detection and few-shot classification. To achieve this goal, the generated images should guarantee category retention for classification beyond the visual quality and diversity. In our preliminary work, we present an ``editing-based'' framework Attribute Group Editing (AGE) for reliable few-shot image generation, which largely improves the generation performance. Nevertheless, AGE's performance on downstream classification is not as satisfactory as expected. This paper investigates the class inconsistency problem and proposes Stable Attribute Group Editing (SAGE) for more stable class-relevant image generation. SAGE takes use of all given few-shot images and estimates a class center embedding based on the category-relevant attribute dictionary. Meanwhile, according to the projection weights on the category-relevant attribute dictionary, we can select category-irrelevant attributes from the similar seen categories. Consequently, SAGE injects the whole distribution of the novel class into StyleGAN's latent space, thus largely remains the category retention and stability of the generated images. Going one step further, we find that class inconsistency is a common problem in GAN-generated images for downstream classification. Even though the generated images look photo-realistic and requires no category-relevant editing, they are usually of limited help for downstream classification. We systematically discuss this issue from both the generative model and classification model perspectives, and propose to boost the downstream classification performance of SAGE by enhancing the pixel and frequency components.

Weakly supervised video anomaly detection aims to identify abnormal events in videos using only video-level labels. Recently, two-stage self-training methods have achieved significant improvements by self-generating pseudo labels and self-refining anomaly scores with these labels. As the pseudo labels play a crucial role, we propose an enhancement framework by exploiting completeness and uncertainty properties for effective self-training. Specifically, we first design a multi-head classification module (each head serves as a classifier) with a diversity loss to maximize the distribution differences of predicted pseudo labels across heads. This encourages the generated pseudo labels to cover as many abnormal events as possible. We then devise an iterative uncertainty pseudo label refinement strategy, which improves not only the initial pseudo labels but also the updated ones obtained by the desired classifier in the second stage. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the proposed method performs favorably against state-of-the-art approaches on the UCF-Crime, TAD, and XD-Violence benchmark datasets.

Few-shot image generation is a challenging task since it aims to generate diverse new images for an unseen category with only a few images. Existing methods suffer from the trade-off between the quality and diversity of generated images. To tackle this problem, we propose Hyperbolic Attribute Editing~(HAE), a simple yet effective method. Unlike other methods that work in Euclidean space, HAE captures the hierarchy among images using data from seen categories in hyperbolic space. Given a well-trained HAE, images of unseen categories can be generated by moving the latent code of a given image toward any meaningful directions in the Poincar\'e disk with a fixing radius. Most importantly, the hyperbolic space allows us to control the semantic diversity of the generated images by setting different radii in the disk. Extensive experiments and visualizations demonstrate that HAE is capable of not only generating images with promising quality and diversity using limited data but achieving a highly controllable and interpretable editing process., Comment: ICCV 2023

In neuroimaging analysis, fMRI can well assess the function changes for brain diseases with no obvious structural lesions. To date, most deep-learning-based fMRI studies have employed functional connectivity (FC) as the basic feature for disease classification. However, FC is calculated on time series of predefined regions of interest and neglects detailed information contained in each voxel. Another drawback of using FC is the limited sample size for the training of deep models. The low representation ability of FC leads to poor performance in clinical practice, especially when dealing with multimodal medical data involving multiple types of visual signals and textual records for brain diseases. To overcome this bottleneck problem in the fMRI feature modality, we propose BrainFormer, an end-to-end functional interaction learning method for brain disease classification with single fMRI volume. Unlike traditional deep learning methods that construct convolution and transformers on FC, BrainFormer learns the functional interaction from fMRI signals, by modeling the local cues within each voxel with 3D convolutions and capturing the global correlations among distant regions with specially designed global attention mechanisms from shallow layers to deep layers. Meanwhile, BrainFormer can deal with multimodal medical data including fMRI volume, structural MRI, FC features and phenotypic data to achieve more comprehensive brain disease diagnosis. We evaluate BrainFormer on five independent multi-site datasets on autism, Alzheimer's disease, depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and headache disorders. The results demonstrate its effectiveness and generalizability for multiple brain diseases diagnosis with multimodal features. BrainFormer may promote precision of neuroimaging-based diagnosis in clinical practice and motivate future studies on fMRI analysis.

Referring video object segmentation aims to segment the object referred by a given language expression. Existing works typically require compressed video bitstream to be decoded to RGB frames before being segmented, which increases computation and storage requirements and ultimately slows the inference down. This may hamper its application in real-world computing resource limited scenarios, such as autonomous cars and drones. To alleviate this problem, in this paper, we explore the referring object segmentation task on compressed videos, namely on the original video data flow. Besides the inherent difficulty of the video referring object segmentation task itself, obtaining discriminative representation from compressed video is also rather challenging. To address this problem, we propose a multi-attention network which consists of dual-path dual-attention module and a query-based cross-modal Transformer module. Specifically, the dual-path dual-attention module is designed to extract effective representation from compressed data in three modalities, i.e., I-frame, Motion Vector and Residual. The query-based cross-modal Transformer firstly models the correlation between linguistic and visual modalities, and then the fused multi-modality features are used to guide object queries to generate a content-aware dynamic kernel and to predict final segmentation masks. Different from previous works, we propose to learn just one kernel, which thus removes the complicated post mask-matching procedure of existing methods. Extensive promising experimental results on three challenging datasets show the effectiveness of our method compared against several state-of-the-art methods which are proposed for processing RGB data. Source code is available at: https://github.com/DexiangHong/MANet., Comment: Accepted by ACM MM 2022

Weakly supervised Referring Expression Grounding (REG) aims to ground a particular target in an image described by a language expression while lacking the correspondence between target and expression. Two main problems exist in weakly supervised REG. First, the lack of region-level annotations introduces ambiguities between proposals and queries. Second, most previous weakly supervised REG methods ignore the discriminative location and context of the referent, causing difficulties in distinguishing the target from other same-category objects. To address the above challenges, we design an entity-enhanced adaptive reconstruction network (EARN). Specifically, EARN includes three modules: entity enhancement, adaptive grounding, and collaborative reconstruction. In entity enhancement, we calculate semantic similarity as supervision to select the candidate proposals. Adaptive grounding calculates the ranking score of candidate proposals upon subject, location and context with hierarchical attention. Collaborative reconstruction measures the ranking result from three perspectives: adaptive reconstruction, language reconstruction and attribute classification. The adaptive mechanism helps to alleviate the variance of different referring expressions. Experiments on five datasets show EARN outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. Qualitative results demonstrate that the proposed EARN can better handle the situation where multiple objects of a particular category are situated together., Comment: 17 pages, 10 figures, accepted by TPAMI. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1908.10568

Deep neural networks (DNN) are a promising tool in medical applications. However, the implementation of complex DNNs on battery-powered devices is challenging due to high energy costs for communication. In this work, a convolutional neural network model is developed for detecting atrial fibrillation from electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. The model demonstrates high performance despite being trained on limited, variable-length input data. Weight pruning and logarithmic quantisation are combined to introduce sparsity and reduce model size, which can be exploited for reduced data movement and lower computational complexity. The final model achieved a 91.1% model compression ratio while maintaining high model accuracy of 91.7% and less than 1% loss.

In recent years, creative content generations like style transfer and neural photo editing have attracted more and more attention. Among these, cartoonization of real-world scenes has promising applications in entertainment and industry. Different from image translations focusing on improving the style effect of generated images, video cartoonization has additional requirements on the temporal consistency. In this paper, we propose a spatially-adaptive semantic alignment framework with perceptual motion consistency for coherent video cartoonization in an unsupervised manner. The semantic alignment module is designed to restore deformation of semantic structure caused by spatial information lost in the encoder-decoder architecture. Furthermore, we devise the spatio-temporal correlative map as a style-independent, global-aware regularization on the perceptual motion consistency. Deriving from similarity measurement of high-level features in photo and cartoon frames, it captures global semantic information beyond raw pixel-value in optical flow. Besides, the similarity measurement disentangles temporal relationships from domain-specific style properties, which helps regularize the temporal consistency without hurting style effects of cartoon images. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate our method is able to generate highly stylistic and temporal consistent cartoon videos.

Conditional image generation is an active research topic including text2image and image translation. Recently image manipulation with linguistic instruction brings new challenges of multimodal conditional generation. However, traditional conditional image generation models mainly focus on generating high-quality and visually realistic images, and lack resolving the partial consistency between image and instruction. To address this issue, we propose an Increment Reasoning Generative Adversarial Network (IR-GAN), which aims to reason the consistency between visual increment in images and semantic increment in instructions. First, we introduce the word-level and instruction-level instruction encoders to learn user's intention from history-correlated instructions as semantic increment. Second, we embed the representation of semantic increment into that of source image for generating target image, where source image plays the role of referring auxiliary. Finally, we propose a reasoning discriminator to measure the consistency between visual increment and semantic increment, which purifies user's intention and guarantees the good logic of generated target image. Extensive experiments and visualization conducted on two datasets show the effectiveness of IR-GAN.

Few-shot image generation is a challenging task even using the state-of-the-art Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Due to the unstable GAN training process and the limited training data, the generated images are often of low quality and low diversity. In this work, we propose a new editing-based method, i.e., Attribute Group Editing (AGE), for few-shot image generation. The basic assumption is that any image is a collection of attributes and the editing direction for a specific attribute is shared across all categories. AGE examines the internal representation learned in GANs and identifies semantically meaningful directions. Specifically, the class embedding, i.e., the mean vector of the latent codes from a specific category, is used to represent the category-relevant attributes, and the category-irrelevant attributes are learned globally by Sparse Dictionary Learning on the difference between the sample embedding and the class embedding. Given a GAN well trained on seen categories, diverse images of unseen categories can be synthesized through editing category-irrelevant attributes while keeping category-relevant attributes unchanged. Without re-training the GAN, AGE is capable of not only producing more realistic and diverse images for downstream visual applications with limited data but achieving controllable image editing with interpretable category-irrelevant directions., Comment: CVPR2022

Neural networks often make predictions relying on the spurious correlations from the datasets rather than the intrinsic properties of the task of interest, facing sharp degradation on out-of-distribution (OOD) test data. Existing de-bias learning frameworks try to capture specific dataset bias by annotations but they fail to handle complicated OOD scenarios. Others implicitly identify the dataset bias by special design low capability biased models or losses, but they degrade when the training and testing data are from the same distribution. In this paper, we propose a General Greedy De-bias learning framework (GGD), which greedily trains the biased models and the base model. The base model is encouraged to focus on examples that are hard to solve with biased models, thus remaining robust against spurious correlations in the test stage. GGD largely improves models' OOD generalization ability on various tasks, but sometimes over-estimates the bias level and degrades on the in-distribution test. We further re-analyze the ensemble process of GGD and introduce the Curriculum Regularization inspired by curriculum learning, which achieves a good trade-off between in-distribution and out-of-distribution performance. Extensive experiments on image classification, adversarial question answering, and visual question answering demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. GGD can learn a more robust base model under the settings of both task-specific biased models with prior knowledge and self-ensemble biased model without prior knowledge., Comment: This work has been accepted by IEEE T-PAMI. Copyright is transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible

Video captioning aims to generate natural language descriptions according to the content, where representation learning plays a crucial role. Existing methods are mainly developed within the supervised learning framework via word-by-word comparison of the generated caption against the ground-truth text without fully exploiting linguistic semantics. In this work, we propose a hierarchical modular network to bridge video representations and linguistic semantics from three levels before generating captions. In particular, the hierarchy is composed of: (I) Entity level, which highlights objects that are most likely to be mentioned in captions. (II) Predicate level, which learns the actions conditioned on highlighted objects and is supervised by the predicate in captions. (III) Sentence level, which learns the global semantic representation and is supervised by the whole caption. Each level is implemented by one module. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art models on the two widely-used benchmarks: MSVD 104.0% and MSR-VTT 51.5% in CIDEr score., Comment: Accepted by CVPR 2022

Event analysis in untrimmed videos has attracted increasing attention due to the application of cutting-edge techniques such as CNN. As a well studied property for CNN-based models, the receptive field is a measurement for measuring the spatial range covered by a single feature response, which is crucial in improving the image categorization accuracy. In video domain, video event semantics are actually described by complex interaction among different concepts, while their behaviors vary drastically from one video to another, leading to the difficulty in concept-based analytics for accurate event categorization. To model the concept behavior, we study temporal concept receptive field of concept-based event representation, which encodes the temporal occurrence pattern of different mid-level concepts. Accordingly, we introduce temporal dynamic convolution (TDC) to give stronger flexibility to concept-based event analytics. TDC can adjust the temporal concept receptive field size dynamically according to different inputs. Notably, a set of coefficients are learned to fuse the results of multiple convolutions with different kernel widths that provide various temporal concept receptive field sizes. Different coefficients can generate appropriate and accurate temporal concept receptive field size according to input videos and highlight crucial concepts. Based on TDC, we propose the temporal dynamic concept modeling network (TDCMN) to learn an accurate and complete concept representation for efficient untrimmed video analysis. Experiment results on FCVID and ActivityNet show that TDCMN demonstrates adaptive event recognition ability conditioned on different inputs, and improve the event recognition performance of Concept-based methods by a large margin. Code is available at https://github.com/qzhb/TDCMN.

Future activity anticipation is a challenging problem in egocentric vision. As a standard future activity anticipation paradigm, recursive sequence prediction suffers from the accumulation of errors. To address this problem, we propose a simple and effective Self-Regulated Learning framework, which aims to regulate the intermediate representation consecutively to produce representation that (a) emphasizes the novel information in the frame of the current time-stamp in contrast to previously observed content, and (b) reflects its correlation with previously observed frames. The former is achieved by minimizing a contrastive loss, and the latter can be achieved by a dynamic reweighing mechanism to attend to informative frames in the observed content with a similarity comparison between feature of the current frame and observed frames. The learned final video representation can be further enhanced by multi-task learning which performs joint feature learning on the target activity labels and the automatically detected action and object class tokens. SRL sharply outperforms existing state-of-the-art in most cases on two egocentric video datasets and two third-person video datasets. Its effectiveness is also verified by the experimental fact that the action and object concepts that support the activity semantics can be accurately identified.

Dense video captioning (DVC) aims to generate multi-sentence descriptions to elucidate the multiple events in the video, which is challenging and demands visual consistency, discoursal coherence, and linguistic diversity. Existing methods mainly generate captions from individual video segments, lacking adaptation to the global visual context and progressive alignment between the fast-evolved visual content and textual descriptions, which results in redundant and spliced descriptions. In this paper, we introduce the concept of information flow to model the progressive information changing across video sequence and captions. By designing a Cross-modal Information Flow Alignment mechanism, the visual and textual information flows are captured and aligned, which endows the captioning process with richer context and dynamics on event/topic evolution. Based on the Cross-modal Information Flow Alignment module, we further put forward DVCFlow framework, which consists of a Global-local Visual Encoder to capture both global features and local features for each video segment, and a pre-trained Caption Generator to produce captions. Extensive experiments on the popular ActivityNet Captions and YouCookII datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms competitive baselines, and generates more human-like text according to subject and objective tests.

Current state-of-the-art approaches for image captioning typically adopt an autoregressive manner, i.e., generating descriptions word by word, which suffers from slow decoding issue and becomes a bottleneck in real-time applications. Non-autoregressive image captioning with continuous iterative refinement, which eliminates the sequential dependence in a sentence generation, can achieve comparable performance to the autoregressive counterparts with a considerable acceleration. Nevertheless, based on a well-designed experiment, we empirically proved that iteration times can be effectively reduced when providing sufficient prior knowledge for the language decoder. Towards that end, we propose a novel two-stage framework, referred to as Semi-Autoregressive Image Captioning (SAIC), to make a better trade-off between performance and speed. The proposed SAIC model maintains autoregressive property in global but relieves it in local. Specifically, SAIC model first jumpily generates an intermittent sequence in an autoregressive manner, that is, it predicts the first word in every word group in order. Then, with the help of the partially deterministic prior information and image features, SAIC model non-autoregressively fills all the skipped words with one iteration. Experimental results on the MS COCO benchmark demonstrate that our SAIC model outperforms the preceding non-autoregressive image captioning models while obtaining a competitive inference speedup. Code is available at https://github.com/feizc/SAIC., Comment: ACM MM2021 Oral

Language bias is a critical issue in Visual Question Answering (VQA), where models often exploit dataset biases for the final decision without considering the image information. As a result, they suffer from performance drop on out-of-distribution data and inadequate visual explanation. Based on experimental analysis for existing robust VQA methods, we stress the language bias in VQA that comes from two aspects, i.e., distribution bias and shortcut bias. We further propose a new de-bias framework, Greedy Gradient Ensemble (GGE), which combines multiple biased models for unbiased base model learning. With the greedy strategy, GGE forces the biased models to over-fit the biased data distribution in priority, thus makes the base model pay more attention to examples that are hard to solve by biased models. The experiments demonstrate that our method makes better use of visual information and achieves state-of-the-art performance on diagnosing dataset VQA-CP without using extra annotations., Comment: Accepted by ICCV 2021. Code: https://github.com/GeraldHan/GGE

Due to the domain discrepancy in visual domain adaptation, the performance of source model degrades when bumping into the high data density near decision boundary in target domain. A common solution is to minimize the Shannon Entropy to push the decision boundary away from the high density area. However, entropy minimization also leads to severe reduction of prediction diversity, and unfortunately brings harm to the domain adaptation. In this paper, we investigate the prediction discriminability and diversity by studying the structure of the classification output matrix of a randomly selected data batch. We find by theoretical analysis that the prediction discriminability and diversity could be separately measured by the Frobenius-norm and rank of the batch output matrix. The nuclear-norm is an upperbound of the former, and a convex approximation of the latter. Accordingly, we propose Batch Nuclear-norm Maximization and Minimization, which performs nuclear-norm maximization on the target output matrix to enhance the target prediction ability, and nuclear-norm minimization on the source batch output matrix to increase applicability of the source domain knowledge. We further approximate the nuclear-norm by L_{1,2}-norm, and design multi-batch optimization for stable solution on large number of categories. The fast approximation method achieves O(n^2) computational complexity and better convergence property. Experiments show that our method could boost the adaptation accuracy and robustness under three typical domain adaptation scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/cuishuhao/BNM., Comment: TPAMI under revivew. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2003.12237

Semi-supervised domain adaptation (SSDA) aims to solve tasks in target domain by utilizing transferable information learned from the available source domain and a few labeled target data. However, source data is not always accessible in practical scenarios, which restricts the application of SSDA in real world circumstances. In this paper, we propose a novel task named Semi-supervised Source Hypothesis Transfer (SSHT), which performs domain adaptation based on source trained model, to generalize well in target domain with a few supervisions. In SSHT, we are facing two challenges: (1) The insufficient labeled target data may result in target features near the decision boundary, with the increased risk of mis-classification; (2) The data are usually imbalanced in source domain, so the model trained with these data is biased. The biased model is prone to categorize samples of minority categories into majority ones, resulting in low prediction diversity. To tackle the above issues, we propose Consistency and Diversity Learning (CDL), a simple but effective framework for SSHT by facilitating prediction consistency between two randomly augmented unlabeled data and maintaining the prediction diversity when adapting model to target domain. Encouraging consistency regularization brings difficulty to memorize the few labeled target data and thus enhances the generalization ability of the learned model. We further integrate Batch Nuclear-norm Maximization into our method to enhance the discriminability and diversity. Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing SSDA methods and unsupervised model adaptation methods on DomainNet, Office-Home and Office-31 datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/Wang-xd1899/SSHT., Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures

Multimedia content is of predominance in the modern Web era. Investigating how users interact with multimodal items is a continuing concern within the rapid development of recommender systems. The majority of previous work focuses on modeling user-item interactions with multimodal features included as side information. However, this scheme is not well-designed for multimedia recommendation. Specifically, only collaborative item-item relationships are implicitly modeled through high-order item-user-item relations. Considering that items are associated with rich contents in multiple modalities, we argue that the latent semantic item-item structures underlying these multimodal contents could be beneficial for learning better item representations and further boosting recommendation. To this end, we propose a LATent sTructure mining method for multImodal reCommEndation, which we term LATTICE for brevity. To be specific, in the proposed LATTICE model, we devise a novel modality-aware structure learning layer, which learns item-item structures for each modality and aggregates multiple modalities to obtain latent item graphs. Based on the learned latent graphs, we perform graph convolutions to explicitly inject high-order item affinities into item representations. These enriched item representations can then be plugged into existing collaborative filtering methods to make more accurate recommendations. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art multimedia recommendation methods and validate the efficacy of mining latent item-item relationships from multimodal features., Comment: Accepted to ACM Multimedia 2021. Authors' version

We study the query-based attack against image retrieval to evaluate its robustness against adversarial examples under the black-box setting, where the adversary only has query access to the top-k ranked unlabeled images from the database. Compared with query attacks in image classification, which produce adversaries according to the returned labels or confidence score, the challenge becomes even more prominent due to the difficulty in quantifying the attack effectiveness on the partial retrieved list. In this paper, we make the first attempt in Query-based Attack against Image Retrieval (QAIR), to completely subvert the top-k retrieval results. Specifically, a new relevance-based loss is designed to quantify the attack effects by measuring the set similarity on the top-k retrieval results before and after attacks and guide the gradient optimization. To further boost the attack efficiency, a recursive model stealing method is proposed to acquire transferable priors on the target model and generate the prior-guided gradients. Comprehensive experiments show that the proposed attack achieves a high attack success rate with few queries against the image retrieval systems under the black-box setting. The attack evaluations on the real-world visual search engine show that it successfully deceives a commercial system such as Bing Visual Search with 98% attack success rate by only 33 queries on average.

Adversarial attack is a technique for deceiving Machine Learning (ML) models, which provides a way to evaluate the adversarial robustness. In practice, attack algorithms are artificially selected and tuned by human experts to break a ML system. However, manual selection of attackers tends to be sub-optimal, leading to a mistakenly assessment of model security. In this paper, a new procedure called Composite Adversarial Attack (CAA) is proposed for automatically searching the best combination of attack algorithms and their hyper-parameters from a candidate pool of \textbf{32 base attackers}. We design a search space where attack policy is represented as an attacking sequence, i.e., the output of the previous attacker is used as the initialization input for successors. Multi-objective NSGA-II genetic algorithm is adopted for finding the strongest attack policy with minimum complexity. The experimental result shows CAA beats 10 top attackers on 11 diverse defenses with less elapsed time (\textbf{6 $\times$ faster than AutoAttack}), and achieves the new state-of-the-art on $l_{\infty}$, $l_{2}$ and unrestricted adversarial attacks., Comment: To appear in AAAI 2021, code will be released later

In visual domain adaptation (DA), separating the domain-specific characteristics from the domain-invariant representations is an ill-posed problem. Existing methods apply different kinds of priors or directly minimize the domain discrepancy to address this problem, which lack flexibility in handling real-world situations. Another research pipeline expresses the domain-specific information as a gradual transferring process, which tends to be suboptimal in accurately removing the domain-specific properties. In this paper, we address the modeling of domain-invariant and domain-specific information from the heuristic search perspective. We identify the characteristics in the existing representations that lead to larger domain discrepancy as the heuristic representations. With the guidance of heuristic representations, we formulate a principled framework of Heuristic Domain Adaptation (HDA) with well-founded theoretical guarantees. To perform HDA, the cosine similarity scores and independence measurements between domain-invariant and domain-specific representations are cast into the constraints at the initial and final states during the learning procedure. Similar to the final condition of heuristic search, we further derive a constraint enforcing the final range of heuristic network output to be small. Accordingly, we propose Heuristic Domain Adaptation Network (HDAN), which explicitly learns the domain-invariant and domain-specific representations with the above mentioned constraints. Extensive experiments show that HDAN has exceeded state-of-the-art on unsupervised DA, multi-source DA and semi-supervised DA. The code is available at https://github.com/cuishuhao/HDA.

Semantic editing on segmentation map has been proposed as an intermediate interface for image generation, because it provides flexible and strong assistance in various image generation tasks. This paper aims to improve quality of edited segmentation map conditioned on semantic inputs. Even though recent studies apply global and local adversarial losses extensively to generate images for higher image quality, we find that they suffer from the misalignment of the boundary area in the mask area. To address this, we propose MExGAN for semantic editing on segmentation map, which uses a novel Multi-Expansion (MEx) loss implemented by adversarial losses on MEx areas. Each MEx area has the mask area of the generation as the majority and the boundary of original context as the minority. To boost convenience and stability of MEx loss, we further propose an Approximated MEx (A-MEx) loss. Besides, in contrast to previous model that builds training data for semantic editing on segmentation map with part of the whole image, which leads to model performance degradation, MExGAN applies the whole image to build the training data. Extensive experiments on semantic editing on segmentation map and natural image inpainting show competitive results on four datasets.