Few-shot object detection (FSOD), which aims at learning a generic detector that can adapt to unseen tasks with scarce training samples, has witnessed consistent improvement recently. However, most existing methods ignore the efficiency issues, e.g., high computational complexity and slow adaptation speed. Notably, efficiency has become an increasingly important evaluation metric for few-shot techniques due to an emerging trend toward embedded AI. To this end, we present an efficient pretrain-transfer framework (PTF) baseline with no computational increment, which achieves comparable results with previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Upon this baseline, we devise an initializer named knowledge inheritance (KI) to reliably initialize the novel weights for the box classifier, which effectively facilitates the knowledge transfer process and boosts the adaptation speed. Within the KI initializer, we propose an adaptive length re-scaling (ALR) strategy to alleviate the vector length inconsistency between the predicted novel weights and the pretrained base weights. Finally, our approach not only achieves the SOTA results across three public benchmarks, i.e., PASCAL VOC, COCO and LVIS, but also exhibits high efficiency with 1.8-100x faster adaptation speed against the other methods on COCO/LVIS benchmark during few-shot transfer. To our best knowledge, this is the first work to consider the efficiency problem in FSOD. We hope to motivate a trend toward powerful yet efficient few-shot technique development. The codes are publicly available at //github.com/Ze-Yang/Efficient-FSOD.
As a general model compression paradigm, feature-based knowledge distillation allows the student model to learn expressive features from the teacher counterpart. In this paper, we mainly focus on designing an effective feature-distillation framework and propose a spatial-channel adaptive masked distillation (AMD) network for object detection. More specifically, in order to accurately reconstruct important feature regions, we first perform attention-guided feature masking on the feature map of the student network, such that we can identify the important features via spatially adaptive feature masking instead of random masking in the previous methods. In addition, we employ a simple and efficient module to allow the student network channel to be adaptive, improving its model capability in object perception and detection. In contrast to the previous methods, more crucial object-aware features can be reconstructed and learned from the proposed network, which is conducive to accurate object detection. The empirical experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method: with the help of our proposed distillation method, the student networks report 41.3%, 42.4%, and 42.7% mAP scores when RetinaNet, Cascade Mask-RCNN and RepPoints are respectively used as the teacher framework for object detection, which outperforms the previous state-of-the-art distillation methods including FGD and MGD.
When deploying modern machine learning-enabled robotic systems in high-stakes applications, detecting distribution shift is critical. However, most existing methods for detecting distribution shift are not well-suited to robotics settings, where data often arrives in a streaming fashion and may be very high-dimensional. In this work, we present an online method for detecting distribution shift with guarantees on the false positive rate - i.e., when there is no distribution shift, our system is very unlikely (with probability $< \epsilon$) to falsely issue an alert; any alerts that are issued should therefore be heeded. Our method is specifically designed for efficient detection even with high dimensional data, and it empirically achieves up to 11x faster detection on realistic robotics settings compared to prior work while maintaining a low false negative rate in practice (whenever there is a distribution shift in our experiments, our method indeed emits an alert).
Recent years have witnessed huge successes in 3D object detection to recognize common objects for autonomous driving (e.g., vehicles and pedestrians). However, most methods rely heavily on a large amount of well-labeled training data. This limits their capability of detecting rare fine-grained objects (e.g., police cars and ambulances), which is important for special cases, such as emergency rescue, and so on. To achieve simultaneous detection for both common and rare objects, we propose a novel task, called generalized few-shot 3D object detection, where we have a large amount of training data for common (base) objects, but only a few data for rare (novel) classes. Specifically, we analyze in-depth differences between images and point clouds, and then present a practical principle for the few-shot setting in the 3D LiDAR dataset. To solve this task, we propose a simple and effective detection framework, including (1) an incremental fine-tuning method to extend existing 3D detection models to recognize both common and rare objects, and (2) a sample adaptive balance loss to alleviate the issue of long-tailed data distribution in autonomous driving scenarios. On the nuScenes dataset, we conduct sufficient experiments to demonstrate that our approach can successfully detect the rare (novel) classes that contain only a few training data, while also maintaining the detection accuracy of common objects.
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is critical to ensuring the reliability and safety of machine learning systems. For instance, in autonomous driving, we would like the driving system to issue an alert and hand over the control to humans when it detects unusual scenes or objects that it has never seen before and cannot make a safe decision. This problem first emerged in 2017 and since then has received increasing attention from the research community, leading to a plethora of methods developed, ranging from classification-based to density-based to distance-based ones. Meanwhile, several other problems are closely related to OOD detection in terms of motivation and methodology. These include anomaly detection (AD), novelty detection (ND), open set recognition (OSR), and outlier detection (OD). Despite having different definitions and problem settings, these problems often confuse readers and practitioners, and as a result, some existing studies misuse terms. In this survey, we first present a generic framework called generalized OOD detection, which encompasses the five aforementioned problems, i.e., AD, ND, OSR, OOD detection, and OD. Under our framework, these five problems can be seen as special cases or sub-tasks, and are easier to distinguish. Then, we conduct a thorough review of each of the five areas by summarizing their recent technical developments. We conclude this survey with open challenges and potential research directions.
Conventionally, spatiotemporal modeling network and its complexity are the two most concentrated research topics in video action recognition. Existing state-of-the-art methods have achieved excellent accuracy regardless of the complexity meanwhile efficient spatiotemporal modeling solutions are slightly inferior in performance. In this paper, we attempt to acquire both efficiency and effectiveness simultaneously. First of all, besides traditionally treating H x W x T video frames as space-time signal (viewing from the Height-Width spatial plane), we propose to also model video from the other two Height-Time and Width-Time planes, to capture the dynamics of video thoroughly. Secondly, our model is designed based on 2D CNN backbones and model complexity is well kept in mind by design. Specifically, we introduce a novel multi-view fusion (MVF) module to exploit video dynamics using separable convolution for efficiency. It is a plug-and-play module and can be inserted into off-the-shelf 2D CNNs to form a simple yet effective model called MVFNet. Moreover, MVFNet can be thought of as a generalized video modeling framework and it can specialize to be existing methods such as C2D, SlowOnly, and TSM under different settings. Extensive experiments are conducted on popular benchmarks (i.e., Something-Something V1 & V2, Kinetics, UCF-101, and HMDB-51) to show its superiority. The proposed MVFNet can achieve state-of-the-art performance with 2D CNN's complexity.
Transformer model architectures have garnered immense interest lately due to their effectiveness across a range of domains like language, vision and reinforcement learning. In the field of natural language processing for example, Transformers have become an indispensable staple in the modern deep learning stack. Recently, a dizzying number of "X-former" models have been proposed - Reformer, Linformer, Performer, Longformer, to name a few - which improve upon the original Transformer architecture, many of which make improvements around computational and memory efficiency. With the aim of helping the avid researcher navigate this flurry, this paper characterizes a large and thoughtful selection of recent efficiency-flavored "X-former" models, providing an organized and comprehensive overview of existing work and models across multiple domains.
Detection and recognition of text in natural images are two main problems in the field of computer vision that have a wide variety of applications in analysis of sports videos, autonomous driving, industrial automation, to name a few. They face common challenging problems that are factors in how text is represented and affected by several environmental conditions. The current state-of-the-art scene text detection and/or recognition methods have exploited the witnessed advancement in deep learning architectures and reported a superior accuracy on benchmark datasets when tackling multi-resolution and multi-oriented text. However, there are still several remaining challenges affecting text in the wild images that cause existing methods to underperform due to there models are not able to generalize to unseen data and the insufficient labeled data. Thus, unlike previous surveys in this field, the objectives of this survey are as follows: first, offering the reader not only a review on the recent advancement in scene text detection and recognition, but also presenting the results of conducting extensive experiments using a unified evaluation framework that assesses pre-trained models of the selected methods on challenging cases, and applies the same evaluation criteria on these techniques. Second, identifying several existing challenges for detecting or recognizing text in the wild images, namely, in-plane-rotation, multi-oriented and multi-resolution text, perspective distortion, illumination reflection, partial occlusion, complex fonts, and special characters. Finally, the paper also presents insight into the potential research directions in this field to address some of the mentioned challenges that are still encountering scene text detection and recognition techniques.
Benefit from the quick development of deep learning techniques, salient object detection has achieved remarkable progresses recently. However, there still exists following two major challenges that hinder its application in embedded devices, low resolution output and heavy model weight. To this end, this paper presents an accurate yet compact deep network for efficient salient object detection. More specifically, given a coarse saliency prediction in the deepest layer, we first employ residual learning to learn side-output residual features for saliency refinement, which can be achieved with very limited convolutional parameters while keep accuracy. Secondly, we further propose reverse attention to guide such side-output residual learning in a top-down manner. By erasing the current predicted salient regions from side-output features, the network can eventually explore the missing object parts and details which results in high resolution and accuracy. Experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach compares favorably against state-of-the-art methods, and with advantages in terms of simplicity, efficiency (45 FPS) and model size (81 MB).
Retrieving object instances among cluttered scenes efficiently requires compact yet comprehensive regional image representations. Intuitively, object semantics can help build the index that focuses on the most relevant regions. However, due to the lack of bounding-box datasets for objects of interest among retrieval benchmarks, most recent work on regional representations has focused on either uniform or class-agnostic region selection. In this paper, we first fill the void by providing a new dataset of landmark bounding boxes, based on the Google Landmarks dataset, that includes $94k$ images with manually curated boxes from $15k$ unique landmarks. Then, we demonstrate how a trained landmark detector, using our new dataset, can be leveraged to index image regions and improve retrieval accuracy while being much more efficient than existing regional methods. In addition, we further introduce a novel regional aggregated selective match kernel (R-ASMK) to effectively combine information from detected regions into an improved holistic image representation. R-ASMK boosts image retrieval accuracy substantially at no additional memory cost, while even outperforming systems that index image regions independently. Our complete image retrieval system improves upon the previous state-of-the-art by significant margins on the Revisited Oxford and Paris datasets. Code and data will be released.
Generic object detection, aiming at locating object instances from a large number of predefined categories in natural images, is one of the most fundamental and challenging problems in computer vision. Deep learning techniques have emerged in recent years as powerful methods for learning feature representations directly from data, and have led to remarkable breakthroughs in the field of generic object detection. Given this time of rapid evolution, the goal of this paper is to provide a comprehensive survey of the recent achievements in this field brought by deep learning techniques. More than 250 key contributions are included in this survey, covering many aspects of generic object detection research: leading detection frameworks and fundamental subproblems including object feature representation, object proposal generation, context information modeling and training strategies; evaluation issues, specifically benchmark datasets, evaluation metrics, and state of the art performance. We finish by identifying promising directions for future research.