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Crowdedness caused by overlapping among similar objects is a ubiquitous challenge in the field of 2D visual object detection. In this paper, we first underline two main effects of the crowdedness issue: 1) IoU-confidence correlation disturbances (ICD) and 2) confused de-duplication (CDD). Then we explore a pathway of cracking these nuts from the perspective of data augmentation. Primarily, a particular copy- paste scheme is proposed towards making crowded scenes. Based on this operation, we first design a &quot;consensus learning&quot; method to further resist the ICD problem and then find out the pasting process naturally reveals a pseudo &quot;depth&quot; of object in the scene, which can be potentially used for alleviating CDD dilemma. Both methods are derived from magical using of the copy-pasting without extra cost for hand-labeling. Experiments show that our approach can easily improve the state-of-the-art detector in typical crowded detection task by more than 2% without any bells and whistles. Moreover, this work can outperform existing data augmentation strategies in crowded scenario. 

AAAI 2023

Improving Crowded Object Detection via Copy-Paste

crowded scenes

object detection

data augmentation

ICPR 2020 is the premier international conference on Pattern Recognition, gathering leading researchers from around the world to present their latest achievements in Pattern Analysis and Recognition, applied Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The topic of the year is " Putting Artificial intelligence to work on Patterns". 
For the first time, ICPR has employed a two-round review process similar to journal submissions, with new papers allowed to be submitted in either the first or second round and papers submitted in the first round and not accepted allowed to be revised and re-submitted for second round review. 

In this edition of the **ICPR 2020** Conference, there are 1407 Oral/Poster presentations organized in five Tracks: 
- Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning for Pattern Analysis; 
- Biometrics, Human Analysis and Behavior Understanding; Computer Vision, Robotics and Intelligent Systems; 
- Document and Media Analysis; and 
- Image and Signal Processing. 

The **ICPR 2020** Main Conference program also includes 7 Keynotes from prominent world-renowned scientists, 8 Tutorials, 28 Demos, 8 Challenges, 2 Panels, as well as an Industry/Sponsor Exhibition. In addition, 41 Workshops on a range of important current and emerging research topics complete the ICPR 2020 program. 


ICPR 2020

Crowdedness caused by overlapping among similar objects is a ubiquitous challenge in the field of 2D visual object detection. In this paper, we first underline two main effects of the crowdedness issue: 1) IoU-confidence correlation disturbances (ICD) and 2) confused de-duplication (CDD). Then we explore a pathway of cracking these nuts from the perspective of data augmentation. Primarily, a particular copy- paste scheme is proposed towards making crowded scenes. Based on this operation, we first design a "consensus learning" method to further resist the ICD problem and then find out the pasting process naturally reveals a pseudo "depth" of object in the scene, which can be potentially used for alleviating CDD dilemma. Both methods are derived from magical using of the copy-pasting without extra cost for hand-labeling. Experiments show that our approach can easily improve the state-of-the-art detector in typical crowded detection task by more than 2% without any bells and whistles. Moreover, this work can outperform existing data augmentation strategies in crowded scenario. 

poster

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.

As a core technology of Intelligent Transportation System, traffic flow prediction has a wide range of applications. The fundamental challenge in traffic flow prediction is to effectively model the complex spatial-temporal dependencies in traffic data. Spatial-temporal Graph Neural Network (GNN) models have emerged as one of the most promising methods to solve this problem. However, GNN-based models have three major limitations for traffic prediction: i) Most methods model spatial dependencies in a static manner, which limits the ability to learn dynamic urban traffic patterns; ii) Most methods only consider short-range spatial information and are unable to capture long-range spatial dependencies; iii) These methods ignore the fact that the propagation of traffic conditions between locations has a time delay in traffic systems. To this end, we propose a novel Propagation Delay-aware dynamic long-range transFormer, namely PDFormer, for accurate traffic flow prediction. Specifically, we design a spatial self-attention module to capture the dynamic spatial dependencies. Then, two graph masking matrices are introduced to highlight spatial dependencies from short- and long-range views. Moreover, a traffic delay-aware feature transformation module is proposed to empower PDFormer with the capability of explicitly modeling the time delay of spatial information propagation. Extensive experimental results on six real-world public traffic datasets show that our method can not only achieve state-of-the-art performance but also exhibit competitive computational efficiency. Moreover, we visualize the learned spatial-temporal attention map to make our model highly interpretable. All datasets and codes are available.

PDFormer: Propagation Delay-aware Dynamic Long-range Transformer for Traffic Flow Prediction

We introduce AVCAffe, the first Audio-Visual dataset consisting of Cognitive load and Affect attributes. We record AVCAffe by simulating remote work scenarios over a video-conferencing platform, where subjects collaborate to complete a number of cognitively engaging tasks. AVCAffe is the largest originally collected (not collected from the Internet) affective dataset in English language. We recruit 106 participants from 18 different countries of origin, spanning an age range of 18 to 57 years old, with a balanced male-female ratio. AVCAffe comprises a total of 108 hours of video, equivalent to more than 58,000 clips along with task-based self-reported ground truth labels for arousal, valence, and cognitive load attributes such as mental demand, temporal demand, effort, and a few others. We believe AVCAffe would be a challenging benchmark for the deep learning research community given the inherent difficulty of classifying affect and cognitive load in particular. Moreover, our dataset fills an existing timely gap by facilitating the creation of learning systems for better self-management of remote work meetings, and further study of hypotheses regarding the impact of remote work on cognitive load and affective states. The dataset and the supplementary material are available on the website: https://pritamqu.github.io/AVCAffe.

AVCAffe: A Large Scale Audio-Visual Dataset of Cognitive Load and Affect for Remote Work

The popular Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm approximates the solution in a clipped policy space. Does there exist better policies outside of this space? By using a novel surrogate objective that employs the sigmoid function (which provides an interesting way of exploration), we found that the answer is ``YES'', and the better policies are in fact located very far from the clipped space. We show that PPO is insufficient in ``off-policyness'',  Our algorithm explores in a much larger policy space than PPO, and it maximizes the Conservative Policy Iteration (CPI) objective better than PPO during training. To the best of our knowledge, all current PPO methods have the clipping operation and optimize in the clipped policy space. Our method is the first of this kind, which advances the understanding of CPI optimization and policy gradient methods.

The Sufficiency of Off-Policyness and Soft Clipping: PPO is still Insufficient according to an Off-Policy Measure

Point annotations are considerably more time-efficient than bounding box annotations. However, how to use cheap point annotations to boost the performance of semi-supervised object detection is still an open question. In this work, we present Point-Teaching, a weakly- and semi-supervised object detection framework to fully utilize the point annotations. Specifically, we propose a Hungarian-based point matching method to generate pseudo labels for point annotated images. We further propose multiple instance learning (MIL) approaches at the level of images and points to supervise the object detector with point annotations. Finally, we propose a simple data augmentation, named Point-Guided Copy-Paste, to reduce the impact of those unmatched points. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a few datasets and various data regimes. In particular, Point-Teaching outperforms the previous best
method Group R-CNN by 3.1 AP with 5% fully label and 2.3 AP with 30% fully label on MS COCO dataset. We believe that our proposed framework can largely lower the bar of learning accurate object detectors and pave the way for its
broader applications.



Point-Teaching: Weakly Semi-Supervised Object Detection with Point Annotations

Recent work has demonstrated that pretrained transformers are overconfident in text classification tasks, which can be calibrated by the famous post-hoc calibration method temperature scaling (TS). Character or word spelling mistakes are frequently encountered in real applications and greatly threaten transformer model safety. Research on calibration under noisy settings is rare, and we focus on this direction. Based on a toy experiment, we discover that TS performs poorly when the datasets are perturbed by slight noise, such as swapping the characters, which results in distribution shift. We further utilize two metrics, predictive uncertainty and maximum mean discrepancy (MMD), to measure the distribution shift between clean and noisy datasets, based on which we propose a simple yet effective transferable TS method for calibrating models dynamically. To evaluate the performance of the proposed methods under noisy settings, we construct a benchmark consisting of four noise types and five shift intensities based on the QNLI, AG-News, and Emotion tasks. Experimental results on the noisy benchmark show that (1) the metrics are effective in measuring distribution shift and (2) transferable TS can significantly decrease the expected calibration error (ECE) compared with the competitive baseline ensemble TS by approximately 46.09\%.

Transferable Post-hoc Calibration on Pretrained Transformers in Noisy Text Classification

Optical flow estimation has made great progress, but usually suffers from degradation under adverse weather. Although semi/full-supervised methods have made good attempts, the domain shift between the synthetic and real adverse weather images would deteriorate their performance. To alleviate this issue, our start point is to unsupervisedly transfer the knowledge from source clean domain to target degraded domain. Our key insight is that adverse weather does not change the intrinsic optical flow of the scene, but causes a significant difference for the warp error between clean and degraded images. In this work, we propose the first unsupervised framework for adverse weather optical flow via hierarchical motion-boundary adaptation. Specifically, we first employ image translation to construct the transformation relationship between clean and degraded domains. In motion adaptation, we utilize the flow consistency knowledge to align the cross-domain optical flows into a motion-invariance common space, where the optical flow from clean weather is used as the guidance-knowledge to obtain a preliminary optical flow for adverse weather. Furthermore, we leverage the warp error inconsistency which measures the motion misalignment of the boundary between the clean and degraded domains, and propose a joint intra- and inter-scene boundary contrastive adaptation to refine the motion boundary. The hierarchical motion and boundary adaptation jointly promotes optical flow in a unified framework. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments have been performed to verify the superiority of the proposed method.

Unsupervised Hierarchical Domain Adaptation for Adverse Weather Optical Flow

Although existing multi-object tracking (MOT) algorithms have obtained competitive performance on various benchmarks, almost all of them train and validate models on the same domain. The domain generalization problem of MOT is hardly studied. To bridge this gap, we first draw the observation that the high-level information contained in natural language is domain invariant to different tracking domains. Based on this observation, we propose to introduce natural language representation into visual MOT models for boosting the domain generalization ability. However, it is infeasible to label every tracking target with a textual description. To tackle this problem, we design two modules, namely visual context prompting (VCP) and visual-language mixing (VLM). Specifically, VCP generates visual prompts based on the input frames. VLM joints the information in the generated visual prompts and the textual prompts from a pre-defined Trackbook to obtain instance-level pseudo textual description, which is domain invariant to different tracking scenes. Through training models on MOT17 and validating them on MOT20, we observe that the pseudo textual descriptions generated by our proposed modules improve the generalization performance of query-based trackers by large margins.

Generalizing Multiple Object Tracking to Unseen Domains by Introducing Natural Language Representation

In this research, we propose a new 3D object detector with a trustworthy depth estimation, dubbed BEVDepth, for camera-based Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) 3D object detection. Our work is based on a key observation – depth estimation in recent approaches is surprisingly inadequate given the fact that depth is essential to camera 3D detection. Our BEVDepth resolves this by leveraging explicit depth supervision. A camera-awareness depth estimation module is also introduced to facilitate the depth predicting capability. Besides, we design a novel Depth Refinement Module to counter the side effects carried by imprecise feature unprojection. Aided by customized Efficient Voxel Pooling and multi-frame mechanism, BEVDepth achieves the new state-of-the-art 60.9% NDS on the challenging nuScenes test set while maintaining high efficiency. For the first time, the NDS score of a camera model reaches 60%.

BEVDepth: Acquisition of Reliable Depth for Multi-view 3D Object Detection

Ensemble methods can deliver surprising performance gains but also bring significantly higher computational costs, e.g., can be up to 2048X in large-scale ensemble tasks. However, we found that the majority of computations in ensemble methods are redundant. For instance, over 77% of samples in CIFAR-100 dataset can be correctly classified with only a single ResNet-18 model, which indicates that only around 23% of the samples need an ensemble of extra models. To this end, we propose an inference efficient ensemble learning method, to simultaneously optimize for effectiveness and efficiency in ensemble learning. More specifically, we regard ensemble of models as a sequential inference process and learn the optimal halting event for inference on a specific sample. At each timestep of the inference process, a common selector judges if the current ensemble has reached ensemble effectiveness and halt further inference, otherwise filters this challenging sample for the subsequent models to conduct more powerful ensemble. Both the base models and common selector are jointly optimized to dynamically adjust ensemble inference for different samples with various hardness, through the novel optimization goals including sequential ensemble boosting and computation saving. The experiments with different backbones on real-world datasets illustrate our method can bring up to 56% inference cost reduction while maintaining comparable performance to full ensemble, achieving significantly better ensemble utility than other baselines.

Towards Inference Efficient Deep Ensemble Learning

Predicting high-fidelity future human poses, from a historically observed sequence, is crucial for intelligent robots to interact with humans. Deep end-to-end learning approaches, which typically train a generic pre-trained model on external datasets and then directly apply it to all test samples, emerge as the dominant solution to solve this issue. Despite encouraging progress, they remain non-optimal, as the unique properties (e.g., motion style, rhythm) of a specific sequence cannot be adapted. More generally, once encountering out-of-distributions, the predicted poses tend to be unreliable. Motivated by this observation, we propose a novel test-time adaptation framework that leverages two self-supervised auxiliary tasks to help the primary forecasting network adapt to the test sequence. In the testing phase, our model can adjust the model parameters by several gradient updates to improve the generation quality. However, due to catastrophic forgetting, both auxiliary tasks typically have a low ability to automatically present the desired positive incentives for the final prediction performance. For this reason, we also propose a meta-auxiliary learning scheme for better adaptation. Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach achieves higher accuracy and more realistic visualization.

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