We present the Caltech Fish Counting Dataset (CFC), a large-scale dataset for detecting, tracking, and counting fish in sonar videos. We identify sonar videos as a rich source of data for advancing low signal-to-noise computer vision applications and tackling domain generalization in multiple-object tracking (MOT) and counting. In comparison to existing MOT and counting datasets, which are largely restricted to videos of people and vehicles in cities, CFC is sourced from a natural-world domain where targets are not easily resolvable and appearance features cannot be easily leveraged for target re-identification. With over half a million annotations in over 1,500 videos sourced from seven different sonar cameras, CFC allows researchers to train MOT and counting algorithms and evaluate generalization performance at unseen test locations. We perform extensive baseline experiments and identify key challenges and opportunities for advancing the state of the art in generalization in MOT and counting.
Data Augmentation (DA) -- generating extra training samples beyond original training set -- has been widely-used in today's unbiased VQA models to mitigate the language biases. Current mainstream DA strategies are synthetic-based methods, which synthesize new samples by either editing some visual regions/words, or re-generating them from scratch. However, these synthetic samples are always unnatural and error-prone. To avoid this issue, a recent DA work composes new augmented samples by randomly pairing pristine images and other human-written questions. Unfortunately, to guarantee augmented samples have reasonable ground-truth answers, they manually design a set of heuristic rules for several question types, which extremely limits its generalization abilities. To this end, we propose a new Knowledge Distillation based Data Augmentation for VQA, dubbed KDDAug. Specifically, we first relax the requirements of reasonable image-question pairs, which can be easily applied to any question types. Then, we design a knowledge distillation (KD) based answer assignment to generate pseudo answers for all composed image-question pairs, which are robust to both in-domain and out-of-distribution settings. Since KDDAug is a model-agnostic DA strategy, it can be seamlessly incorporated into any VQA architectures. Extensive ablation studies on multiple backbones and benchmarks have demonstrated the effectiveness and generalization abilities of KDDAug.
Neural architecture search (NAS) has become a common approach to developing and discovering new neural architectures for different target platforms and purposes. However, scanning the search space is comprised of long training processes of many candidate architectures, which is costly in terms of computational resources and time. Regression algorithms are a common tool to predicting a candidate architecture's accuracy, which can dramatically accelerate the search procedure. We aim at proposing a new baseline that will support the development of regression algorithms that can predict an architecture's accuracy just from its scheme, or by only training it for a minimal number of epochs. Therefore, we introduce the NAAP-440 dataset of 440 neural architectures, which were trained on CIFAR10 using a fixed recipe. Our experiments indicate that by using off-the-shelf regression algorithms and running up to 10% of the training process, not only is it possible to predict an architecture's accuracy rather precisely, but that the values predicted for the architectures also maintain their accuracy order with a minimal number of monotonicity violations. This approach may serve as a powerful tool for accelerating NAS-based studies and thus dramatically increase their efficiency. The dataset and code used in the study have been made public.
Network architecture search (NAS) has become a common approach to developing and discovering new neural architectures for different target platforms and purposes. However, scanning the search space is comprised of long training processes of many candidate architectures, which is costly in terms of computational resources and time. Regression algorithms are a common tool to predicting a candidate architecture's accuracy, which can dramatically accelerate the search procedure. We aim at proposing a new baseline that will support the development of regression algorithms that can predict an architecture's accuracy just from its scheme, or by only training it for a minimal number of epochs. Therefore, we introduce the NAAP-440 dataset of 440 neural architectures, which were trained on CIFAR10 using a fixed recipe. Our experiments indicate that by using off-the-shelf regression algorithms and running up to 10% of the training process, not only is it possible to predict an architecture's accuracy rather precisely, but that the values predicted for the architectures also maintain their accuracy order with a minimal number of monotonicity violations. This approach may serve as a powerful tool for accelerating NAS-based studies and thus dramatically increase their efficiency. The dataset and code used in the study have been made public.
Multi-label image classification allows predicting a set of labels from a given image. Unlike multiclass classification, where only one label per image is assigned, such setup is applicable for a broader range of applications. In this work we revisit two popular approaches to multilabel classification: transformer-based heads and labels relations information graph processing branches. Although transformer-based heads are considered to achieve better results than graph-based branches, we argue that with the proper training strategy graph-based methods can demonstrate just a small accuracy drop, while spending less computational resources on inference. In our training strategy, instead of Asymmetric Loss (ASL), which is the de-facto standard for multilabel classification, we introduce its modification acting in the angle space. It implicitly learns a proxy feature vector on the unit hypersphere for each class, providing a better discrimination ability, than binary cross entropy loss does on unnormalized features. With the proposed loss and training strategy, we obtain SOTA results among single modality methods on widespread multilabel classification benchmarks such as MS-COCO, PASCAL-VOC, NUS-Wide and Visual Genome 500. Source code of our method is available as a part of the OpenVINO Training Extensions //github.com/openvinotoolkit/deep-object-reid/tree/multilabel
Sequential multiple assignment randomized trials (SMARTs) are the gold standard trial design to generate data for the evaluation of multi-stage treatment regimes. As with conventional (single-stage) randomized clinical trials, interim monitoring allows early stopping; however, there are few methods for principled interim analysis in SMARTs. Because SMARTs involve multiple stages of treatment, a key challenge is that not all enrolled participants will have progressed through all treatment stages at the time of an interim analysis. Wu et al. (2021) propose an estimator for the mean outcome under a given regime that uses data only from participants who have completed all treatment stages. We propose a doubly-robust estimator for the mean outcome under a given regime that gains efficiency by using partial information from enrolled participants regardless of their progression through treatment stages. Using the asymptotic distribution of this estimator, we derive associated Pocock and O'Brien-Fleming testing procedures for early stopping. In simulation experiments, the estimator controls type I error and achieves nominal power while reducing expected sample size relative to the method of Wu et al. (2021). We provide an illustrative application of the proposed estimator using a case study based on a recent SMART evaluating behavioral pain interventions for breast cancer patients.
Recent deep learning approaches for multi-view depth estimation are employed either in a depth-from-video or a multi-view stereo setting. Despite different settings, these approaches are technically similar: they correlate multiple source views with a keyview to estimate a depth map for the keyview. In this work, we introduce the Robust Multi-View Depth Benchmark that is built upon a set of public datasets and allows evaluation in both settings on data from different domains. We evaluate recent approaches and find imbalanced performances across domains. Further, we consider a third setting, where camera poses are available and the objective is to estimate the corresponding depth maps with their correct scale. We show that recent approaches do not generalize across datasets in this setting. This is because their cost volume output runs out of distribution. To resolve this, we present the Robust MVD Baseline model for multi-view depth estimation, which is built upon existing components but employs a novel scale augmentation procedure. It can be applied for robust multi-view depth estimation, independent of the target data. We provide code for the proposed benchmark and baseline model at //github.com/lmb-freiburg/robustmvd.
In many visual systems, visual tracking often bases on RGB image sequences, in which some targets are invalid in low-light conditions, and tracking performance is thus affected significantly. Introducing other modalities such as depth and infrared data is an effective way to handle imaging limitations of individual sources, but multi-modal imaging platforms usually require elaborate designs and cannot be applied in many real-world applications at present. Near-infrared (NIR) imaging becomes an essential part of many surveillance cameras, whose imaging is switchable between RGB and NIR based on the light intensity. These two modalities are heterogeneous with very different visual properties and thus bring big challenges for visual tracking. However, existing works have not studied this challenging problem. In this work, we address the cross-modal object tracking problem and contribute a new video dataset, including 654 cross-modal image sequences with over 481K frames in total, and the average video length is more than 735 frames. To promote the research and development of cross-modal object tracking, we propose a new algorithm, which learns the modality-aware target representation to mitigate the appearance gap between RGB and NIR modalities in the tracking process. It is plug-and-play and could thus be flexibly embedded into different tracking frameworks. Extensive experiments on the dataset are conducted, and we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in two representative tracking frameworks against 17 state-of-the-art tracking methods. We will release the dataset for free academic usage, dataset download link and code will be released soon.
Since real-world objects and their interactions are often multi-modal and multi-typed, heterogeneous networks have been widely used as a more powerful, realistic, and generic superclass of traditional homogeneous networks (graphs). Meanwhile, representation learning (\aka~embedding) has recently been intensively studied and shown effective for various network mining and analytical tasks. In this work, we aim to provide a unified framework to deeply summarize and evaluate existing research on heterogeneous network embedding (HNE), which includes but goes beyond a normal survey. Since there has already been a broad body of HNE algorithms, as the first contribution of this work, we provide a generic paradigm for the systematic categorization and analysis over the merits of various existing HNE algorithms. Moreover, existing HNE algorithms, though mostly claimed generic, are often evaluated on different datasets. Understandable due to the application favor of HNE, such indirect comparisons largely hinder the proper attribution of improved task performance towards effective data preprocessing and novel technical design, especially considering the various ways possible to construct a heterogeneous network from real-world application data. Therefore, as the second contribution, we create four benchmark datasets with various properties regarding scale, structure, attribute/label availability, and \etc.~from different sources, towards handy and fair evaluations of HNE algorithms. As the third contribution, we carefully refactor and amend the implementations and create friendly interfaces for 13 popular HNE algorithms, and provide all-around comparisons among them over multiple tasks and experimental settings.
Most deep learning-based models for speech enhancement have mainly focused on estimating the magnitude of spectrogram while reusing the phase from noisy speech for reconstruction. This is due to the difficulty of estimating the phase of clean speech. To improve speech enhancement performance, we tackle the phase estimation problem in three ways. First, we propose Deep Complex U-Net, an advanced U-Net structured model incorporating well-defined complex-valued building blocks to deal with complex-valued spectrograms. Second, we propose a polar coordinate-wise complex-valued masking method to reflect the distribution of complex ideal ratio masks. Third, we define a novel loss function, weighted source-to-distortion ratio (wSDR) loss, which is designed to directly correlate with a quantitative evaluation measure. Our model was evaluated on a mixture of the Voice Bank corpus and DEMAND database, which has been widely used by many deep learning models for speech enhancement. Ablation experiments were conducted on the mixed dataset showing that all three proposed approaches are empirically valid. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in all metrics, outperforming previous approaches by a large margin.