Low-light conditions have an adverse impact on machine cognition, limiting the performance of computer vision systems in real life. Since low-light data is limited and difficult to annotate, we focus on image processing to enhance low-light images and improve the performance of any downstream task model, instead of fine-tuning each of the models which can be prohibitively expensive. We propose to improve the existing zero-reference low-light enhancement by leveraging the CLIP model to capture image prior and for semantic guidance. Specifically, we propose a data augmentation strategy to learn an image prior via prompt learning, based on image sampling, to learn the image prior without any need for paired or unpaired normal-light data. Next, we propose a semantic guidance strategy that maximally takes advantage of existing low-light annotation by introducing both content and context cues about the image training patches. We experimentally show, in a qualitative study, that the proposed prior and semantic guidance help to improve the overall image contrast and hue, as well as improve background-foreground discrimination, resulting in reduced over-saturation and noise over-amplification, common in related zero-reference methods. As we target machine cognition, rather than rely on assuming the correlation between human perception and downstream task performance, we conduct and present an ablation study and comparison with related zero-reference methods in terms of task-based performance across many low-light datasets, including image classification, object and face detection, showing the effectiveness of our proposed method.
The success of AI models relies on the availability of large, diverse, and high-quality datasets, which can be challenging to obtain due to data scarcity, privacy concerns, and high costs. Synthetic data has emerged as a promising solution by generating artificial data that mimics real-world patterns. This paper provides an overview of synthetic data research, discussing its applications, challenges, and future directions. We present empirical evidence from prior art to demonstrate its effectiveness and highlight the importance of ensuring its factuality, fidelity, and unbiasedness. We emphasize the need for responsible use of synthetic data to build more powerful, inclusive, and trustworthy language models.
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have been widely applied in various fields due to their significant power on processing graph-structured data. Typical GCN and its variants work under a homophily assumption (i.e., nodes with same class are prone to connect to each other), while ignoring the heterophily which exists in many real-world networks (i.e., nodes with different classes tend to form edges). Existing methods deal with heterophily by mainly aggregating higher-order neighborhoods or combing the immediate representations, which leads to noise and irrelevant information in the result. But these methods did not change the propagation mechanism which works under homophily assumption (that is a fundamental part of GCNs). This makes it difficult to distinguish the representation of nodes from different classes. To address this problem, in this paper we design a novel propagation mechanism, which can automatically change the propagation and aggregation process according to homophily or heterophily between node pairs. To adaptively learn the propagation process, we introduce two measurements of homophily degree between node pairs, which is learned based on topological and attribute information, respectively. Then we incorporate the learnable homophily degree into the graph convolution framework, which is trained in an end-to-end schema, enabling it to go beyond the assumption of homophily. More importantly, we theoretically prove that our model can constrain the similarity of representations between nodes according to their homophily degree. Experiments on seven real-world datasets demonstrate that this new approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods under heterophily or low homophily, and gains competitive performance under homophily.
Image-level weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) is a fundamental yet challenging computer vision task facilitating scene understanding and automatic driving. Most existing methods resort to classification-based Class Activation Maps (CAMs) to play as the initial pseudo labels, which tend to focus on the discriminative image regions and lack customized characteristics for the segmentation task. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel activation modulation and recalibration (AMR) scheme, which leverages a spotlight branch and a compensation branch to obtain weighted CAMs that can provide recalibration supervision and task-specific concepts. Specifically, an attention modulation module (AMM) is employed to rearrange the distribution of feature importance from the channel-spatial sequential perspective, which helps to explicitly model channel-wise interdependencies and spatial encodings to adaptively modulate segmentation-oriented activation responses. Furthermore, we introduce a cross pseudo supervision for dual branches, which can be regarded as a semantic similar regularization to mutually refine two branches. Extensive experiments show that AMR establishes a new state-of-the-art performance on the PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset, surpassing not only current methods trained with the image-level of supervision but also some methods relying on stronger supervision, such as saliency label. Experiments also reveal that our scheme is plug-and-play and can be incorporated with other approaches to boost their performance.
Visual recognition is currently one of the most important and active research areas in computer vision, pattern recognition, and even the general field of artificial intelligence. It has great fundamental importance and strong industrial needs. Deep neural networks (DNNs) have largely boosted their performances on many concrete tasks, with the help of large amounts of training data and new powerful computation resources. Though recognition accuracy is usually the first concern for new progresses, efficiency is actually rather important and sometimes critical for both academic research and industrial applications. Moreover, insightful views on the opportunities and challenges of efficiency are also highly required for the entire community. While general surveys on the efficiency issue of DNNs have been done from various perspectives, as far as we are aware, scarcely any of them focused on visual recognition systematically, and thus it is unclear which progresses are applicable to it and what else should be concerned. In this paper, we present the review of the recent advances with our suggestions on the new possible directions towards improving the efficiency of DNN-related visual recognition approaches. We investigate not only from the model but also the data point of view (which is not the case in existing surveys), and focus on three most studied data types (images, videos and points). This paper attempts to provide a systematic summary via a comprehensive survey which can serve as a valuable reference and inspire both researchers and practitioners who work on visual recognition problems.
Humans perceive the world by concurrently processing and fusing high-dimensional inputs from multiple modalities such as vision and audio. Machine perception models, in stark contrast, are typically modality-specific and optimised for unimodal benchmarks, and hence late-stage fusion of final representations or predictions from each modality (`late-fusion') is still a dominant paradigm for multimodal video classification. Instead, we introduce a novel transformer based architecture that uses `fusion bottlenecks' for modality fusion at multiple layers. Compared to traditional pairwise self-attention, our model forces information between different modalities to pass through a small number of bottleneck latents, requiring the model to collate and condense the most relevant information in each modality and only share what is necessary. We find that such a strategy improves fusion performance, at the same time reducing computational cost. We conduct thorough ablation studies, and achieve state-of-the-art results on multiple audio-visual classification benchmarks including Audioset, Epic-Kitchens and VGGSound. All code and models will be released.
Domain shift is a fundamental problem in visual recognition which typically arises when the source and target data follow different distributions. The existing domain adaptation approaches which tackle this problem work in the closed-set setting with the assumption that the source and the target data share exactly the same classes of objects. In this paper, we tackle a more realistic problem of open-set domain shift where the target data contains additional classes that are not present in the source data. More specifically, we introduce an end-to-end Progressive Graph Learning (PGL) framework where a graph neural network with episodic training is integrated to suppress underlying conditional shift and adversarial learning is adopted to close the gap between the source and target distributions. Compared to the existing open-set adaptation approaches, our approach guarantees to achieve a tighter upper bound of the target error. Extensive experiments on three standard open-set benchmarks evidence that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-arts in open-set domain adaptation.
Substantial efforts have been devoted more recently to presenting various methods for object detection in optical remote sensing images. However, the current survey of datasets and deep learning based methods for object detection in optical remote sensing images is not adequate. Moreover, most of the existing datasets have some shortcomings, for example, the numbers of images and object categories are small scale, and the image diversity and variations are insufficient. These limitations greatly affect the development of deep learning based object detection methods. In the paper, we provide a comprehensive review of the recent deep learning based object detection progress in both the computer vision and earth observation communities. Then, we propose a large-scale, publicly available benchmark for object DetectIon in Optical Remote sensing images, which we name as DIOR. The dataset contains 23463 images and 192472 instances, covering 20 object classes. The proposed DIOR dataset 1) is large-scale on the object categories, on the object instance number, and on the total image number; 2) has a large range of object size variations, not only in terms of spatial resolutions, but also in the aspect of inter- and intra-class size variability across objects; 3) holds big variations as the images are obtained with different imaging conditions, weathers, seasons, and image quality; and 4) has high inter-class similarity and intra-class diversity. The proposed benchmark can help the researchers to develop and validate their data-driven methods. Finally, we evaluate several state-of-the-art approaches on our DIOR dataset to establish a baseline for future research.
Embedding entities and relations into a continuous multi-dimensional vector space have become the dominant method for knowledge graph embedding in representation learning. However, most existing models ignore to represent hierarchical knowledge, such as the similarities and dissimilarities of entities in one domain. We proposed to learn a Domain Representations over existing knowledge graph embedding models, such that entities that have similar attributes are organized into the same domain. Such hierarchical knowledge of domains can give further evidence in link prediction. Experimental results show that domain embeddings give a significant improvement over the most recent state-of-art baseline knowledge graph embedding models.
Top-down visual attention mechanisms have been used extensively in image captioning and visual question answering (VQA) to enable deeper image understanding through fine-grained analysis and even multiple steps of reasoning. In this work, we propose a combined bottom-up and top-down attention mechanism that enables attention to be calculated at the level of objects and other salient image regions. This is the natural basis for attention to be considered. Within our approach, the bottom-up mechanism (based on Faster R-CNN) proposes image regions, each with an associated feature vector, while the top-down mechanism determines feature weightings. Applying this approach to image captioning, our results on the MSCOCO test server establish a new state-of-the-art for the task, achieving CIDEr / SPICE / BLEU-4 scores of 117.9, 21.5 and 36.9, respectively. Demonstrating the broad applicability of the method, applying the same approach to VQA we obtain first place in the 2017 VQA Challenge.
Dynamic programming (DP) solves a variety of structured combinatorial problems by iteratively breaking them down into smaller subproblems. In spite of their versatility, DP algorithms are usually non-differentiable, which hampers their use as a layer in neural networks trained by backpropagation. To address this issue, we propose to smooth the max operator in the dynamic programming recursion, using a strongly convex regularizer. This allows to relax both the optimal value and solution of the original combinatorial problem, and turns a broad class of DP algorithms into differentiable operators. Theoretically, we provide a new probabilistic perspective on backpropagating through these DP operators, and relate them to inference in graphical models. We derive two particular instantiations of our framework, a smoothed Viterbi algorithm for sequence prediction and a smoothed DTW algorithm for time-series alignment. We showcase these instantiations on two structured prediction tasks and on structured and sparse attention for neural machine translation.