United States

Effectively  preserving and encoding structure features from objects in irregular and sparse LiDAR points is a crucial challenge to 3D object detection on the point cloud. Recently, Transformer has demonstrated promising performance on many 2D and even 3D vision tasks. Compared with the fixed and rigid convolution kernels, the self-attention mechanism in Transformer can adaptively exclude the unrelated or noisy points and is thus suitable for preserving the local spatial structure in the irregular LiDAR point cloud. However, Transformer only performs a simple sum on the point features, based on the self-attention mechanism, and all the points share the same transformation for \textit{value}.  A such isotropic operation cannot capture the direction-distance-oriented local structure, which is essential for 3D object detection. In this work, we propose a Structure-Embedding transFormer (SEFormer), which can not only preserve the local structure as a traditional Transformer but also have the ability to encode the local structure. Compared to the self-attention mechanism in traditional Transformer, SEFormer learns different feature transformations for \textit{value} points based on the relative directions and distances to the query point. Then we propose a SEFormer-based network for high-performance 3D object detection. Extensive experiments show that the proposed architecture can achieve SOTA results on the Waymo Open Dataset, one of the most significant 3D detection benchmarks for autonomous driving. Specifically, SEFormer achieves 79.02% mAP, which is 1.2% higher than existing works. We will release the codes.

AAAI 2023

SEFormer: Structure Embedding Transformer for 3D Object Detection

structure preserving

structure encoding

3d object detection

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

Single-source domain generalization (SDG) in medical image segmentation is a challenging yet essential task as domain shifts are quite common among clinical image datasets. Previous attempts most conduct global-only/random augmentation.  Their augmented samples are usually insufficient in diversity and informativeness, thus failing to cover the possible target domain distribution. In this paper, we rethink the data augmentation strategy for SDG in medical image segmentation. Motivated by the class-level representation invariance and style mutability of medical images, we hypothesize that  unseen target data can be sampled from a linear combination of C (the class number) random variables, where each variable follows a location-scale distribution at the class level. Accordingly, data augmented can be readily made by sampling the random variables through a general form. On the empirical front, we implement such strategy with constrained Bezier transformation on both  global and  local (i.e. class-level) regions, which can largely increase the augmentation diversity.  A Saliency-balancing Fusion mechanism is further proposed to enrich the informativeness by engaging the gradient information, guiding augmentation with proper orientation and magnitude. As an important contribution, we prove theoretically that our proposed augmentation can lead to an upper bound of the generalization risk on the unseen  target domain, thus confirming our hypothesis. Combining the two strategies, our Saliency-balancing Location-scale Augmentation (SLAug) exceeds the state-of-the-art works by a large margin in two challenging SDG tasks.

Rethinking Data Augmentation for Single-source Domain Generalization in Medical Image Segmentation

We propose novel identification conditions and a statistical estimation method for the probabilities of potential outcome types using covariate information in randomized trials in which the treatment assignment is randomized but subject compliance is not perfect. Different from existing studies, the proposed identification conditions do not require strict assumptions such as the assumption of monotonicity. When the probabilities of potential outcome types are identifiable through the proposed conditions, the problem of estimating the probabilities of potential outcome types is reduced to that of singular models. Thus, the probabilities cannot be evaluated using standard statistical likelihood-based estimation methods. Rather, the proposed identification conditions show that we can derive consistent estimators of the probabilities of potential outcome types via the method of moments, which leads to the asymptotic normality of the proposed estimators through the delta method under regular conditions. We also propose a new statistical estimation method based on the bounded constrained augmented Lagrangian method to derive more efficient estimators than can be derived through the method of moments.

Identification and Estimation of the Probabilities of Potential Outcome Types Using Covariate Information in Studies with Non-compliance

The exploration of mutual-benefit cross-domains has shown great potential toward accurate self-supervised depth estimation. In this work, we revisit feature fusion between depth and semantic information and propose an efficient local adaptive attention method for geometric aware representation enhancement. Instead of building global connections or deforming attention across the feature space without restraint, we bound the spatial interaction within a learnable region of interest. In particular, we leverage geometric cues from semantic information to learn local adaptive bounding boxes to guide unsupervised feature aggregation. The local areas preclude most irrelevant reference points from attention space, yielding more selective feature learning and faster convergence. We naturally extend the paradigm into a multi-head and hierarchic way to enable the information distillation in different semantic levels and improve the feature discriminative ability for fine-grained depth estimation. Extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset show that our proposed method establishes a new state-of-the-art in self-supervised monocular depth estimation task, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach over former Transformer variants.

ROIFormer: Semantic-Aware Region of Interest Transformer for Efficient Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation

Massive rumors usually appear along with breaking news or trending topics, seriously hindering the truth. Existing rumor detection methods are mostly focused on the same domain, thus have poor performance in cross-domain scenarios due to domain shift. In this work, we propose an end-to-end instance-wise and prototype-wise contrastive learning model with cross-attention mechanism for cross-domain rumor detection. The model not only performs cross-domain
feature alignment, but also enforces target samples to align with the corresponding prototypes of a given source domain. Since target labels in a target domain are unavailable, we use a clustering-based approach with carefully initialized centers
by a batch of source domain samples to produce pseudo labels. Moreover, we use a cross-attention mechanism on a pair of source data and target data with the same labels to learn domain-invariant representations. Because the samples in a
domain pair tend to express similar semantic patterns especially on the people’s attitudes (e.g., supporting or denying) towards the same category of rumors, the discrepancy between a pair of source domain and target domain will be decreased. We conduct experiments on four groups of cross-domain datasets and show that our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance.


Unsupervised Cross-Domain Rumor Detection with Contrastive Learning and Cross-Attention

Deep neural network, despite its remarkable capability of discriminating targeted in-distribution samples, shows poor performance on detecting anomalous out-of-distribution data. To address this defect, state-of-the-art solutions choose to train deep networks on an auxiliary dataset of outliers. Various training criteria for these auxiliary outliers are proposed based on heuristic intuitions. However, we find that these intuitively designed outlier training criteria can hurt in-distribution learning and eventually lead to inferior performance. To this end, we identify three causes of the in-distribution incompatibility: contradictory gradient, false likelihood, and distribution shift. Based on our new understandings, we propose a new out-of-distribution detection method by adapting both the top-design of deep models and the loss function. Our method achieves in-distribution compatibility by pursuing less interference with the probabilistic characteristic of in-distribution features. On several benchmarks, our method not only achieves the state-of-the-art out-of-distribution detection performance but also improves the in-distribution accuracy.

Towards In-distribution Compatible Out-of-distribution Detection

Deep anomaly detection methods learn representations that separate between normal and anomalous images. Although self-supervised representation learning is commonly used, small dataset sizes limit its effectiveness. It was previously shown that utilizing external, generic datasets (e.g. ImageNet classification) can significantly improve anomaly detection performance. One approach is outlier exposure, which fails when the external datasets do not resemble the anomalies. We take the approach of transferring representations pre-trained on external datasets for anomaly detection. Anomaly detection performance can be significantly improved by fine-tuning the pre-trained representations on the normal training images. In this paper, we first demonstrate and analyze that contrastive learning, the most popular self-supervised learning paradigm cannot be naively applied to pre-trained features.  The reason is that pre-trained feature initialization causes poor conditioning for standard contrastive objectives, resulting in bad optimization dynamics. Based on our analysis, we provide a modified contrastive objective, the Mean-Shifted Contrastive Loss. Our method is highly effective and achieves a new state-of-the-art anomaly detection performance including 98.6% ROC-AUC on the CIFAR-10 dataset.

Mean-Shifted Contrastive Loss for Anomaly Detection

Panoptic Narrative Grounding (PNG) is an emerging cross-modal grounding task, which locates the target regions of an image corresponding to the text description. Existing approaches for PNG are mainly based on a two-stage paradigm, which is computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose a one-stage network for real-time PNG, termed End-to-End Panoptic Narrative Grounding network (EPNG), which directly generates masks for referents. Specifically, we propose two innovative designs, i.e., Locality-Perceptive Attention (LPA) and a bidirectional Semantic Alignment Loss (SAL), to properly handle the many-to-many relationship between textual expressions and visual objects. LPA embeds the local spatial priors into attention modeling, i.e., a pixel may belong to multiple masks at different scales, thereby improving segmentation. To help understand the complex semantic relationships, SAL proposes a bidirectional contrastive objective to regularize the semantic consistency inter modalities. Extensive experiments on the PNG benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method. Compared to the single-stage baseline, our method achieves a significant improvement of up to 9.4% accuracy. More importantly, our EPNG is 10 times faster than the two-stage model. Meanwhile, the generalization ability of EPNG is also validated by zero-shot experiments on other grounding tasks. 

Towards Real-Time Panoptic Narrative Grounding by an End-to-End Grounding Network

Most existing Human-Object Interaction (HOI) Detection methods rely heavily on full annotations with predefined HOI categories, which is limited in diversity and costly to scale further. We aim at advancing zero-shot HOI detection to detect both seen and unseen HOIs simultaneously. The fundamental challenges are to discover potential human-object pairs and identify novel HOI categories. To overcome the above challenges, we propose a novel End-to-end zero-shot HOI Detection (EoID) framework via vision-language knowledge distillation. We first design an Interactive Score module combined with a Two-stage Bipartite Matching algorithm to achieve interaction distinguishment for human-object pairs in an action-agnostic manner.
Then we transfer the distribution of action probability from the pretrained vision-language teacher as well as the seen ground truth to the HOI model to attain zero-shot HOI classification. Extensive experiments on HICO-Det dataset demonstrate that our model discovers potential interactive pairs and enables the recognition of unseen HOIs. Finally, our method outperforms the previous SOTA under various zero-shot settings. Moreover, our method is generalizable to large-scale object detection data to further scale up the action sets. The source code is available at: https://github.com/mrwu-mac/EoID.

End-to-End Zero-Shot HOI Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation

Co-Salient Object Detection (CoSOD) aims at detecting common salient objects within a group of relevant source images. Most of the latest works employ the attention mechanism for finding common objects. To achieve accurate CoSOD results with high-quality maps and high efficiency, we propose a novel Memory-aided Contrastive Consensus Learning (MCCL) framework, which is capable of effectively detecting co-salient objects in real-time (∼110 fps). To learn better group consensus, we propose the Group Consensus Aggregation Module (GCAM) to abstract the common features of each image group; meanwhile, to make the consensus representation more discriminative, we introduce the Memorybased Contrastive Module (MCM), which saves and updates the consensus of images from different groups in a queue of memories. Finally, to improve the quality and integrity of the predicted maps, we develop an Adversarial Integrity Learning (AIL) strategy to make the segmented regions more likely composed of complete objects with less surrounding noise. Extensive experiments on all the latest CoSOD benchmarks demonstrate that our lite MCCL outperforms 13 cutting-edge models, achieving the new state of the art (~5.9% and ~6.2% improvement in S-measure on CoSOD3k and CoSal2015, respectively). Moreover, we show the potential of applying our method to downstream applications, such as query-based object retrieval, with online demos. Our source codes, saliency maps, and demos will be publicly available at: https://github.com/ZhengPeng7/MCCL.

Memory-aided Contrastive Consensus Learning for Co-salient Object Detection

Measuring and alleviating the discrepancies between the synthetic (source) and real scene (target) data is the core issue for domain adaptive semantic segmentation. Though recent works have introduced depth information in the source domain to reinforce the geometric and semantic knowledge transfer, they cannot extract the intrinsic 3D information of objects, including positions and shapes, merely based on 2D estimated depth. In this work, we propose a novel Geometry-Aware Network for Domain Adaptation (GANDA), leveraging more compact 3D geometric point cloud representations to shrink the domain gaps. In particular, we first utilize the auxiliary depth supervision from the source domain to obtain the depth prediction in the target domain to accomplish structure-texture disentanglement. Beyond depth estimation, we explicitly exploit 3D topology on the point clouds generated from RGB-D images for further coordinate-color disentanglement and pseudo-labels refinement in the target domain. Moreover, to improve the 2D classifier in the target domain, we perform domain-invariant geometric adaptation from source to target and unify the 2D semantic and 3D geometric segmentation results in two domains. Note that our GANDA is plug-and-play in any existing UDA framework. Qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-arts on GTA5->Cityscapes and SYNTHIA->Cityscapes.

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SEFormer: Structure Embedding Transformer for 3D Object Detection

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