This is a very short technical report, which introduces the solution of the Team BUPT-CASIA for Short-video Face Parsing Track of The 3rd Person in Context (PIC) Workshop and Challenge at CVPR 2021. Face parsing has recently attracted increasing interest due to its numerous application potentials. Generally speaking, it has a lot in common with human parsing, such as task setting, data characteristics, number of categories and so on. Therefore, this work applies state-of-the-art human parsing method to face parsing task to explore the similarities and differences between them. Our submission achieves 86.84% score and wins the 2nd place in the challenge.
We introduce an approach that creates animatable human avatars from monocular videos using 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Existing methods based on neural radiance fields (NeRFs) achieve high-quality novel-view/novel-pose image synthesis but often require days of training, and are extremely slow at inference time. Recently, the community has explored fast grid structures for efficient training of clothed avatars. Albeit being extremely fast at training, these methods can barely achieve an interactive rendering frame rate with around 15 FPS. In this paper, we use 3D Gaussian Splatting and learn a non-rigid deformation network to reconstruct animatable clothed human avatars that can be trained within 30 minutes and rendered at real-time frame rates (50+ FPS). Given the explicit nature of our representation, we further introduce as-isometric-as-possible regularizations on both the Gaussian mean vectors and the covariance matrices, enhancing the generalization of our model on highly articulated unseen poses. Experimental results show that our method achieves comparable and even better performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches on animatable avatar creation from a monocular input, while being 400x and 250x faster in training and inference, respectively.
Novel View Synthesis (NVS), which tries to produce a realistic image at the target view given source view images and their corresponding poses, is a fundamental problem in 3D Vision. As this task is heavily under-constrained, some recent work, like Zero123, tries to solve this problem with generative modeling, specifically using pre-trained diffusion models. Although this strategy generalizes well to new scenes, compared to neural radiance field-based methods, it offers low levels of flexibility. For example, it can only accept a single-view image as input, despite realistic applications often offering multiple input images. This is because the source-view images and corresponding poses are processed separately and injected into the model at different stages. Thus it is not trivial to generalize the model into multi-view source images, once they are available. To solve this issue, we try to process each pose image pair separately and then fuse them as a unified visual representation which will be injected into the model to guide image synthesis at the target-views. However, inconsistency and computation costs increase as the number of input source-view images increases. To solve these issues, the Multi-view Cross Former module is proposed which maps variable-length input data to fix-size output data. A two-stage training strategy is introduced to further improve the efficiency during training time. Qualitative and quantitative evaluation over multiple datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method against previous approaches. The code will be released according to the acceptance.
Reinforcement Learning (RL) systems can be complex and non-interpretable, making it challenging for non-AI experts to understand or intervene in their decisions. This is due in part to the sequential nature of RL in which actions are chosen because of future rewards. However, RL agents discard the qualitative features of their training, making it difficult to recover user-understandable information for "why" an action is chosen. We propose a technique, Experiential Explanations, to generate counterfactual explanations by training influence predictors along with the RL policy. Influence predictors are models that learn how sources of reward affect the agent in different states, thus restoring information about how the policy reflects the environment. A human evaluation study revealed that participants presented with experiential explanations were better able to correctly guess what an agent would do than those presented with other standard types of explanation. Participants also found that experiential explanations are more understandable, satisfying, complete, useful, and accurate. The qualitative analysis provides insights into the factors of experiential explanations that are most useful.
For a long time, images have proved perfect at both storing and conveying rich semantics, especially human emotions. A lot of research has been conducted to provide machines with the ability to recognize emotions in photos of people. Previous methods mostly focus on facial expressions but fail to consider the scene context, meanwhile scene context plays an important role in predicting emotions, leading to more accurate results. In addition, Valence-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) values offer a more precise quantitative understanding of continuous emotions, yet there has been less emphasis on predicting them compared to discrete emotional categories. In this paper, we present a novel Multi-Branch Network (MBN), which utilizes various source information, including faces, bodies, and scene contexts to predict both discrete and continuous emotions in an image. Experimental results on EMOTIC dataset, which contains large-scale images of people in unconstrained situations labeled with 26 discrete categories of emotions and VAD values, show that our proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods with 28.4% in mAP and 0.93 in MAE. The results highlight the importance of utilizing multiple contextual information in emotion prediction and illustrate the potential of our proposed method in a wide range of applications, such as effective computing, human-computer interaction, and social robotics. Source code: //github.com/BaoNinh2808/Multi-Branch-Network-for-Imagery-Emotion-Prediction
Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) recently has been a new rising research hotspot, which uses powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) as a brain to perform multimodal tasks. The surprising emergent capabilities of MLLM, such as writing stories based on images and OCR-free math reasoning, are rare in traditional methods, suggesting a potential path to artificial general intelligence. In this paper, we aim to trace and summarize the recent progress of MLLM. First of all, we present the formulation of MLLM and delineate its related concepts. Then, we discuss the key techniques and applications, including Multimodal Instruction Tuning (M-IT), Multimodal In-Context Learning (M-ICL), Multimodal Chain of Thought (M-CoT), and LLM-Aided Visual Reasoning (LAVR). Finally, we discuss existing challenges and point out promising research directions. In light of the fact that the era of MLLM has only just begun, we will keep updating this survey and hope it can inspire more research. An associated GitHub link collecting the latest papers is available at //github.com/BradyFU/Awesome-Multimodal-Large-Language-Models.
Few-shot Knowledge Graph (KG) completion is a focus of current research, where each task aims at querying unseen facts of a relation given its few-shot reference entity pairs. Recent attempts solve this problem by learning static representations of entities and references, ignoring their dynamic properties, i.e., entities may exhibit diverse roles within task relations, and references may make different contributions to queries. This work proposes an adaptive attentional network for few-shot KG completion by learning adaptive entity and reference representations. Specifically, entities are modeled by an adaptive neighbor encoder to discern their task-oriented roles, while references are modeled by an adaptive query-aware aggregator to differentiate their contributions. Through the attention mechanism, both entities and references can capture their fine-grained semantic meanings, and thus render more expressive representations. This will be more predictive for knowledge acquisition in the few-shot scenario. Evaluation in link prediction on two public datasets shows that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results with different few-shot sizes.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been shown to be effective models for different predictive tasks on graph-structured data. Recent work on their expressive power has focused on isomorphism tasks and countable feature spaces. We extend this theoretical framework to include continuous features - which occur regularly in real-world input domains and within the hidden layers of GNNs - and we demonstrate the requirement for multiple aggregation functions in this context. Accordingly, we propose Principal Neighbourhood Aggregation (PNA), a novel architecture combining multiple aggregators with degree-scalers (which generalize the sum aggregator). Finally, we compare the capacity of different models to capture and exploit the graph structure via a novel benchmark containing multiple tasks taken from classical graph theory, alongside existing benchmarks from real-world domains, all of which demonstrate the strength of our model. With this work, we hope to steer some of the GNN research towards new aggregation methods which we believe are essential in the search for powerful and robust models.
Interest in the field of Explainable Artificial Intelligence has been growing for decades and has accelerated recently. As Artificial Intelligence models have become more complex, and often more opaque, with the incorporation of complex machine learning techniques, explainability has become more critical. Recently, researchers have been investigating and tackling explainability with a user-centric focus, looking for explanations to consider trustworthiness, comprehensibility, explicit provenance, and context-awareness. In this chapter, we leverage our survey of explanation literature in Artificial Intelligence and closely related fields and use these past efforts to generate a set of explanation types that we feel reflect the expanded needs of explanation for today's artificial intelligence applications. We define each type and provide an example question that would motivate the need for this style of explanation. We believe this set of explanation types will help future system designers in their generation and prioritization of requirements and further help generate explanations that are better aligned to users' and situational needs.
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown dramatic improvements in single image super-resolution (SISR) by using large-scale external samples. Despite their remarkable performance based on the external dataset, they cannot exploit internal information within a specific image. Another problem is that they are applicable only to the specific condition of data that they are supervised. For instance, the low-resolution (LR) image should be a "bicubic" downsampled noise-free image from a high-resolution (HR) one. To address both issues, zero-shot super-resolution (ZSSR) has been proposed for flexible internal learning. However, they require thousands of gradient updates, i.e., long inference time. In this paper, we present Meta-Transfer Learning for Zero-Shot Super-Resolution (MZSR), which leverages ZSSR. Precisely, it is based on finding a generic initial parameter that is suitable for internal learning. Thus, we can exploit both external and internal information, where one single gradient update can yield quite considerable results. (See Figure 1). With our method, the network can quickly adapt to a given image condition. In this respect, our method can be applied to a large spectrum of image conditions within a fast adaptation process.
We propose a novel single shot object detection network named Detection with Enriched Semantics (DES). Our motivation is to enrich the semantics of object detection features within a typical deep detector, by a semantic segmentation branch and a global activation module. The segmentation branch is supervised by weak segmentation ground-truth, i.e., no extra annotation is required. In conjunction with that, we employ a global activation module which learns relationship between channels and object classes in a self-supervised manner. Comprehensive experimental results on both PASCAL VOC and MS COCO detection datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. In particular, with a VGG16 based DES, we achieve an mAP of 81.7 on VOC2007 test and an mAP of 32.8 on COCO test-dev with an inference speed of 31.5 milliseconds per image on a Titan Xp GPU. With a lower resolution version, we achieve an mAP of 79.7 on VOC2007 with an inference speed of 13.0 milliseconds per image.