United States

Recent transformer-based offline video instance segmentation (VIS) approaches achieve encouraging results and significantly outperform online approaches. However, their reliance on the whole video and the immense computational complexity caused by full Spatio-temporal attention limit them in real-life applications such as processing lengthy videos. In this paper, we propose a single-stage transformer-based efficient online VIS framework named InstanceFormer, which is especially suitable for long and challenging videos. We propose three novel components to model short-term and long-term dependency and temporal coherence. First, we propagate the representation, location, and semantic information of prior instances to model short-term changes. Second, we propose a novel memory cross-attention in the decoder, which allows the network to look into earlier instances within a certain temporal window. Finally, we employ a temporal contrastive loss to impose coherence in the representation of an instance across all frames. Memory attention and temporal coherence are particularly beneficial to long-range dependency modeling, including challenging scenarios like occlusion. The proposed InstanceFormer outperforms previous online benchmark methods by a large margin across multiple datasets. Most importantly, InstanceFormer surpasses offline approaches for challenging and long datasets such as YouTube-VIS-2021 and OVIS. Code is available at https://github.com/rajatkoner08/InstanceFormer.

AAAI 2023

InstanceFormer: An online Video Instance Segmentation Framework

tracking free vis

video instance segmentation

tracking

video understanding

transformer

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
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The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines.

poster

For few-shot learning, it is still a critical challenge to realize photo-realistic face visually dubbing on high-resolution videos. Previous works fail to generate high-fidelity dubbing results. To address the above problem, this paper proposes a Deformation Inpainting Network (DINet) for high-resolution face visually dubbing. Different from previous works relying on multiple up-sample layers to directly generate pixels from latent embeddings, DINet performs spatial deformation on feature maps of reference images to better preserve high-frequency textural details. Specifically, DINet consists of one deformation part and one inpainting part. In the first part, five reference facial images adaptively perform spatial deformation to create deformed feature maps encoding mouth shapes at each frame, in order to align with input driving audio and also the head poses of input source images. In the second part, to produce face visually dubbing, a feature decoder is responsible for adaptively incorporating mouth movements from the deformed feature maps and other attributes (i.e., head pose and upper facial expression) from the source feature maps together. Finally, DINet achieves face visually dubbing with rich textural details. We conduct qualitative and quantitative comparisons to validate our DINet on high-resolution videos. The experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art works.

DINet: Deformation Inpainting Network for Realistic Face Visually Dubbing on High Resolution Video

The research in real-time segmentation mainly focuses on desktop GPUs.
However, autonomous driving and many other applications rely on real-time segmentation on edge, and current arts are far from the goal.
In addition, recent advances in vision transformers also inspire us to re-design the traditional CNN-based network architecture for the dense prediction task.
In this work, we propose to combine the self-attention block with lightweight convolutions to form new building blocks and employ latency constraints to search efficient sub-networks.
We train an MLP latency model based on generated architecture configurations and their latency measured on mobile devices, so that we can predict the latency of subnets during the search phase.
To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to achieve over 74% mIoU on Cityscapes with semi-real-time inference (over 15 FPS) on mobile GPU from an off-the-shelf phone. 

Towards Real-Time Segmentation on the Edge

Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), as a classic routing optimization problem originally arising in the domain of transportation and logistics, has become a critical task in broader domains, such as manufacturing and biology. Recently, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has been increasingly employed to solve TSP due to its high inference efficiency. Nevertheless, most of existing end-to-end DRL algorithms only perform well on small TSP instances and can hardly generalize to large scale because of the drastically soaring memory consumption and computation time along with the enlarging problem scale. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end DRL approach, referred to as Pointerformer, based on multi-pointer Transformer. Particularly, Pointerformer adopts both reversible residual network in the encoder and multi-pointer network in the decoder to effectively contain memory consumption of the encoder-decoder architecture. To further improve the performance of TSP solutions, Pointerformer employs a feature augmentation method to explore the symmetries of TSP at both training and inference stages as well as an enhanced context embedding approach to include more comprehensive context information in the query. Extensive experiments on a randomly generated benchmark and a public benchmark have shown that, while achieving comparative results on most small-scale TSP instances as state-of-the-art DRL approaches do, Pointerformer can also well generalize to large-scale TSPs.

Pointerformer: Deep Reinforced Multi-Pointer Transformer for the Traveling Salesman Problem

Topic models have been thoroughly investigated for multiple years due to their great potential in analyzing and understanding texts. Recently, researchers combine the study of topic models with deep learning techniques, known as Neural Topic Models (NTMs). However, existing NTMs are mainly tested based on general document modeling without considering different textual analysis scenarios. We assume that there are different characteristics to model topics in different textual analysis tasks. In this paper, we propose a Conversational Neural Topic Model (ConvNTM) designed in particular for the conversational scenario. Unlike the general document topic modeling, a conversation session lasts for multiple turns: each short-text utterance complies with a single topic distribution and these topic distributions are dependent across turns. Moreover, there are roles in conversations, a.k.a., speakers and addressees. Topic distributions are partially determined by such roles in conversations. We take these factors into account to model topics in conversations via the multi-turn and multi-role formulation. We also leverage the word co-occurrence relationship as a new training objective to further improve topic quality. Comprehensive experimental results based on the benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed ConvNTM achieves the best performance both in topic modeling and in typical downstream tasks within conversational research (i.e., dialogue act classification and dialogue response generation).

ConvNTM: Conversational Neural Topic Model

While mislabeled or ambiguously-labeled samples in the training set could negatively affect the performance of deep models, diagnosing the dataset and identifying mislabeled samples helps to improve the generalization power. 
\emph{Training dynamics}, i.e., the traces left by iterations of optimization algorithms, have recently been proved to be effective to localize mislabeled samples with hand-crafted features.
In this paper, beyond manually designed features, we introduce a novel learning-based solution, leveraging a \emph{noise detector}, instanced by an LSTM network, which learns to predict whether a sample was mislabeled using the raw training dynamics as input. 
Specifically, the proposed method trains the noise detector in a supervised manner using the dataset with synthesized label noises and can adapt to various datasets (either naturally or synthesized label-noised) without retraining. 
We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the proposed method.
We train the noise detector based on the synthesized label-noised CIFAR dataset and test such noise detector on Tiny ImageNet, CUB-200, Caltech-256, WebVision and Clothing1M. 
Results show that the proposed method precisely detects mislabeled samples on various datasets without further adaptation, and outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Besides, more experiments demonstrate that the mislabel identification can guide a label correction, namely data debugging, providing orthogonal improvements of algorithm-centric state-of-the-art techniques from the data aspect. 

Learning from Training Dynamics: Identifying Mislabeled Data Beyond Manually Designed Features

Speaker recognition achieved great progress recently, however, it is not easy or efficient to further improve its performance via traditional solutions: collecting more data and designing new neural networks. Aiming at the fundamental challenge of speech data, i.e. low information density, multimodal learning can mitigate this challenge by introducing richer and more discriminative information as input for identity recognition. Specifically, since the face image is more discriminative than the speech for identity recognition, we conduct multimodal learning by introducing a face recognition model (teacher) to transfer discriminative knowledge to a speaker recognition model (student) during training. However, this knowledge transfer via distillation is not trivial because the big domain gap between face and speech can easily lead to overfitting. In this work, we introduce a multimodal learning framework, VGSR (Vision-Guided Speaker Recognition). Specifically, we propose a MKD (Margin-based Knowledge Distillation) strategy for cross-modality distillation by introducing a loose constrain to align the teacher and student, greatly reducing overfitting. Our MKD strategy can easily adapt to various existing knowledge distillation methods. In addition, we propose a QAW (Quality-based Adaptive Weights) module to weight input samples via quantified data quality, leading to a robust model training. Experimental results on the VoxCeleb1 and CN-Celeb datasets show our proposed strategies can effectively improve the accuracy of speaker recognition by a margin of 10% ∼ 15%, and our methods are very robust to different noises.

Cross-Modal Distillation for Speaker Recognition

Recently, several methods such as private ANM, EM-PC and Priv-PC have been proposed to handle differentially private causal discovery in various scenarios including bivariate, multivariate Gaussian and categorical cases. And there was also a question raised by the latest research that how to achieve private nonlinear causal discovery with numerical data. This is exactly the problem that we aim to solve in this work. We propose to detect nonlinear causal relations between observed numerical data by using regression-based conditional independence test (RCIT) consisting of kernel ridge regression (KRR) and Hilbert-Schmidt independence criterion (HSIC) with permutation approximation. We conduct the sensitivity analysis for this RCIT and propose a private constraint-based causal discovery framework with differential privacy guarantees. We conduct extensive simulations and real-world experiments on both conditional independence test and causal discovery, and demonstrate that our techniques are practically able to handle nonlinear numerical cases and easy to implement.

Differentially Private Nonlinear Causal Discovery from Numerical Data

Regression-based methods have shown high efficiency and effectiveness for multi-view human mesh recovery. The key components of a typical regressor lie in the feature extraction of input views and the fusion of multi-view features. In this paper, we present Pixel-aligned Feedback Fusion (PaFF) for accurate yet efficient human mesh recovery from multi-view images. PaFF is an iterative regression framework that performs feature extraction and fusion alternately. At each iteration, PaFF extracts pixel-aligned feedback features from each input view according to the reprojection of the current estimation and fuses them together with respect to each vertex of the downsampled mesh. In this way, our regressor can not only perceive the misalignment status of each view from the feedback features but also correct the mesh parameters more effectively based on the feature fusion on mesh vertices. Additionally, our regressor disentangles the global orientation and translation of the body mesh from the estimation of mesh parameters such that the camera parameters of input views can be better utilized in the regression process. The efficacy of our method is validated in the Human3.6M dataset via comprehensive ablation experiments, where PaFF achieves 33.02 MPJPE and brings significant improvements over the previous best solutions by more than 29%. The project page with code and video results can be found at https://kairobo.github.io/PaFF/.

Delving Deep into Pixel Alignment Feature for Accurate Multi-view Human Mesh Recovery

Understanding the relationships between items can improve the accuracy and interpretability of recommender systems. Among these relationships, the substitute and complement relationships attract the most attention in e-commerce platforms. The substitutable items are interchangeable and might be compared with each other before purchasing, while the complementary items are used in conjunction and are usually bought together with the query item. In this paper, we focus on two issues of inferring the substitutable and complementary items: 1) how to model their mutual influence to improve the performance of downstream tasks, 2) how to further discriminate them by considering the strength of relationship for different item pairs. We propose a novel multi-task learning framework named Enhanced Multi-Relationships Integration Graph Convolutional Network (EMRIGCN). We regard the relationship inference task as a link prediction task in heterogeneous graph with different types of edges between nodes (items). To model the mutual influence between substitute and complement, EMRIGCN adopts a two-level integration module, i.e., feature and structure integration, based on experts sharing mechanism during message passing. To obtain the strength of relationship for item pairs, we build an auxiliary loss function to further increase or decrease the distances between embeddings of items with weak or strong relation in latent space. Extensive experiments on both public and industrial datasets prove that EMRIGCN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art solutions. We also conducted A/B tests on real world recommender systems of Meituan Maicai, an online supermarket platform in China, and obtained 15.3\% improvement on VBR and 15.34\% improvement on RPM.Understanding the relationships between items can improve the accuracy and interpretability of recommender systems. Among these relationships, the substitute and complement relationships attract the most attention in e-commerce platforms. The substitutable items are interchangeable and might be compared with each other before purchasing, while the complementary items are used in conjunction and are usually bought together with the query item. In this paper, we focus on two issues of inferring the substitutable and complementary items: 1) how to model their mutual influence to improve the performance of downstream tasks, 2) how to further discriminate them by considering the strength of relationship for different item pairs. We propose a novel multi-task learning framework named Enhanced Multi-Relationships Integration Graph Convolutional Network (EMRIGCN). We regard the relationship inference task as a link prediction task in heterogeneous graph with different types of edges between nodes (items). To model the mutual influence between substitute and complement, EMRIGCN adopts a two-level integration module, i.e., feature and structure integration, based on experts sharing mechanism during message passing. To obtain the strength of relationship for item pairs, we build an auxiliary loss function to further increase or decrease the distances between embeddings of items with weak or strong relation in latent space. Extensive experiments on both public and industrial datasets prove that EMRIGCN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art solutions. We also conducted A/B tests on real world recommender systems of Meituan Maicai, an online supermarket platform in China, and obtained 15.3\% improvement on VBR and 15.34\% improvement on RPM.

Enhanced Multi-Relationships Integration Graph Convolutional Network for Inferring Substitutable and Complementary Items

Counterfactual Regret Minimization algorithms are the most popular way of estimating the Nash Equilibrium in imperfect-information zero-sum games. In particular, Deepstack -- the state-of-the-art Poker bot -- employs the so-called Deep Counterfactual Value Network (DCVN) to learn the Counterfactual Values (CFVs) associated with various states in the game. Each CFV is a multiplication of two factors: (1) the probability that the opponent would reach a given state in a game, which can be explicitly calculated from the input data, and (2) the expected value (EV) of a payoff in that state, which is a complex function of the input data, hard to calculate. In this paper, we propose a simple yet powerful modification to the CFVs estimation process, which consists in utilizing a deep neural network to estimate only the EV factor of CFV. This new target setting significantly simplifies the learning problem and leads to a much more accurate CFVs estimation. A direct comparison, in terms of CFVs prediction losses, shows a significant prediction accuracy improvement of the proposed approach (DEVN) over the original DCVN formulation (relatively by 9.18-15.70%, depending on particular settings). Furthermore, the application of DEVN improves the theoretical lower bound of the error by 29.05-31.83% compared to the DCVN pipeline. Additionally, DEVN is able to achieve the goal using significantly smaller, and faster to infer, networks. While the proposed modification may seem to be of a rather technical nature, it, in fact, presents a fundamentally different approach to the overall process of learning and estimating CFVs, since the distributions of the training signals differ significantly between DCVN and DEVN. The former estimates CFVs, which are biased by the probability of reaching a given game state, while training the latter relies on a direct EV estimation, regardless of the state probability. In effect, the learning signal of DEVN presents a better estimation of the true value of a given state, thus allowing more accurate CFVs estimation.

InstanceFormer: An online Video Instance Segmentation Framework

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