The generalization with respect to domain shifts, as they frequently appear in applications such as autonomous driving, is one of the remaining big challenges for deep learning models. Therefore, we propose an intra-source style augmentation (ISSA) method to improve domain generalization in semantic segmentation. Our method is based on a novel masked noise encoder for StyleGAN2 inversion. The model learns to faithfully reconstruct the image preserving its semantic layout through noise prediction. Random masking of the estimated noise enables the style mixing capability of our model, i.e. it allows to alter the global appearance without affecting the semantic layout of an image. Using the proposed masked noise encoder to randomize style and content combinations in the training set, ISSA effectively increases the diversity of training data and reduces spurious correlation. As a result, we achieve up to $12.4\%$ mIoU improvements on driving-scene semantic segmentation under different types of data shifts, i.e., changing geographic locations, adverse weather conditions, and day to night. ISSA is model-agnostic and straightforwardly applicable with CNNs and Transformers. It is also complementary to other domain generalization techniques, e.g., it improves the recent state-of-the-art solution RobustNet by $3\%$ mIoU in Cityscapes to Dark Z\"urich.
Achieving high accuracy on data from domains unseen during training is a fundamental challenge in domain generalization (DG). While state-of-the-art DG classifiers have demonstrated impressive performance across various tasks, they have shown a bias towards domain-dependent information, such as image styles, rather than domain-invariant information, such as image content. This bias renders them unreliable for deployment in risk-sensitive scenarios such as autonomous driving where a misclassification could lead to catastrophic consequences. To enable risk-averse predictions from a DG classifier, we propose a novel inference procedure, Test-Time Neural Style Smoothing (TT-NSS), that uses a "style-smoothed" version of the DG classifier for prediction at test time. Specifically, the style-smoothed classifier classifies a test image as the most probable class predicted by the DG classifier on random re-stylizations of the test image. TT-NSS uses a neural style transfer module to stylize a test image on the fly, requires only black-box access to the DG classifier, and crucially, abstains when predictions of the DG classifier on the stylized test images lack consensus. Additionally, we propose a neural style smoothing (NSS) based training procedure that can be seamlessly integrated with existing DG methods. This procedure enhances prediction consistency, improving the performance of TT-NSS on non-abstained samples. Our empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of TT-NSS and NSS at producing and improving risk-averse predictions on unseen domains from DG classifiers trained with SOTA training methods on various benchmark datasets and their variations.
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.
This paper introduces video domain generalization where most video classification networks degenerate due to the lack of exposure to the target domains of divergent distributions. We observe that the global temporal features are less generalizable, due to the temporal domain shift that videos from other unseen domains may have an unexpected absence or misalignment of the temporal relations. This finding has motivated us to solve video domain generalization by effectively learning the local-relation features of different timescales that are more generalizable, and exploiting them along with the global-relation features to maintain the discriminability. This paper presents the VideoDG framework with two technical contributions. The first is a new deep architecture named the Adversarial Pyramid Network, which improves the generalizability of video features by capturing the local-relation, global-relation, and cross-relation features progressively. On the basis of pyramid features, the second contribution is a new and robust approach of adversarial data augmentation that can bridge different video domains by improving the diversity and quality of augmented data. We construct three video domain generalization benchmarks in which domains are divided according to different datasets, different consequences of actions, or different camera views, respectively. VideoDG consistently outperforms the combinations of previous video classification models and existing domain generalization methods on all benchmarks.
Generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) data is a capability natural to humans yet challenging for machines to reproduce. This is because most learning algorithms strongly rely on the i.i.d.~assumption on source/target data, which is often violated in practice due to domain shift. Domain generalization (DG) aims to achieve OOD generalization by using only source data for model learning. Since first introduced in 2011, research in DG has made great progresses. In particular, intensive research in this topic has led to a broad spectrum of methodologies, e.g., those based on domain alignment, meta-learning, data augmentation, or ensemble learning, just to name a few; and has covered various vision applications such as object recognition, segmentation, action recognition, and person re-identification. In this paper, for the first time a comprehensive literature review is provided to summarize the developments in DG for computer vision over the past decade. Specifically, we first cover the background by formally defining DG and relating it to other research fields like domain adaptation and transfer learning. Second, we conduct a thorough review into existing methods and present a categorization based on their methodologies and motivations. Finally, we conclude this survey with insights and discussions on future research directions.
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.
Leveraging datasets available to learn a model with high generalization ability to unseen domains is important for computer vision, especially when the unseen domain's annotated data are unavailable. We study a novel and practical problem of Open Domain Generalization (OpenDG), which learns from different source domains to achieve high performance on an unknown target domain, where the distributions and label sets of each individual source domain and the target domain can be different. The problem can be generally applied to diverse source domains and widely applicable to real-world applications. We propose a Domain-Augmented Meta-Learning framework to learn open-domain generalizable representations. We augment domains on both feature-level by a new Dirichlet mixup and label-level by distilled soft-labeling, which complements each domain with missing classes and other domain knowledge. We conduct meta-learning over domains by designing new meta-learning tasks and losses to preserve domain unique knowledge and generalize knowledge across domains simultaneously. Experiment results on various multi-domain datasets demonstrate that the proposed Domain-Augmented Meta-Learning (DAML) outperforms prior methods for unseen domain recognition.
The notion of "in-domain data" in NLP is often over-simplistic and vague, as textual data varies in many nuanced linguistic aspects such as topic, style or level of formality. In addition, domain labels are many times unavailable, making it challenging to build domain-specific systems. We show that massive pre-trained language models implicitly learn sentence representations that cluster by domains without supervision -- suggesting a simple data-driven definition of domains in textual data. We harness this property and propose domain data selection methods based on such models, which require only a small set of in-domain monolingual data. We evaluate our data selection methods for neural machine translation across five diverse domains, where they outperform an established approach as measured by both BLEU and by precision and recall of sentence selection with respect to an oracle.
Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable success in computer vision tasks. Existing neural networks mainly operate in the spatial domain with fixed input sizes. For practical applications, images are usually large and have to be downsampled to the predetermined input size of neural networks. Even though the downsampling operations reduce computation and the required communication bandwidth, it removes both redundant and salient information obliviously, which results in accuracy degradation. Inspired by digital signal processing theories, we analyze the spectral bias from the frequency perspective and propose a learning-based frequency selection method to identify the trivial frequency components which can be removed without accuracy loss. The proposed method of learning in the frequency domain leverages identical structures of the well-known neural networks, such as ResNet-50, MobileNetV2, and Mask R-CNN, while accepting the frequency-domain information as the input. Experiment results show that learning in the frequency domain with static channel selection can achieve higher accuracy than the conventional spatial downsampling approach and meanwhile further reduce the input data size. Specifically for ImageNet classification with the same input size, the proposed method achieves 1.41% and 0.66% top-1 accuracy improvements on ResNet-50 and MobileNetV2, respectively. Even with half input size, the proposed method still improves the top-1 accuracy on ResNet-50 by 1%. In addition, we observe a 0.8% average precision improvement on Mask R-CNN for instance segmentation on the COCO dataset.
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 investigate the problem of automatically determining what type of shoe left an impression found at a crime scene. This recognition problem is made difficult by the variability in types of crime scene evidence (ranging from traces of dust or oil on hard surfaces to impressions made in soil) and the lack of comprehensive databases of shoe outsole tread patterns. We find that mid-level features extracted by pre-trained convolutional neural nets are surprisingly effective descriptors for this specialized domains. However, the choice of similarity measure for matching exemplars to a query image is essential to good performance. For matching multi-channel deep features, we propose the use of multi-channel normalized cross-correlation and analyze its effectiveness. Our proposed metric significantly improves performance in matching crime scene shoeprints to laboratory test impressions. We also show its effectiveness in other cross-domain image retrieval problems: matching facade images to segmentation labels and aerial photos to map images. Finally, we introduce a discriminatively trained variant and fine-tune our system through our proposed metric, obtaining state-of-the-art performance.