We introduce S$^2$VS, a video similarity learning approach with self-supervision. Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) is typically used to train deep models on a proxy task so as to have strong transferability on target tasks after fine-tuning. Here, in contrast to prior work, SSL is used to perform video similarity learning and address multiple retrieval and detection tasks at once with no use of labeled data. This is achieved by learning via instance-discrimination with task-tailored augmentations and the widely used InfoNCE loss together with an additional loss operating jointly on self-similarity and hard-negative similarity. We benchmark our method on tasks where video relevance is defined with varying granularity, ranging from video copies to videos depicting the same incident or event. We learn a single universal model that achieves state-of-the-art performance on all tasks, surpassing previously proposed methods that use labeled data. The code and pretrained models are publicly available at: \url{//github.com/gkordo/s2vs}
Existing image/video datasets for cattle behavior recognition are mostly small, lack well-defined labels, or are collected in unrealistic controlled environments. This limits the utility of machine learning (ML) models learned from them. Therefore, we introduce a new dataset, called Cattle Visual Behaviors (CVB), that consists of 502 video clips, each fifteen seconds long, captured in natural lighting conditions, and annotated with eleven visually perceptible behaviors of grazing cattle. We use the Computer Vision Annotation Tool (CVAT) to collect our annotations. To make the procedure more efficient, we perform an initial detection and tracking of cattle in the videos using appropriate pre-trained models. The results are corrected by domain experts along with cattle behavior labeling in CVAT. The pre-hoc detection and tracking step significantly reduces the manual annotation time and effort. Moreover, we convert CVB to the atomic visual action (AVA) format and train and evaluate the popular SlowFast action recognition model on it. The associated preliminary results confirm that we can localize the cattle and recognize their frequently occurring behaviors with confidence. By creating and sharing CVB, our aim is to develop improved models capable of recognizing all important behaviors accurately and to assist other researchers and practitioners in developing and evaluating new ML models for cattle behavior classification using video data.
Scene Text Recognition (STR) is a challenging task due to variations in text style, shape, and background. Incorporating linguistic information is an effective way to enhance the robustness of STR models. Existing methods rely on permuted language modeling (PLM) or masked language modeling (MLM) to learn contextual information implicitly, either through an ensemble of permuted autoregressive (AR) LMs training or iterative non-autoregressive (NAR) decoding procedure. However, these methods exhibit limitations: PLM's AR decoding results in the lack of information about future characters, while MLM provides global information of the entire text but neglects dependencies among each predicted character. In this paper, we propose a Masked and Permuted Implicit Context Learning Network for STR, which unifies PLM and MLM within a single decoding architecture, inheriting the advantages of both approaches. We utilize the training procedure of PLM, and to integrate MLM, we incorporate word length information into the decoding process by introducing specific numbers of mask tokens. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks using both AR and NAR decoding procedures.
In 3D action recognition, there exists rich complementary information between skeleton modalities. Nevertheless, how to model and utilize this information remains a challenging problem for self-supervised 3D action representation learning. In this work, we formulate the cross-modal interaction as a bidirectional knowledge distillation problem. Different from classic distillation solutions that transfer the knowledge of a fixed and pre-trained teacher to the student, in this work, the knowledge is continuously updated and bidirectionally distilled between modalities. To this end, we propose a new Cross-modal Mutual Distillation (CMD) framework with the following designs. On the one hand, the neighboring similarity distribution is introduced to model the knowledge learned in each modality, where the relational information is naturally suitable for the contrastive frameworks. On the other hand, asymmetrical configurations are used for teacher and student to stabilize the distillation process and to transfer high-confidence information between modalities. By derivation, we find that the cross-modal positive mining in previous works can be regarded as a degenerated version of our CMD. We perform extensive experiments on NTU RGB+D 60, NTU RGB+D 120, and PKU-MMD II datasets. Our approach outperforms existing self-supervised methods and sets a series of new records. The code is available at: //github.com/maoyunyao/CMD
What matters for contrastive learning? We argue that contrastive learning heavily relies on informative features, or "hard" (positive or negative) features. Early works include more informative features by applying complex data augmentations and large batch size or memory bank, and recent works design elaborate sampling approaches to explore informative features. The key challenge toward exploring such features is that the source multi-view data is generated by applying random data augmentations, making it infeasible to always add useful information in the augmented data. Consequently, the informativeness of features learned from such augmented data is limited. In response, we propose to directly augment the features in latent space, thereby learning discriminative representations without a large amount of input data. We perform a meta learning technique to build the augmentation generator that updates its network parameters by considering the performance of the encoder. However, insufficient input data may lead the encoder to learn collapsed features and therefore malfunction the augmentation generator. A new margin-injected regularization is further added in the objective function to avoid the encoder learning a degenerate mapping. To contrast all features in one gradient back-propagation step, we adopt the proposed optimization-driven unified contrastive loss instead of the conventional contrastive loss. Empirically, our method achieves state-of-the-art results on several benchmark datasets.
Deep learning on graphs has attracted significant interests recently. However, most of the works have focused on (semi-) supervised learning, resulting in shortcomings including heavy label reliance, poor generalization, and weak robustness. To address these issues, self-supervised learning (SSL), which extracts informative knowledge through well-designed pretext tasks without relying on manual labels, has become a promising and trending learning paradigm for graph data. Different from SSL on other domains like computer vision and natural language processing, SSL on graphs has an exclusive background, design ideas, and taxonomies. Under the umbrella of graph self-supervised learning, we present a timely and comprehensive review of the existing approaches which employ SSL techniques for graph data. We construct a unified framework that mathematically formalizes the paradigm of graph SSL. According to the objectives of pretext tasks, we divide these approaches into four categories: generation-based, auxiliary property-based, contrast-based, and hybrid approaches. We further conclude the applications of graph SSL across various research fields and summarize the commonly used datasets, evaluation benchmark, performance comparison and open-source codes of graph SSL. Finally, we discuss the remaining challenges and potential future directions in this research field.
Self-supervised learning methods are gaining increasing traction in computer vision due to their recent success in reducing the gap with supervised learning. In natural language processing (NLP) self-supervised learning and transformers are already the methods of choice. The recent literature suggests that the transformers are becoming increasingly popular also in computer vision. So far, the vision transformers have been shown to work well when pretrained either using a large scale supervised data or with some kind of co-supervision, e.g. in terms of teacher network. These supervised pretrained vision transformers achieve very good results in downstream tasks with minimal changes. In this work we investigate the merits of self-supervised learning for pretraining image/vision transformers and then using them for downstream classification tasks. We propose Self-supervised vIsion Transformers (SiT) and discuss several self-supervised training mechanisms to obtain a pretext model. The architectural flexibility of SiT allows us to use it as an autoencoder and work with multiple self-supervised tasks seamlessly. We show that a pretrained SiT can be finetuned for a downstream classification task on small scale datasets, consisting of a few thousand images rather than several millions. The proposed approach is evaluated on standard datasets using common protocols. The results demonstrate the strength of the transformers and their suitability for self-supervised learning. We outperformed existing self-supervised learning methods by large margin. We also observed that SiT is good for few shot learning and also showed that it is learning useful representation by simply training a linear classifier on top of the learned features from SiT. Pretraining, finetuning, and evaluation codes will be available under: //github.com/Sara-Ahmed/SiT.
Pre-training text representations has recently been shown to significantly improve the state-of-the-art in many natural language processing tasks. The central goal of pre-training is to learn text representations that are useful for subsequent tasks. However, existing approaches are optimized by minimizing a proxy objective, such as the negative log likelihood of language modeling. In this work, we introduce a learning algorithm which directly optimizes model's ability to learn text representations for effective learning of downstream tasks. We show that there is an intrinsic connection between multi-task pre-training and model-agnostic meta-learning with a sequence of meta-train steps. The standard multi-task learning objective adopted in BERT is a special case of our learning algorithm where the depth of meta-train is zero. We study the problem in two settings: unsupervised pre-training and supervised pre-training with different pre-training objects to verify the generality of our approach.Experimental results show that our algorithm brings improvements and learns better initializations for a variety of downstream tasks.
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks have pushed the state-of-the art for semantic segmentation provided that a large amount of images together with pixel-wise annotations is available. Data collection is expensive and a solution to alleviate it is to use transfer learning. This reduces the amount of annotated data required for the network training but it does not get rid of this heavy processing step. We propose a method of transfer learning without annotations on the target task for datasets with redundant content and distinct pixel distributions. Our method takes advantage of the approximate content alignment of the images between two datasets when the approximation error prevents the reuse of annotation from one dataset to another. Given the annotations for only one dataset, we train a first network in a supervised manner. This network autonomously learns to generate deep data representations relevant to the semantic segmentation. Then the images in the new dataset, we train a new network to generate a deep data representation that matches the one from the first network on the previous dataset. The training consists in a regression between feature maps and does not require any annotations on the new dataset. We show that this method reaches performances similar to a classic transfer learning on the PASCAL VOC dataset with synthetic transformations.
We consider the task of weakly supervised one-shot detection. In this task, we attempt to perform a detection task over a set of unseen classes, when training only using weak binary labels that indicate the existence of a class instance in a given example. The model is conditioned on a single exemplar of an unseen class and a target example that may or may not contain an instance of the same class as the exemplar. A similarity map is computed by using a Siamese neural network to map the exemplar and regions of the target example to a latent representation space and then computing cosine similarity scores between representations. An attention mechanism weights different regions in the target example, and enables learning of the one-shot detection task using the weaker labels alone. The model can be applied to detection tasks from different domains, including computer vision object detection. We evaluate our attention Siamese networks on a one-shot detection task from the audio domain, where it detects audio keywords in spoken utterances. Our model considerably outperforms a baseline approach and yields a 42.6% average precision for detection across 10 unseen classes. Moreover, architectural developments from computer vision object detection models such as a region proposal network can be incorporated into the model architecture, and results show that performance is expected to improve by doing so.