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Due to the impressive capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), recent works have focused on employing MLLM-based agents for autonomous driving in large-scale and dynamic environments. However, prevalent approaches often directly translate high-level instructions into low-level vehicle control signals, which deviates from the inherent language generation paradigm of MLLMs and fails to fully harness their emergent powers. As a result, the generalizability of these methods is highly restricted by autonomous driving datasets used during fine-tuning. To tackle this challenge, we propose to connect high-level instructions and low-level control signals with mid-level language-driven commands, which are more fine-grained than high-level instructions but more universal and explainable than control signals, and thus can effectively bridge the gap in between. We implement this idea through a hierarchical multi-agent driving system named AD-H, including a MLLM planner for high-level reasoning and a lightweight controller for low-level execution. The hierarchical design liberates the MLLM from low-level control signal decoding and therefore fully releases their emergent capability in high-level perception, reasoning, and planning. We build a new dataset with action hierarchy annotations. Comprehensive closed-loop evaluations demonstrate several key advantages of our proposed AD-H system. First, AD-H can notably outperform state-of-the-art methods in achieving exceptional driving performance, even exhibiting self-correction capabilities during vehicle operation, a scenario not encountered in the training dataset. Second, AD-H demonstrates superior generalization under long-horizon instructions and novel environmental conditions, significantly surpassing current state-of-the-art methods. We will make our data and code publicly accessible at https://github.com/zhangzaibin/AD-H

The success of transformers in computer vision has led to several attempts to adapt them for mobile devices, but their performance remains unsatisfactory in some real-world applications. To address this issue, we propose PP-MobileSeg, a semantic segmentation model that achieves state-of-the-art performance on mobile devices. PP-MobileSeg comprises three novel parts: the StrideFormer backbone, the Aggregated Attention Module (AAM), and the Valid Interpolate Module (VIM). The four-stage StrideFormer backbone is built with MV3 blocks and strided SEA attention, and it is able to extract rich semantic and detailed features with minimal parameter overhead. The AAM first filters the detailed features through semantic feature ensemble voting and then combines them with semantic features to enhance the semantic information. Furthermore, we proposed VIM to upsample the downsampled feature to the resolution of the input image. It significantly reduces model latency by only interpolating classes present in the final prediction, which is the most significant contributor to overall model latency. Extensive experiments show that PP-MobileSeg achieves a superior tradeoff between accuracy, model size, and latency compared to other methods. On the ADE20K dataset, PP-MobileSeg achieves 1.57% higher accuracy in mIoU than SeaFormer-Base with 32.9% fewer parameters and 42.3% faster acceleration on Qualcomm Snapdragon 855. Source codes are available at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleSeg/tree/release/2.8., Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures

Interactive image segmentation aims at segmenting a target region through a way of human-computer interaction. Recent works based on deep learning have achieved excellent performance, while most of them focus on improving the accuracy of the training set and ignore potential improvement on the test set. In the inference phase, they tend to have a good performance on similar domains to the training set, and lack adaptability to domain shift, so they require more user efforts to obtain satisfactory results. In this work, we propose RAIS, a robust and accurate architecture for interactive segmentation with continuous learning, where the model can learn from both train and test data sets. For efficient learning on the test set, we propose a novel optimization strategy to update global and local parameters with a basic segmentation module and adaptation module, respectively. Moreover, we perform extensive experiments on several benchmarks that show our method can handle data distribution shifts and achieves SOTA performance compared with recent interactive segmentation methods. Besides, our method also shows its robustness in the datasets of remote sensing and medical imaging where the data domains are completely different between training and testing., Comment: 8 pages

In recent years, the rapid development of deep learning has brought great advancements to image and video segmentation methods based on neural networks. However, to unleash the full potential of such models, large numbers of high-quality annotated images are necessary for model training. Currently, many widely used open-source image segmentation software relies heavily on manual annotation which is tedious and time-consuming. In this work, we introduce EISeg, an Efficient Interactive SEGmentation annotation tool that can drastically improve image segmentation annotation efficiency, generating highly accurate segmentation masks with only a few clicks. We also provide various domain-specific models for remote sensing, medical imaging, industrial quality inspections, human segmentation, and temporal aware models for video segmentation. The source code for our algorithm and user interface are available at: https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleSeg., Comment: 8 pages

Adversarial training has been demonstrated to be one of the most effective remedies for defending adversarial examples, yet it often suffers from the huge robustness generalization gap on unseen testing adversaries, deemed as the adversarially robust generalization problem. Despite the preliminary understandings devoted to adversarially robust generalization, little is known from the architectural perspective. To bridge the gap, this paper for the first time systematically investigated the relationship between adversarially robust generalization and architectural design. Inparticular, we comprehensively evaluated 20 most representative adversarially trained architectures on ImageNette and CIFAR-10 datasets towards multiple `p-norm adversarial attacks. Based on the extensive experiments, we found that, under aligned settings, Vision Transformers (e.g., PVT, CoAtNet) often yield better adversarially robust generalization while CNNs tend to overfit on specific attacks and fail to generalize on multiple adversaries. To better understand the nature behind it, we conduct theoretical analysis via the lens of Rademacher complexity. We revealed the fact that the higher weight sparsity contributes significantly towards the better adversarially robust generalization of Transformers, which can be often achieved by the specially-designed attention blocks. We hope our paper could help to better understand the mechanism for designing robust DNNs. Our model weights can be found at http://robust.art.

Natural image matting is a fundamental and challenging computer vision task. It has many applications in image editing and composition. Recently, deep learning-based approaches have achieved great improvements in image matting. However, most of them require a user-supplied trimap as an auxiliary input, which limits the matting applications in the real world. Although some trimap-free approaches have been proposed, the matting quality is still unsatisfactory compared to trimap-based ones. Without the trimap guidance, the matting models suffer from foreground-background ambiguity easily, and also generate blurry details in the transition area. In this work, we propose PP-Matting, a trimap-free architecture that can achieve high-accuracy natural image matting. Our method applies a high-resolution detail branch (HRDB) that extracts fine-grained details of the foreground with keeping feature resolution unchanged. Also, we propose a semantic context branch (SCB) that adopts a semantic segmentation subtask. It prevents the detail prediction from local ambiguity caused by semantic context missing. In addition, we conduct extensive experiments on two well-known benchmarks: Composition-1k and Distinctions-646. The results demonstrate the superiority of PP-Matting over previous methods. Furthermore, we provide a qualitative evaluation of our method on human matting which shows its outstanding performance in the practical application. The code and pre-trained models will be available at PaddleSeg: https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleSeg.

Real-world applications have high demands for semantic segmentation methods. Although semantic segmentation has made remarkable leap-forwards with deep learning, the performance of real-time methods is not satisfactory. In this work, we propose PP-LiteSeg, a novel lightweight model for the real-time semantic segmentation task. Specifically, we present a Flexible and Lightweight Decoder (FLD) to reduce computation overhead of previous decoder. To strengthen feature representations, we propose a Unified Attention Fusion Module (UAFM), which takes advantage of spatial and channel attention to produce a weight and then fuses the input features with the weight. Moreover, a Simple Pyramid Pooling Module (SPPM) is proposed to aggregate global context with low computation cost. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that PP-LiteSeg achieves a superior trade-off between accuracy and speed compared to other methods. On the Cityscapes test set, PP-LiteSeg achieves 72.0% mIoU/273.6 FPS and 77.5% mIoU/102.6 FPS on NVIDIA GTX 1080Ti. Source code and models are available at PaddleSeg: https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleSeg.

As the COVID-19 pandemic rampages across the world, the demands of video conferencing surge. To this end, real-time portrait segmentation becomes a popular feature to replace backgrounds of conferencing participants. While feature-rich datasets, models and algorithms have been offered for segmentation that extract body postures from life scenes, portrait segmentation has yet not been well covered in a video conferencing context. To facilitate the progress in this field, we introduce an open-source solution named PP-HumanSeg. This work is the first to construct a large-scale video portrait dataset that contains 291 videos from 23 conference scenes with 14K fine-labeled frames and extensions to multi-camera teleconferencing. Furthermore, we propose a novel Semantic Connectivity-aware Learning (SCL) for semantic segmentation, which introduces a semantic connectivity-aware loss to improve the quality of segmentation results from the perspective of connectivity. And we propose an ultra-lightweight model with SCL for practical portrait segmentation, which achieves the best trade-off between IoU and the speed of inference. Extensive evaluations on our dataset demonstrate the superiority of SCL and our model. The source code is available at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleSeg., Comment: Accepted by WACV workshop

High-quality training data play a key role in image segmentation tasks. Usually, pixel-level annotations are expensive, laborious and time-consuming for the large volume of training data. To reduce labelling cost and improve segmentation quality, interactive segmentation methods have been proposed, which provide the result with just a few clicks. However, their performance does not meet the requirements of practical segmentation tasks in terms of speed and accuracy. In this work, we propose EdgeFlow, a novel architecture that fully utilizes interactive information of user clicks with edge-guided flow. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance without any post-processing or iterative optimization scheme. Comprehensive experiments on benchmarks also demonstrate the superiority of our method. In addition, with the proposed method, we develop an efficient interactive segmentation tool for practical data annotation tasks. The source code and tool is avaliable at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleSeg., Comment: accepted by ICCV Workshop

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial noises, which motivates the benchmark of model robustness. Existing benchmarks mainly focus on evaluating defenses, but there are no comprehensive studies of how architecture design and training techniques affect robustness. Comprehensively benchmarking their relationships is beneficial for better understanding and developing robust DNNs. Thus, we propose RobustART, the first comprehensive Robustness investigation benchmark on ImageNet regarding ARchitecture design (49 human-designed off-the-shelf architectures and 1200+ networks from neural architecture search) and Training techniques (10+ techniques, e.g., data augmentation) towards diverse noises (adversarial, natural, and system noises). Extensive experiments substantiated several insights for the first time, e.g., (1) adversarial training is effective for the robustness against all noises types for Transformers and MLP-Mixers; (2) given comparable model sizes and aligned training settings, CNNs > Transformers > MLP-Mixers on robustness against natural and system noises; Transformers > MLP-Mixers > CNNs on adversarial robustness; (3) for some light-weight architectures, increasing model sizes or using extra data cannot improve robustness. Our benchmark presents: (1) an open-source platform for comprehensive robustness evaluation; (2) a variety of pre-trained models to facilitate robustness evaluation; and (3) a new view to better understand the mechanism towards designing robust DNNs. We will continuously develop to this ecosystem for the community.

Previous feature alignment methods in Unsupervised domain adaptation(UDA) mostly only align global features without considering the mismatch between class-wise features. In this work, we propose a new coarse-to-fine feature alignment method using contrastive learning called CFContra. It draws class-wise features closer than coarse feature alignment or class-wise feature alignment only, therefore improves the model's performance to a great extent. We build it upon one of the most effective methods of UDA called entropy minimization to further improve performance. In particular, to prevent excessive memory occupation when applying contrastive loss in semantic segmentation, we devise a new way to build and update the memory bank. In this way, we make the algorithm more efficient and viable with limited memory. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our method and model trained on the GTA5 to Cityscapes dataset has boost mIOU by 3.5 compared to the MinEnt algorithm. Our code will be publicly available.

Deep learning models are vulnerable to adversarial examples. As a more threatening type for practical deep learning systems, physical adversarial examples have received extensive research attention in recent years. However, without exploiting the intrinsic characteristics such as model-agnostic and human-specific patterns, existing works generate weak adversarial perturbations in the physical world, which fall short of attacking across different models and show visually suspicious appearance. Motivated by the viewpoint that attention reflects the intrinsic characteristics of the recognition process, this paper proposes the Dual Attention Suppression (DAS) attack to generate visually-natural physical adversarial camouflages with strong transferability by suppressing both model and human attention. As for attacking, we generate transferable adversarial camouflages by distracting the model-shared similar attention patterns from the target to non-target regions. Meanwhile, based on the fact that human visual attention always focuses on salient items (e.g., suspicious distortions), we evade the human-specific bottom-up attention to generate visually-natural camouflages which are correlated to the scenario context. We conduct extensive experiments in both the digital and physical world for classification and detection tasks on up-to-date models (e.g., Yolo-V5) and significantly demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

There has been extensive evidence demonstrating that deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples, which motivates the development of defenses against adversarial attacks. Existing adversarial defenses typically improve model robustness against individual specific perturbation types (\eg, $\ell_{\infty}$-norm bounded adversarial examples). However, adversaries are likely to generate multiple types of perturbations in practice (\eg, $\ell_1$, $\ell_2$, and $\ell_{\infty}$ perturbations). Some recent methods improve model robustness against adversarial attacks in multiple $\ell_p$ balls, but their performance against each perturbation type is still far from satisfactory. In this paper, we observe that different $\ell_p$ bounded adversarial perturbations induce different statistical properties that can be separated and characterized by the statistics of Batch Normalization (BN). We thus propose Gated Batch Normalization (GBN) to adversarially train a perturbation-invariant predictor for defending multiple $\ell_p$ bounded adversarial perturbations. GBN consists of a multi-branch BN layer and a gated sub-network. Each BN branch in GBN is in charge of one perturbation type to ensure that the normalized output is aligned towards learning perturbation-invariant representation. Meanwhile, the gated sub-network is designed to separate inputs added with different perturbation types. We perform an extensive evaluation of our approach on commonly-used dataset including MNIST, CIFAR-10, and Tiny-ImageNet, and demonstrate that GBN outperforms previous defense proposals against multiple perturbation types (\ie, $\ell_1$, $\ell_2$, and $\ell_{\infty}$ perturbations) by large margins., Comment: Accepted on IJCV