State-of-the-art unsupervised re-ID methods train the neural networks using a memory-based non-parametric softmax loss. Instance feature vectors stored in memory are assigned pseudo-labels by clustering and updated at instance level. However, the varying cluster sizes leads to inconsistency in the updating progress of each cluster. To solve this problem, we present Cluster Contrast which stores feature vectors and computes contrast loss at the cluster level. Our approach employs a unique cluster representation to describe each cluster, resulting in a cluster-level memory dictionary. In this way, the consistency of clustering can be effectively maintained throughout the pipline and the GPU memory consumption can be significantly reduced. Thus, our method can solve the problem of cluster inconsistency and be applicable to larger data sets. In addition, we adopt different clustering algorithms to demonstrate the robustness and generalization of our framework. The application of Cluster Contrast to a standard unsupervised re-ID pipeline achieves considerable improvements of 9.9%, 8.3%, 12.1% compared to state-of-the-art purely unsupervised re-ID methods and 5.5%, 4.8%, 4.4% mAP compared to the state-of-the-art unsupervised domain adaptation re-ID methods on the Market, Duke, and MSMT17 datasets. Code is available at //github.com/alibaba/cluster-contrast.
Object re-identification (ReID) aims to find instances with the same identity as the given probe from a large gallery. Pairwise losses play an important role in training a strong ReID network. Existing pairwise losses densely exploit each instance as an anchor and sample its triplets in a mini-batch. This dense sampling mechanism inevitably introduces positive pairs that share few visual similarities, which can be harmful to the training. To address this problem, we propose a novel loss paradigm termed Sparse Pairwise (SP) loss that only leverages few appropriate pairs for each class in a mini-batch, and empirically demonstrate that it is sufficient for the ReID tasks. Based on the proposed loss framework, we propose an adaptive positive mining strategy that can dynamically adapt to diverse intra-class variations. Extensive experiments show that SP loss and its adaptive variant AdaSP loss outperform other pairwise losses, and achieve state-of-the-art performance across several ReID benchmarks. Code is available at //github.com/Astaxanthin/AdaSP.
Average-K classification is an alternative to top-K classification in which the number of labels returned varies with the ambiguity of the input image but must average to K over all the samples. A simple method to solve this task is to threshold the softmax output of a model trained with the cross-entropy loss. This approach is theoretically proven to be asymptotically consistent, but it is not guaranteed to be optimal for a finite set of samples. In this paper, we propose a new loss function based on a multi-label classification head in addition to the classical softmax. This second head is trained using pseudo-labels generated by thresholding the softmax head while guaranteeing that K classes are returned on average. We show that this approach allows the model to better capture ambiguities between classes and, as a result, to return more consistent sets of possible classes. Experiments on two datasets from the literature demonstrate that our approach outperforms the softmax baseline, as well as several other loss functions more generally designed for weakly supervised multi-label classification. The gains are larger the higher the uncertainty, especially for classes with few samples.
Unsupervised person re-identification (Re-ID) attracts increasing attention due to its potential to resolve the scalability problem of supervised Re-ID models. Most existing unsupervised methods adopt an iterative clustering mechanism, where the network was trained based on pseudo labels generated by unsupervised clustering. However, clustering errors are inevitable. To generate high-quality pseudo-labels and mitigate the impact of clustering errors, we propose a novel clustering relationship modeling framework for unsupervised person Re-ID. Specifically, before clustering, the relation between unlabeled images is explored based on a graph correlation learning (GCL) module and the refined features are then used for clustering to generate high-quality pseudo-labels.Thus, GCL adaptively mines the relationship between samples in a mini-batch to reduce the impact of abnormal clustering when training. To train the network more effectively, we further propose a selective contrastive learning (SCL) method with a selective memory bank update policy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method shows much better results than most state-of-the-art unsupervised methods on Market1501, DukeMTMC-reID and MSMT17 datasets. We will release the code for model reproduction.
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods for person re-identification (re-ID) aim at transferring re-ID knowledge from labeled source data to unlabeled target data. Although achieving great success, most of them only use limited data from a single-source domain for model pre-training, making the rich labeled data insufficiently exploited. To make full use of the valuable labeled data, we introduce the multi-source concept into UDA person re-ID field, where multiple source datasets are used during training. However, because of domain gaps, simply combining different datasets only brings limited improvement. In this paper, we try to address this problem from two perspectives, \ie{} domain-specific view and domain-fusion view. Two constructive modules are proposed, and they are compatible with each other. First, a rectification domain-specific batch normalization (RDSBN) module is explored to simultaneously reduce domain-specific characteristics and increase the distinctiveness of person features. Second, a graph convolutional network (GCN) based multi-domain information fusion (MDIF) module is developed, which minimizes domain distances by fusing features of different domains. The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art UDA person re-ID methods by a large margin, and even achieves comparable performance to the supervised approaches without any post-processing techniques.
We present a new method to learn video representations from large-scale unlabeled video data. Ideally, this representation will be generic and transferable, directly usable for new tasks such as action recognition and zero or few-shot learning. We formulate unsupervised representation learning as a multi-modal, multi-task learning problem, where the representations are shared across different modalities via distillation. Further, we introduce the concept of loss function evolution by using an evolutionary search algorithm to automatically find optimal combination of loss functions capturing many (self-supervised) tasks and modalities. Thirdly, we propose an unsupervised representation evaluation metric using distribution matching to a large unlabeled dataset as a prior constraint, based on Zipf's law. This unsupervised constraint, which is not guided by any labeling, produces similar results to weakly-supervised, task-specific ones. The proposed unsupervised representation learning results in a single RGB network and outperforms previous methods. Notably, it is also more effective than several label-based methods (e.g., ImageNet), with the exception of large, fully labeled video datasets.
Few-shot image classification aims to classify unseen classes with limited labeled samples. Recent works benefit from the meta-learning process with episodic tasks and can fast adapt to class from training to testing. Due to the limited number of samples for each task, the initial embedding network for meta learning becomes an essential component and can largely affects the performance in practice. To this end, many pre-trained methods have been proposed, and most of them are trained in supervised way with limited transfer ability for unseen classes. In this paper, we proposed to train a more generalized embedding network with self-supervised learning (SSL) which can provide slow and robust representation for downstream tasks by learning from the data itself. We evaluate our work by extensive comparisons with previous baseline methods on two few-shot classification datasets ({\em i.e.,} MiniImageNet and CUB). Based on the evaluation results, the proposed method achieves significantly better performance, i.e., improve 1-shot and 5-shot tasks by nearly \textbf{3\%} and \textbf{4\%} on MiniImageNet, by nearly \textbf{9\%} and \textbf{3\%} on CUB. Moreover, the proposed method can gain the improvement of (\textbf{15\%}, \textbf{13\%}) on MiniImageNet and (\textbf{15\%}, \textbf{8\%}) on CUB by pretraining using more unlabeled data. Our code will be available at \hyperref[//github.com/phecy/SSL-FEW-SHOT.]{//github.com/phecy/ssl-few-shot.}
Sufficient training data is normally required to train deeply learned models. However, the number of pedestrian images per ID in person re-identification (re-ID) datasets is usually limited, since manually annotations are required for multiple camera views. To produce more data for training deeply learned models, generative adversarial network (GAN) can be leveraged to generate samples for person re-ID. However, the samples generated by vanilla GAN usually do not have labels. So in this paper, we propose a virtual label called Multi-pseudo Regularized Label (MpRL) and assign it to the generated images. With MpRL, the generated samples will be used as supplementary of real training data to train a deep model in a semi-supervised learning fashion. Considering data bias between generated and real samples, MpRL utilizes different contributions from predefined training classes. The contribution-based virtual labels are automatically assigned to generated samples to reduce ambiguous prediction in training. Meanwhile, MpRL only relies on predefined training classes without using extra classes. Furthermore, to reduce over-fitting, a regularized manner is applied to MpRL to regularize the learning process. To verify the effectiveness of MpRL, two state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are adopted in our experiments. Experiments demonstrate that by assigning MpRL to generated samples, we can further improve the person re-ID performance on three datasets i.e., Market-1501, DukeMTMCreID, and CUHK03. The proposed method obtains +6.29%, +6.30% and +5.58% improvements in rank-1 accuracy over a strong CNN baseline respectively, and outperforms the state-of-the- art methods.
In this paper, we propose a conceptually simple and geometrically interpretable objective function, i.e. additive margin Softmax (AM-Softmax), for deep face verification. In general, the face verification task can be viewed as a metric learning problem, so learning large-margin face features whose intra-class variation is small and inter-class difference is large is of great importance in order to achieve good performance. Recently, Large-margin Softmax and Angular Softmax have been proposed to incorporate the angular margin in a multiplicative manner. In this work, we introduce a novel additive angular margin for the Softmax loss, which is intuitively appealing and more interpretable than the existing works. We also emphasize and discuss the importance of feature normalization in the paper. Most importantly, our experiments on LFW BLUFR and MegaFace show that our additive margin softmax loss consistently performs better than the current state-of-the-art methods using the same network architecture and training dataset. Our code has also been made available at //github.com/happynear/AMSoftmax
Person Re-identification (re-id) faces two major challenges: the lack of cross-view paired training data and learning discriminative identity-sensitive and view-invariant features in the presence of large pose variations. In this work, we address both problems by proposing a novel deep person image generation model for synthesizing realistic person images conditional on pose. The model is based on a generative adversarial network (GAN) and used specifically for pose normalization in re-id, thus termed pose-normalization GAN (PN-GAN). With the synthesized images, we can learn a new type of deep re-id feature free of the influence of pose variations. We show that this feature is strong on its own and highly complementary to features learned with the original images. Importantly, we now have a model that generalizes to any new re-id dataset without the need for collecting any training data for model fine-tuning, thus making a deep re-id model truly scalable. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art models, often significantly. In particular, the features learned on Market-1501 can achieve a Rank-1 accuracy of 68.67% on VIPeR without any model fine-tuning, beating almost all existing models fine-tuned on the dataset.
Training a deep architecture using a ranking loss has become standard for the person re-identification task. Increasingly, these deep architectures include additional components that leverage part detections, attribute predictions, pose estimators and other auxiliary information, in order to more effectively localize and align discriminative image regions. In this paper we adopt a different approach and carefully design each component of a simple deep architecture and, critically, the strategy for training it effectively for person re-identification. We extensively evaluate each design choice, leading to a list of good practices for person re-identification. By following these practices, our approach outperforms the state of the art, including more complex methods with auxiliary components, by large margins on four benchmark datasets. We also provide a qualitative analysis of our trained representation which indicates that, while compact, it is able to capture information from localized and discriminative regions, in a manner akin to an implicit attention mechanism.