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Vanilla text-to-image diffusion models struggle with generating accurate human images, commonly resulting in imperfect anatomies such as unnatural postures or disproportionate limbs.Existing methods address this issue mostly by fine-tuning the model with extra images or adding additional controls -- human-centric priors such as pose or depth maps -- during the image generation phase. This paper explores the integration of these human-centric priors directly into the model fine-tuning stage, essentially eliminating the need for extra conditions at the inference stage. We realize this idea by proposing a human-centric alignment loss to strengthen human-related information from the textual prompts within the cross-attention maps. To ensure semantic detail richness and human structural accuracy during fine-tuning, we introduce scale-aware and step-wise constraints within the diffusion process, according to an in-depth analysis of the cross-attention layer. Extensive experiments show that our method largely improves over state-of-the-art text-to-image models to synthesize high-quality human images based on user-written prompts. Project page: \url{https://hcplayercvpr2024.github.io}., Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2024

Person Re-identification (ReID) plays a more and more crucial role in recent years with a wide range of applications. Existing ReID methods are suffering from the challenges of misalignment and occlusions, which degrade the performance dramatically. Most methods tackle such challenges by utilizing external tools to locate body parts or exploiting matching strategies. Nevertheless, the inevitable domain gap between the datasets utilized for external tools and the ReID datasets and the complicated matching process make these methods unreliable and sensitive to noises. In this paper, we propose a Region Generation and Assessment Network (RGANet) to effectively and efficiently detect the human body regions and highlight the important regions. In the proposed RGANet, we first devise a Region Generation Module (RGM) which utilizes the pre-trained CLIP to locate the human body regions using semantic prototypes extracted from text descriptions. Learnable prompt is designed to eliminate domain gap between CLIP datasets and ReID datasets. Then, to measure the importance of each generated region, we introduce a Region Assessment Module (RAM) that assigns confidence scores to different regions and reduces the negative impact of the occlusion regions by lower scores. The RAM consists of a discrimination-aware indicator and an invariance-aware indicator, where the former indicates the capability to distinguish from different identities and the latter represents consistency among the images of the same class of human body regions. Extensive experimental results for six widely-used benchmarks including three tasks (occluded, partial, and holistic) demonstrate the superiority of RGANet against state-of-the-art methods.

Two types of nucleation layers (NLs), including in-situ low-temperature grown GaN (LT-GaN) and ex-situ sputtered physical vapor deposition AlN (PVD-AlN), are applied on cone-shaped nanoscale patterned sapphire substrate (NPSS). The initial growth process of GaN on these two NLs is comparably investigated by a series of growth interruptions. The coalescence process of GaN grains is modulated by adjusting the three-dimensional (3D) temperatures. The results indicate that higher 3D temperatures reduce the edge dislocation density while increasing the residual compressive stress in GaN films. Compared to the LT-GaN NLs, the PVD-AlN NLs effectively resist Ostwald ripening and facilitate the uniform growth of GaN grains on NPSS. Furthermore, GaN films grown on NPSS with PVD-AlN NLs exhibit a reduction of over 50% in both screw and edge dislocation densities compared to those grown on LT-GaN NLs. Additionally, PVD-AlN NLs result in an increase of about 0.5 GPa in the residual compressive stress observed in GaN films.

Visual retrieval tasks such as image retrieval and person re-identification (Re-ID) aim at effectively and thoroughly searching images with similar content or the same identity. After obtaining retrieved examples, re-ranking is a widely adopted post-processing step to reorder and improve the initial retrieval results by making use of the contextual information from semantically neighboring samples. Prevailing re-ranking approaches update distance metrics and mostly rely on inefficient crosscheck set comparison operations while computing expanded neighbors based distances. In this work, we present an efficient re-ranking method which refines initial retrieval results by updating features. Specifically, we reformulate re-ranking based on Graph Convolution Networks (GCN) and propose a novel Graph Convolution based Re-ranking (GCR) for visual retrieval tasks via feature propagation. To accelerate computation for large-scale retrieval, a decentralized and synchronous feature propagation algorithm which supports parallel or distributed computing is introduced. In particular, the plain GCR is extended for cross-camera retrieval and an improved feature propagation formulation is presented to leverage affinity relationships across different cameras. It is also extended for video-based retrieval, and Graph Convolution based Re-ranking for Video (GCRV) is proposed by mathematically deriving a novel profile vector generation method for the tracklet. Without bells and whistles, the proposed approaches achieve state-of-the-art performances on seven benchmark datasets from three different tasks, i.e., image retrieval, person Re-ID and video-based person Re-ID., Comment: Code is publicly available: https://github.com/WesleyZhang1991/GCN_rerank

Image-text retrieval is a central problem for understanding the semantic relationship between vision and language, and serves as the basis for various visual and language tasks. Most previous works either simply learn coarse-grained representations of the overall image and text, or elaborately establish the correspondence between image regions or pixels and text words. However, the close relations between coarse- and fine-grained representations for each modality are important for image-text retrieval but almost neglected. As a result, such previous works inevitably suffer from low retrieval accuracy or heavy computational cost. In this work, we address image-text retrieval from a novel perspective by combining coarse- and fine-grained representation learning into a unified framework. This framework is consistent with human cognition, as humans simultaneously pay attention to the entire sample and regional elements to understand the semantic content. To this end, a Token-Guided Dual Transformer (TGDT) architecture which consists of two homogeneous branches for image and text modalities, respectively, is proposed for image-text retrieval. The TGDT incorporates both coarse- and fine-grained retrievals into a unified framework and beneficially leverages the advantages of both retrieval approaches. A novel training objective called Consistent Multimodal Contrastive (CMC) loss is proposed accordingly to ensure the intra- and inter-modal semantic consistencies between images and texts in the common embedding space. Equipped with a two-stage inference method based on the mixed global and local cross-modal similarity, the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art retrieval performances with extremely low inference time when compared with representative recent approaches., Comment: Code is publicly available: https://github.com/LCFractal/TGDT

Knowledge distillation is an effective paradigm for boosting the performance of pocket-size model, especially when multiple teacher models are available, the student would break the upper limit again. However, it is not economical to train diverse teacher models for the disposable distillation. In this paper, we introduce a new concept dubbed Avatars for distillation, which are the inference ensemble models derived from the teacher. Concretely, (1) For each iteration of distillation training, various Avatars are generated by a perturbation transformation. We validate that Avatars own higher upper limit of working capacity and teaching ability, aiding the student model in learning diverse and receptive knowledge perspectives from the teacher model. (2) During the distillation, we propose an uncertainty-aware factor from the variance of statistical differences between the vanilla teacher and Avatars, to adjust Avatars' contribution on knowledge transfer adaptively. Avatar Knowledge Distillation AKD is fundamentally different from existing methods and refines with the innovative view of unequal training. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our Avatars mechanism, which polishes up the state-of-the-art distillation methods for dense prediction without more extra computational cost. The AKD brings at most 0.7 AP gains on COCO 2017 for Object Detection and 1.83 mIoU gains on Cityscapes for Semantic Segmentation, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/Gumpest/AvatarKD., Comment: Accepted by ACM MM 2023

Human-centric visual tasks have attracted increasing research attention due to their widespread applications. In this paper, we aim to learn a general human representation from massive unlabeled human images which can benefit downstream human-centric tasks to the maximum extent. We call this method SOLIDER, a Semantic cOntrollable seLf-supervIseD lEaRning framework. Unlike the existing self-supervised learning methods, prior knowledge from human images is utilized in SOLIDER to build pseudo semantic labels and import more semantic information into the learned representation. Meanwhile, we note that different downstream tasks always require different ratios of semantic information and appearance information. For example, human parsing requires more semantic information, while person re-identification needs more appearance information for identification purpose. So a single learned representation cannot fit for all requirements. To solve this problem, SOLIDER introduces a conditional network with a semantic controller. After the model is trained, users can send values to the controller to produce representations with different ratios of semantic information, which can fit different needs of downstream tasks. Finally, SOLIDER is verified on six downstream human-centric visual tasks. It outperforms state of the arts and builds new baselines for these tasks. The code is released in https://github.com/tinyvision/SOLIDER., Comment: accepted by CVPR2023

In this report, we present a fast and accurate object detection method dubbed DAMO-YOLO, which achieves higher performance than the state-of-the-art YOLO series. DAMO-YOLO is extended from YOLO with some new technologies, including Neural Architecture Search (NAS), efficient Reparameterized Generalized-FPN (RepGFPN), a lightweight head with AlignedOTA label assignment, and distillation enhancement. In particular, we use MAE-NAS, a method guided by the principle of maximum entropy, to search our detection backbone under the constraints of low latency and high performance, producing ResNet/CSP-like structures with spatial pyramid pooling and focus modules. In the design of necks and heads, we follow the rule of ``large neck, small head''.We import Generalized-FPN with accelerated queen-fusion to build the detector neck and upgrade its CSPNet with efficient layer aggregation networks (ELAN) and reparameterization. Then we investigate how detector head size affects detection performance and find that a heavy neck with only one task projection layer would yield better results.In addition, AlignedOTA is proposed to solve the misalignment problem in label assignment. And a distillation schema is introduced to improve performance to a higher level. Based on these new techs, we build a suite of models at various scales to meet the needs of different scenarios. For general industry requirements, we propose DAMO-YOLO-T/S/M/L. They can achieve 43.6/47.7/50.2/51.9 mAPs on COCO with the latency of 2.78/3.83/5.62/7.95 ms on T4 GPUs respectively. Additionally, for edge devices with limited computing power, we have also proposed DAMO-YOLO-Ns/Nm/Nl lightweight models. They can achieve 32.3/38.2/40.5 mAPs on COCO with the latency of 4.08/5.05/6.69 ms on X86-CPU. Our proposed general and lightweight models have outperformed other YOLO series models in their respective application scenarios., Comment: Project Website: https://github.com/tinyvision/damo-yolo

Current person image retrieval methods have achieved great improvements in accuracy metrics. However, they rarely describe the reliability of the prediction. In this paper, we propose an Uncertainty-Aware Learning (UAL) method to remedy this issue. UAL aims at providing reliability-aware predictions by considering data uncertainty and model uncertainty simultaneously. Data uncertainty captures the ``noise" inherent in the sample, while model uncertainty depicts the model's confidence in the sample's prediction. Specifically, in UAL, (1) we propose a sampling-free data uncertainty learning method to adaptively assign weights to different samples during training, down-weighting the low-quality ambiguous samples. (2) we leverage the Bayesian framework to model the model uncertainty by assuming the parameters of the network follow a Bernoulli distribution. (3) the data uncertainty and the model uncertainty are jointly learned in a unified network, and they serve as two fundamental criteria for the reliability assessment: if a probe is high-quality (low data uncertainty) and the model is confident in the prediction of the probe (low model uncertainty), the final ranking will be assessed as reliable. Experiments under the risk-controlled settings and the multi-query settings show the proposed reliability assessment is effective. Our method also shows superior performance on three challenging benchmarks under the vanilla single query settings.

We study the backward compatible problem for person re-identification (Re-ID), which aims to constrain the features of an updated new model to be comparable with the existing features from the old model in galleries. Most of the existing works adopt distillation-based methods, which focus on pushing new features to imitate the distribution of the old ones. However, the distillation-based methods are intrinsically sub-optimal since it forces the new feature space to imitate the inferior old feature space. To address this issue, we propose the Ranking-based Backward Compatible Learning (RBCL), which directly optimizes the ranking metric between new features and old features. Different from previous methods, RBCL only pushes the new features to find best-ranking positions in the old feature space instead of strictly alignment, and is in line with the ultimate goal of backward retrieval. However, the sharp sigmoid function used to make the ranking metric differentiable also incurs the gradient vanish issue, therefore stems the ranking refinement during the later period of training. To address this issue, we propose the Dynamic Gradient Reactivation (DGR), which can reactivate the suppressed gradients by adding dynamic computed constant during forward step. To further help targeting the best-ranking positions, we include the Neighbor Context Agents (NCAs) to approximate the entire old feature space during training. Unlike previous works which only test on the in-domain settings, we make the first attempt to introduce the cross-domain settings (including both supervised and unsupervised), which are more meaningful and difficult. The experimental results on all five settings show that the proposed RBCL outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by large margins under all settings., Comment: Submitted to Pattern Recognition on Dec 06, 2021. Under Review

Nowadays, real data in person re-identification (ReID) task is facing privacy issues, e.g., the banned dataset DukeMTMC-ReID. Thus it becomes much harder to collect real data for ReID task. Meanwhile, the labor cost of labeling ReID data is still very high and further hinders the development of the ReID research. Therefore, many methods turn to generate synthetic images for ReID algorithms as alternatives instead of real images. However, there is an inevitable domain gap between synthetic and real images. In previous methods, the generation process is based on virtual scenes, and their synthetic training data can not be changed according to different target real scenes automatically. To handle this problem, we propose a novel Target-Aware Generation pipeline to produce synthetic person images, called TAGPerson. Specifically, it involves a parameterized rendering method, where the parameters are controllable and can be adjusted according to target scenes. In TAGPerson, we extract information from target scenes and use them to control our parameterized rendering process to generate target-aware synthetic images, which would hold a smaller gap to the real images in the target domain. In our experiments, our target-aware synthetic images can achieve a much higher performance than the generalized synthetic images on MSMT17, i.e. 47.5% vs. 40.9% for rank-1 accuracy. We will release this toolkit\footnote{\noindent Code is available at \href{https://github.com/tagperson/tagperson-blender}{https://github.com/tagperson/tagperson-blender}} for the ReID community to generate synthetic images at any desired taste.

The Visual Question Answering (VQA) task utilizes both visual image and language analysis to answer a textual question with respect to an image. It has been a popular research topic with an increasing number of real-world applications in the last decade. This paper describes our recent research of AliceMind-MMU (ALIbaba's Collection of Encoder-decoders from Machine IntelligeNce lab of Damo academy - MultiMedia Understanding) that obtains similar or even slightly better results than human being does on VQA. This is achieved by systematically improving the VQA pipeline including: (1) pre-training with comprehensive visual and textual feature representation; (2) effective cross-modal interaction with learning to attend; and (3) A novel knowledge mining framework with specialized expert modules for the complex VQA task. Treating different types of visual questions with corresponding expertise needed plays an important role in boosting the performance of our VQA architecture up to the human level. An extensive set of experiments and analysis are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the new research work.

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer knowledge learned from a labeled source domain to a different unlabeled target domain. Most existing UDA methods focus on learning domain-invariant feature representation, either from the domain level or category level, using convolution neural networks (CNNs)-based frameworks. One fundamental problem for the category level based UDA is the production of pseudo labels for samples in target domain, which are usually too noisy for accurate domain alignment, inevitably compromising the UDA performance. With the success of Transformer in various tasks, we find that the cross-attention in Transformer is robust to the noisy input pairs for better feature alignment, thus in this paper Transformer is adopted for the challenging UDA task. Specifically, to generate accurate input pairs, we design a two-way center-aware labeling algorithm to produce pseudo labels for target samples. Along with the pseudo labels, a weight-sharing triple-branch transformer framework is proposed to apply self-attention and cross-attention for source/target feature learning and source-target domain alignment, respectively. Such design explicitly enforces the framework to learn discriminative domain-specific and domain-invariant representations simultaneously. The proposed method is dubbed CDTrans (cross-domain transformer), and it provides one of the first attempts to solve UDA tasks with a pure transformer solution. Experiments show that our proposed method achieves the best performance on public UDA datasets, e.g. VisDA-2017 and DomainNet. Code and models are available at https://github.com/CDTrans/CDTrans.

Recently, GAN based method has demonstrated strong effectiveness in generating augmentation data for person re-identification (ReID), on account of its ability to bridge the gap between domains and enrich the data variety in feature space. However, most of the ReID works pick all the GAN generated data as additional training samples or evaluate the quality of GAN generation at the entire data set level, ignoring the image-level essential feature of data in ReID task. In this paper, we analyze the in-depth characteristics of ReID sample and solve the problem of "What makes a GAN-generated image good for ReID". Specifically, we propose to examine each data sample with id-consistency and diversity constraints by mapping image onto different spaces. With a metric-based sampling method, we demonstrate that not every GAN-generated data is beneficial for augmentation. Models trained with data filtered by our quality evaluation outperform those trained with the full augmentation set by a large margin. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our method on both supervised ReID task and unsupervised domain adaptation ReID task., Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures

In this work, we address the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation for person re-ID where annotations are available for the source domain but not for target. Previous methods typically follow a two-stage optimization pipeline, where the network is first pre-trained on source and then fine-tuned on target with pseudo labels created by feature clustering. Such methods sustain two main limitations. (1) The label noise may hinder the learning of discriminative features for recognizing target classes. (2) The domain gap may hinder knowledge transferring from source to target. We propose three types of technical schemes to alleviate these issues. First, we propose a cluster-wise contrastive learning algorithm (CCL) by iterative optimization of feature learning and cluster refinery to learn noise-tolerant representations in the unsupervised manner. Second, we adopt a progressive domain adaptation (PDA) strategy to gradually mitigate the domain gap between source and target data. Third, we propose Fourier augmentation (FA) for further maximizing the class separability of re-ID models by imposing extra constraints in the Fourier space. We observe that these proposed schemes are capable of facilitating the learning of discriminative feature representations. Experiments demonstrate that our method consistently achieves notable improvements over the state-of-the-art unsupervised re-ID methods on multiple benchmarks, e.g., surpassing MMT largely by 8.1\%, 9.9\%, 11.4\% and 11.1\% mAP on the Market-to-Duke, Duke-to-Market, Market-to-MSMT and Duke-to-MSMT tasks, respectively., Comment: ICCV 2021

Nowadays, deep learning is widely applied to extract features for similarity computation in person re-identification (re-ID) and have achieved great success. However, due to the non-overlapping between training and testing IDs, the difference between the data used for model training and the testing data makes the performance of learned feature degraded during testing. Hence, re-ranking is proposed to mitigate this issue and various algorithms have been developed. However, most of existing re-ranking methods focus on replacing the Euclidean distance with sophisticated distance metrics, which are not friendly to downstream tasks and hard to be used for fast retrieval of massive data in real applications. In this work, we propose a graph-based re-ranking method to improve learned features while still keeping Euclidean distance as the similarity metric. Inspired by graph convolution networks, we develop an operator to propagate features over an appropriate graph. Since graph is the essential key for the propagation, two important criteria are considered for designing the graph, and three different graphs are explored accordingly. Furthermore, a simple yet effective method is proposed to generate a profile vector for each tracklet in videos, which helps extend our method to video re-ID. Extensive experiments on three benchmark data sets, e.g., Market-1501, Duke, and MARS, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

This paper introduces our solution for the Track2 in AI City Challenge 2021 (AICITY21). The Track2 is a vehicle re-identification (ReID) task with both the real-world data and synthetic data. We mainly focus on four points, i.e. training data, unsupervised domain-adaptive (UDA) training, post-processing, model ensembling in this challenge. (1) Both cropping training data and using synthetic data can help the model learn more discriminative features. (2) Since there is a new scenario in the test set that dose not appear in the training set, UDA methods perform well in the challenge. (3) Post-processing techniques including re-ranking, image-to-track retrieval, inter-camera fusion, etc, significantly improve final performance. (4) We ensemble CNN-based models and transformer-based models which provide different representation diversity. With aforementioned techniques, our method finally achieves 0.7445 mAP score, yielding the first place in the competition. Codes are available at https://github.com/michuanhaohao/AICITY2021_Track2_DMT., Comment: CVPR 2021 AI CITY CHALLENGE City-Scale Multi-Camera Vehicle Re-Identification Top 1. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2004.10547

Multi-Target Multi-Camera Tracking has a wide range of applications and is the basis for many advanced inferences and predictions. This paper describes our solution to the Track 3 multi-camera vehicle tracking task in 2021 AI City Challenge (AICITY21). This paper proposes a multi-target multi-camera vehicle tracking framework guided by the crossroad zones. The framework includes: (1) Use mature detection and vehicle re-identification models to extract targets and appearance features. (2) Use modified JDETracker (without detection module) to track single-camera vehicles and generate single-camera tracklets. (3) According to the characteristics of the crossroad, the Tracklet Filter Strategy and the Direction Based Temporal Mask are proposed. (4) Propose Sub-clustering in Adjacent Cameras for multi-camera tracklets matching. Through the above techniques, our method obtained an IDF1 score of 0.8095, ranking first on the leaderboard. The code have released: https://github.com/LCFractal/AIC21-MTMC., Comment: CVPR 2021 AI CITY CHALLENGE City-Scale Multi-Camera Vehicle Tracking Top 1