Existing image/video datasets for cattle behavior recognition are mostly small, lack well-defined labels, or are collected in unrealistic controlled environments. This limits the utility of machine learning (ML) models learned from them. Therefore, we introduce a new dataset, called Cattle Visual Behaviors (CVB), that consists of 502 video clips, each fifteen seconds long, captured in natural lighting conditions, and annotated with eleven visually perceptible behaviors of grazing cattle. We use the Computer Vision Annotation Tool (CVAT) to collect our annotations. To make the procedure more efficient, we perform an initial detection and tracking of cattle in the videos using appropriate pre-trained models. The results are corrected by domain experts along with cattle behavior labeling in CVAT. The pre-hoc detection and tracking step significantly reduces the manual annotation time and effort. Moreover, we convert CVB to the atomic visual action (AVA) format and train and evaluate the popular SlowFast action recognition model on it. The associated preliminary results confirm that we can localize the cattle and recognize their frequently occurring behaviors with confidence. By creating and sharing CVB, our aim is to develop improved models capable of recognizing all important behaviors accurately and to assist other researchers and practitioners in developing and evaluating new ML models for cattle behavior classification using video data.
Image captioning is a significant field across computer vision and natural language processing. We propose and present AIC-AB NET, a novel Attribute-Information-Combined Attention-Based Network that combines spatial attention architecture and text attributes in an encoder-decoder. For caption generation, adaptive spatial attention determines which image region best represents the image and whether to attend to the visual features or the visual sentinel. Text attribute information is synchronously fed into the decoder to help image recognition and reduce uncertainty. We have tested and evaluated our AICAB NET on the MS COCO dataset and a new proposed Fashion dataset. The Fashion dataset is employed as a benchmark of single-object images. The results show the superior performance of the proposed model compared to the state-of-the-art baseline and ablated models on both the images from MSCOCO and our single-object images. Our AIC-AB NET outperforms the baseline adaptive attention network by 0.017 (CIDEr score) on the MS COCO dataset and 0.095 (CIDEr score) on the Fashion dataset.
Driver distraction causes a significant number of traffic accidents every year, resulting in economic losses and casualties. Currently, the level of automation in commercial vehicles is far from completely unmanned, and drivers still play an important role in operating and controlling the vehicle. Therefore, driver distraction behavior detection is crucial for road safety. At present, driver distraction detection primarily relies on traditional convolutional neural networks (CNN) and supervised learning methods. However, there are still challenges such as the high cost of labeled datasets, limited ability to capture high-level semantic information, and weak generalization performance. In order to solve these problems, this paper proposes a new self-supervised learning method based on masked image modeling for driver distraction behavior detection. Firstly, a self-supervised learning framework for masked image modeling (MIM) is introduced to solve the serious human and material consumption issues caused by dataset labeling. Secondly, the Swin Transformer is employed as an encoder. Performance is enhanced by reconfiguring the Swin Transformer block and adjusting the distribution of the number of window multi-head self-attention (W-MSA) and shifted window multi-head self-attention (SW-MSA) detection heads across all stages, which leads to model more lightening. Finally, various data augmentation strategies are used along with the best random masking strategy to strengthen the model's recognition and generalization ability. Test results on a large-scale driver distraction behavior dataset show that the self-supervised learning method proposed in this paper achieves an accuracy of 99.60%, approximating the excellent performance of advanced supervised learning methods. Our code is publicly available at github.com/Rocky1salady-killer/SL-DDBD.
Human Activity Recognition (HAR), based on machine and deep learning algorithms is considered one of the most promising technologies to monitor professional and daily life activities for different categories of people (e.g., athletes, elderly, kids, employers) in order to provide a variety of services related, for example to well-being, empowering of technical performances, prevention of risky situation, and educational purposes. However, the analysis of the effectiveness and the efficiency of HAR methodologies suffers from the lack of a standard workflow, which might represent the baseline for the estimation of the quality of the developed pattern recognition models. This makes the comparison among different approaches a challenging task. In addition, researchers can make mistakes that, when not detected, definitely affect the achieved results. To mitigate such issues, this paper proposes an open-source automatic and highly configurable framework, named B-HAR, for the definition, standardization, and development of a baseline framework in order to evaluate and compare HAR methodologies. It implements the most popular data processing methods for data preparation and the most commonly used machine and deep learning pattern recognition models.
Multimodal learning helps to comprehensively understand the world, by integrating different senses. Accordingly, multiple input modalities are expected to boost model performance, but we actually find that they are not fully exploited even when the multimodal model outperforms its uni-modal counterpart. Specifically, in this paper we point out that existing multimodal discriminative models, in which uniform objective is designed for all modalities, could remain under-optimized uni-modal representations, caused by another dominated modality in some scenarios, e.g., sound in blowing wind event, vision in drawing picture event, etc. To alleviate this optimization imbalance, we propose on-the-fly gradient modulation to adaptively control the optimization of each modality, via monitoring the discrepancy of their contribution towards the learning objective. Further, an extra Gaussian noise that changes dynamically is introduced to avoid possible generalization drop caused by gradient modulation. As a result, we achieve considerable improvement over common fusion methods on different multimodal tasks, and this simple strategy can also boost existing multimodal methods, which illustrates its efficacy and versatility. The source code is available at \url{//github.com/GeWu-Lab/OGM-GE_CVPR2022}.
Some neurons in deep networks specialize in recognizing highly specific perceptual, structural, or semantic features of inputs. In computer vision, techniques exist for identifying neurons that respond to individual concept categories like colors, textures, and object classes. But these techniques are limited in scope, labeling only a small subset of neurons and behaviors in any network. Is a richer characterization of neuron-level computation possible? We introduce a procedure (called MILAN, for mutual-information-guided linguistic annotation of neurons) that automatically labels neurons with open-ended, compositional, natural language descriptions. Given a neuron, MILAN generates a description by searching for a natural language string that maximizes pointwise mutual information with the image regions in which the neuron is active. MILAN produces fine-grained descriptions that capture categorical, relational, and logical structure in learned features. These descriptions obtain high agreement with human-generated feature descriptions across a diverse set of model architectures and tasks, and can aid in understanding and controlling learned models. We highlight three applications of natural language neuron descriptions. First, we use MILAN for analysis, characterizing the distribution and importance of neurons selective for attribute, category, and relational information in vision models. Second, we use MILAN for auditing, surfacing neurons sensitive to protected categories like race and gender in models trained on datasets intended to obscure these features. Finally, we use MILAN for editing, improving robustness in an image classifier by deleting neurons sensitive to text features spuriously correlated with class labels.
We present a novel counterfactual framework for both Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) and Open-Set Recognition (OSR), whose common challenge is generalizing to the unseen-classes by only training on the seen-classes. Our idea stems from the observation that the generated samples for unseen-classes are often out of the true distribution, which causes severe recognition rate imbalance between the seen-class (high) and unseen-class (low). We show that the key reason is that the generation is not Counterfactual Faithful, and thus we propose a faithful one, whose generation is from the sample-specific counterfactual question: What would the sample look like, if we set its class attribute to a certain class, while keeping its sample attribute unchanged? Thanks to the faithfulness, we can apply the Consistency Rule to perform unseen/seen binary classification, by asking: Would its counterfactual still look like itself? If ``yes'', the sample is from a certain class, and ``no'' otherwise. Through extensive experiments on ZSL and OSR, we demonstrate that our framework effectively mitigates the seen/unseen imbalance and hence significantly improves the overall performance. Note that this framework is orthogonal to existing methods, thus, it can serve as a new baseline to evaluate how ZSL/OSR models generalize. Codes are available at //github.com/yue-zhongqi/gcm-cf.
Model-agnostic meta-learners aim to acquire meta-learned parameters from similar tasks to adapt to novel tasks from the same distribution with few gradient updates. With the flexibility in the choice of models, those frameworks demonstrate appealing performance on a variety of domains such as few-shot image classification and reinforcement learning. However, one important limitation of such frameworks is that they seek a common initialization shared across the entire task distribution, substantially limiting the diversity of the task distributions that they are able to learn from. In this paper, we augment MAML with the capability to identify the mode of tasks sampled from a multimodal task distribution and adapt quickly through gradient updates. Specifically, we propose a multimodal MAML (MMAML) framework, which is able to modulate its meta-learned prior parameters according to the identified mode, allowing more efficient fast adaptation. We evaluate the proposed model on a diverse set of few-shot learning tasks, including regression, image classification, and reinforcement learning. The results not only demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in modulating the meta-learned prior in response to the characteristics of tasks but also show that training on a multimodal distribution can produce an improvement over unimodal training.
We present SlowFast networks for video recognition. Our model involves (i) a Slow pathway, operating at low frame rate, to capture spatial semantics, and (ii) a Fast pathway, operating at high frame rate, to capture motion at fine temporal resolution. The Fast pathway can be made very lightweight by reducing its channel capacity, yet can learn useful temporal information for video recognition. Our models achieve strong performance for both action classification and detection in video, and large improvements are pin-pointed as contributions by our SlowFast concept. We report 79.0% accuracy on the Kinetics dataset without using any pre-training, largely surpassing the previous best results of this kind. On AVA action detection we achieve a new state-of-the-art of 28.3 mAP. Code will be made publicly available.
Multi-relation Question Answering is a challenging task, due to the requirement of elaborated analysis on questions and reasoning over multiple fact triples in knowledge base. In this paper, we present a novel model called Interpretable Reasoning Network that employs an interpretable, hop-by-hop reasoning process for question answering. The model dynamically decides which part of an input question should be analyzed at each hop; predicts a relation that corresponds to the current parsed results; utilizes the predicted relation to update the question representation and the state of the reasoning process; and then drives the next-hop reasoning. Experiments show that our model yields state-of-the-art results on two datasets. More interestingly, the model can offer traceable and observable intermediate predictions for reasoning analysis and failure diagnosis, thereby allowing manual manipulation in predicting the final answer.
Visual Question Answering (VQA) models have struggled with counting objects in natural images so far. We identify a fundamental problem due to soft attention in these models as a cause. To circumvent this problem, we propose a neural network component that allows robust counting from object proposals. Experiments on a toy task show the effectiveness of this component and we obtain state-of-the-art accuracy on the number category of the VQA v2 dataset without negatively affecting other categories, even outperforming ensemble models with our single model. On a difficult balanced pair metric, the component gives a substantial improvement in counting over a strong baseline by 6.6%.