Canada

Video instance segmentation on mobile devices is an important yet very challenging edge AI problem. It mainly suffers from (1) heavy computation and memory costs for frame-by-frame pixel-level instance perception and (2) complicated heuristics for tracking objects. To address those issues, we present MobileInst, a lightweight and mobile-friendly framework for video instance segmentation on mobile devices. Firstly, MobileInst adopts a mobile vision transformer to extract multi-level semantic features and presents an efficient query-based dual-transformer instance decoder for mask kernels and a semantic-enhanced mask decoder to generate instance segmentation per frame. Secondly, MobileInst exploits simple yet effective kernel reuse and kernel association to track objects for video instance segmentation. Further, we propose temporal query passing to enhance the tracking ability for kernels. We conduct experiments on COCO and YouTube-VIS datasets to demonstrate the superiority of MobileInst and evaluate the inference latency on one single CPU core of Snapdragon@778G Mobile Platform, without other methods of acceleration. On the COCO dataset, MobileInst achieves 31.2 mask AP and 433 ms on the mobile CPU, which reduces the latency by 50% compared to the previous SOTA. For video instance segmentation, MobileInst achieves 35.0 AP on YouTube-VIS 2019 and 30.1 AP on YouTube-VIS 2021. Code will be available to facilitate real-world applications and future research.

AAAI 2024

MobileInst: Video Instance Segmentation on the Mobile

mobile transformers

video instance segmentation

image segmentation

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

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-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.<br><br><br><br>

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

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. 

Action segmentation serves as a pivotal component in comprehending videos, encompassing the learning of a sequence of semantically consistent action units known as actoms. Conventional methodologies tend to require a significant consumption of time for both training and learning phases. This paper introduces an innovative unsupervised framework for action segmentation in video, characterized by its fast learning capability and absence of mandatory training. The core idea involves splitting the video into distinct actoms, which are then merging together based on shared actions. The key challenge here is to prevent the inadvertent creation of singular actoms that attempt to represent multiple actions during the splitting phase. Additionally, it is crucial to avoid situations where actoms associated with the same action are incorrectly grouped into multiple clusters during the merging phase. In this paper, we present a method for calculating the similarity between adjacent frames under a subspace assumption. Then, we employ a local minimum searching procedure, which effectively splits the video into coherent actoms aligned with their semantic meaning and provides us an action segmentation proposal. Subsequently, we calculate a spatio-temporal similarity between actoms, followed by developing a merging process to merge actoms representing identical actions within the action segmentation proposals. Our approach is evaluated on four benchmark datasets, and the results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Besides, our method also achieves the optimal balance between accuracy and learning time when compared to existing unsupervised techniques. Code is available at https://github.com/y66y/SaM.

Unsupervised Action Segmentation via Fast Learning of Semantically Consistent Actoms

Image animation aims to bring static images to life according to driving videos and create engaging visual content that can be used for various purposes such as animation, entertainment, and education. Recent unsupervised methods utilize affine and thin-plate spline transformations based on keypoints to transfer the motion in driving frames to the source image. However, limited by the expressive power of the transformations used, these methods always produce poor results when the gap between the motion in the driving frame and the source image is large. To address this issue, we propose to model motion from the source image to the driving frame in highly-expressive diffeomorphism spaces. Firstly, we introduce Continuous Piecewise-Affine based (CPAB) transformation to model the motion and present a well-designed inference algorithm to generate CPAB transformation from control keypoints. Secondly, we propose a SAM-guided keypoint semantic loss to further constrain the keypoint extraction process and improve the semantic consistency between the corresponding keypoints on the source and driving images. Finally, we design a structure alignment loss to align the structure-related features extracted from driving and generated images, thus helping the generator generate results that are more consistent with the driving action. Extensive experiments on four datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method against state-of-the-art competitors quantitatively and qualitatively. Code will be publicly available at: https://github.com/DevilPG/AAAI2024-CPABMM.

Continuous Piecewise-Affine Based Motion Model for Image Animation

Video Motion Magnification (VMM) aims to break the resolution limit of human visual perception capability and reveal the imperceptible minor motion that contains valuable information in the macroscopic domain. However, challenges arise in this task due to photon noise inevitably introduced by photographic devices and spatial inconsistency in amplification, leading to flickering artifacts in static fields and motion blur and distortion in dynamic fields in the video. Existing methods focus on explicit motion modeling without emphasizing prioritized denoising during the motion magnification process. This paper proposes a novel dynamic filtering strategy to achieve static-dynamic field adaptive denoising. Specifically, based on Eulerian theory, we separate texture and shape to extract motion representation through inter-frame shape differences, expecting to leverage these subdivided features to solve this task finely. Then, we introduce a novel dynamic filter that eliminates noise cues and preserves critical features in the motion magnification and amplification generation phases. Overall, our unified framework, EulerMormer, is a pioneering effort to first equip with Transformer in learning-based VMM. The core of the dynamic filter lies in a global dynamic sparse cross-covariance attention mechanism that explicitly removes noise while preserving vital information, coupled with a multi-scale dual-path gating mechanism that selectively regulates the dependence on different frequency features to reduce spatial attenuation and complement motion boundaries. We demonstrate extensive experiments that EulerMormer achieves more robust video motion magnification from the Eulerian perspective, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/VUT-HFUT/EulerMormer.

EulerMormer: Robust Eulerian Motion Magnification via Dynamic Filtering within Transformer

3D occupancy prediction is an emerging task that aims to estimate the occupancy states and semantics of 3D scenes using multi-view images. However, image-based scene perception encounters significant challenges in achieving accurate prediction due to the absence of geometric priors. In this paper, we address this issue by exploring cross-modal knowledge distillation in this task, i.e., we leverage a stronger multi-modal model to guide the visual model during training. In practice, we observe that directly applying features or logits alignment, proposed and widely used in bird's-eye-view (BEV) perception, does not yield satisfactory results. To overcome this problem, we introduce RadOcc, a Rendering assisted distillation paradigm for 3D Occupancy prediction. By employing differentiable volume rendering, we generate depth and semantic maps in perspective views and propose two novel consistency criteria between the rendered outputs of teacher and student models. Specifically, the depth consistency loss aligns the termination distributions of the rendered rays, while the semantic consistency loss mimics the intra-segment similarity guided by vision foundation models (VLMs). Experimental results on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in improving various 3D occupancy prediction approaches, e.g., our proposed methodology enhances our baseline by 2.2% in the metric of mIoU and achieves 50% in Occ3D benchmark.

RadOcc: Learning Cross-Modality Occupancy Knowledge through Rendering Assisted Distillation | VIDEO

The emergence of text-driven motion synthesis technique provides animators with great potential to create efficiently. However, in most cases, textual expressions only contain general and qualitative motion descriptions, while lack fine depiction and sufficient intensity, leading to the synthesized motions that either (a) semantically compliant but uncontrollable over specific pose details, or (b) even deviates from the provided descriptions, bringing animators with undesired cases. In this paper, we propose DiffKFC, a conditional diffusion model for text-driven motion synthesis with KeyFrames Collaborated, enabling realistic generation with collaborative and efficient dual-level control: coarse guidance at semantic level, with only few keyframes for direct and fine-grained depiction down to body posture level. Unlike existing inference-editing diffusion models that incorporate conditions without training, our conditional diffusion model is explicitly trained and can fully exploit correlations among texts, keyframes and the diffused target frames. To preserve the control capability of discrete and sparse keyframes, we customize dilated mask attention modules where only partial valid tokens participate in local-to-global attention, indicated by the dilated keyframe mask. Additionally, we develop a simple yet effective smoothness prior, which steers the generated frames towards seamless keyframe transitions at inference. Extensive experiments show that our model not only achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of semantic fidelity, but more importantly, is able to satisfy animator requirements through fine-grained guidance without tedious labor.

Enhanced Fine-Grained Motion Diffusion for Text-Driven Human Motion Synthesis | VIDEO

Byzantine machine learning has garnered considerable attention in light of the unpredictable faults that can occur in large-scale distributed learning systems. The key to secure resilience against Byzantine machines in distributed learning is resilient aggregation mechanisms. Although abundant resilient aggregation rules have been proposed, they are designed in ad-hoc manners, imposing extra barriers on comparing, analyzing, and improving the rules across performance criteria. This paper studies near-optimal aggregation rules using clustering in the presence of outliers. Our outlier-robust clustering approach utilizes geometric properties of the update vectors provided by workers. Our analysis show that constant approximations to the 1-center and 1-mean clustering problems with outliers provide near-optimal resilient aggregators for metric-based criteria, which have been proven to be crucial in the homogeneous and heterogeneous cases respectively. In addition, we discuss two contradicting types of attacks under which no single aggregation rule is guaranteed to improve upon the naive average. Based on the discussion, we propose a two-phase resilient aggregation framework. We run experiments for image classification using a non-convex loss function. The proposed algorithms outperform previously known aggregation rules by a large margin with both homogeneous and heterogeneous data distributions among non-faulty workers.

Near-Optimal Resilient Aggregation Rules for Distributed Learning Using 1-Center and 1-Mean Clustering with Outliers | VIDEO

Generating stylized talking head with diverse head motions is crucial for achieving natural-looking videos but still remains challenging. Previous works either adopt a regressive method to capture the speaking style, resulting in a coarse style that is averaged across all training data, or employ a universal network to synthesize videos with different styles which causes suboptimal performance. To address these, we propose a novel dynamic-weight method, namely Say Anything with Any Style (SAAS), which queries the discrete style representation via a generative model with a learned style codebook. Specifically, we develop a multi-task VQ-VAE that incorporates three closely related tasks to learn a style codebook as a prior for style extraction. This discrete prior, along with the generative model, enhances the precision and robustness when extracting the speaking styles of the given style clips. By utilizing the extracted style, a residual architecture comprising a canonical branch and style-specific branch is employed to predict the mouth shapes conditioned on any driving audio while transferring the speaking style from the source to any desired one. To adapt to different speaking styles, we steer clear of employing a universal network by exploring an elaborate HyperStyle to produce the style-specific weights offset for the style branch. Furthermore, we construct a pose generator and a pose codebook to store the quantized pose representation, allowing us to sample diverse head motions aligned with the audio and the extracted style. Experiments demonstrate that our approach surpasses state-of-the-art methods in terms of both lip-synchronization and stylized expression. Besides, we extend our SAAS to video-driven style editing field and achieve satisfactory performance as well.

Say Anything with Any Style | VIDEO

Conventional open-world object detection (OWOD) problem setting first distinguishes known and unknown classes and then later incrementally learns the unknown objects when introduced with labels in the subsequent tasks. However, the current OWOD formulation heavily relies on the external human oracle for knowledge input during the incremental learning stages. Such reliance on run-time makes this formulation less realistic in a real-world deployment. To address this, we introduce a more realistic formulation, named semi-supervised open-world detection (SS-OWOD), that reduces the annotation cost by casting the incremental learning stages of OWOD in a semi-supervised manner. We demonstrate that the performance of the state-of-the-art OWOD detector dramatically deteriorates in the proposed SS-OWOD setting. Therefore, we introduce a novel SS-OWOD detector, named SS-OWFormer, that utilizes a feature-alignment scheme to better align the object query representations between the original and augmented images to leverage the large unlabeled and few labeled data. We further introduce a pseudo-labeling scheme for unknown detection that exploits the inherent capability of decoder object queries to capture object-specific information. On the COCO dataset, our SS-OWFormer using only 50% of the labeled data achieves detection performance that is on par with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) OWOD detector using all the 100% of labeled data. Further, our SS-OWFormer achieves an absolute gain of 4.8% in unknown recall over the SOTA OWOD detector. Lastly, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our SS-OWOD problem setting and approach for remote sensing object detection, proposing carefully curated splits and baseline performance evaluations. Our experiments on 4 datasets including MS COCO, PASCAL, Objects365 and DOTA demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Our source code, models and splits are available here https://github.com/sahalshajim/SS-OWFormer

Semi-supervised Open-World Object Detection

Multi-agent perception (MAP) allows autonomous systems to understand complex environments by interpreting data from multiple sources. This paper investigates intermediate collaboration for MAP with a specific focus on exploring "good" properties of collaborative view (i.e., post-collaboration feature) and its underlying relationship to individual views (i.e., pre-collaboration features), which were treated as an opaque procedure by most existing works. We propose a novel framework named CMiMC (Contrastive Mutual Information Maximization for Collaborative Perception) for intermediate collaboration. The core philosophy of CMiMC is to preserve discriminative information of individual views in the collaborative view by maximizing mutual information between pre- and post-collaboration features while enhancing the efficacy of collaborative views by minimizing the loss function of downstream tasks. In particular, we define multi-view mutual information (MVMI) for intermediate collaboration that evaluates correlations between collaborative views and individual views on both global and local scales. We establish CMiMNet based on multi-view contrastive learning to realize estimation and maximization of MVMI, which assists the training of a collaborative encoder for voxel-level feature fusion. We evaluate CMiMC on V2X-Sim 1.0, it improves the SOTA average precision by 3.08% and 4.44% at 0.5 and 0.7 IoU (Intersection-over-Union) thresholds, respectively. In addition, CMiMC can reduce communication volume to 1/32 while achieving performance comparable to SOTA. The code is released at https://github.com/anonymous4aaai/CMiMC.git.

What Makes Good Collaborative Views? Contrastive Mutual Information Maximization for Multi-Agent Perception

Learning 3D  representation plays a critical role in masked autoencoder (MAE) based pre-training methods for point cloud, including single-modal and cross-modal based MAE. Specifically, although cross-modal MAE methods learn strong 3D representations via the auxiliary of other modal knowledge, they often suffer from heavy computational burdens and heavily rely on massive cross-modal data pairs that are often unavailable, which hinders their applications in practice. Instead, single-modal methods with solely point clouds as input are preferred in real applications due to their simplicity and efficiency. However, such methods easily suffer from limited 3D representations with global random mask input. To learn compact 3D representations, we propose a simple yet effective Point Feature Enhancement Masked Autoencoders (Point-FEMAE), which mainly consists of a global branch and a local branch to capture latent semantic features. Specifically, to learn more compact features, a share-parameter Transformer encoder is introduced to extract point features from the global and local unmasked patches obtained by global random and local block mask strategies, followed by a specific decoder to reconstruct. Meanwhile, to further enhance features in the local branch, we propose a Local Enhancement Module with local patch convolution to perceive fine-grained local context at larger scales. Our method significantly improves the pre-training efficiency compared to cross-modal alternatives, and extensive downstream experiments underscore the state-of-the-art effectiveness, particularly outperforming our baseline (Point-MAE) by 5.16%, 5.00%, and 5.04% in three variants of ScanObjectNN, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/zyh16143998882/AAAI24-PointFEMAE.

MobileInst: Video Instance Segmentation on the Mobile

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MobileInst: Video Instance Segmentation on the Mobile

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Unsupervised Action Segmentation via Fast Learning of Semantically Consistent Actoms

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