Feature compression, as an important branch of video coding for machines (VCM), has attracted significant attention and exploration. However, the existing methods mainly focus on intra-feature similarity, such as the Mean Squared Error (MSE) between the reconstructed and original features, while neglecting the importance of inter-feature relationships. In this paper, we analyze the inter-feature relationships, focusing on feature discriminability in machine vision and underscoring its significance in feature compression. To maintain the feature discriminability of reconstructed features, we introduce a discrimination metric for feature compression. The discrimination metric is designed to ensure that the distance between features of the same category is smaller than the distance between features of different categories. Furthermore, we explore the relationship between the discrimination metric and the discriminability of the original features. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed discrimination metric and reveal there exists a trade-off between the discrimination metric and the discriminability of the original features.
Machine learning has attracted widespread attention and evolved into an enabling technology for a wide range of highly successful applications, such as intelligent computer vision, speech recognition, medical diagnosis, and more. Yet a special need has arisen where, due to privacy, usability, and/or the right to be forgotten, information about some specific samples needs to be removed from a model, called machine unlearning. This emerging technology has drawn significant interest from both academics and industry due to its innovation and practicality. At the same time, this ambitious problem has led to numerous research efforts aimed at confronting its challenges. To the best of our knowledge, no study has analyzed this complex topic or compared the feasibility of existing unlearning solutions in different kinds of scenarios. Accordingly, with this survey, we aim to capture the key concepts of unlearning techniques. The existing solutions are classified and summarized based on their characteristics within an up-to-date and comprehensive review of each category's advantages and limitations. The survey concludes by highlighting some of the outstanding issues with unlearning techniques, along with some feasible directions for new research opportunities.
In many visual systems, visual tracking often bases on RGB image sequences, in which some targets are invalid in low-light conditions, and tracking performance is thus affected significantly. Introducing other modalities such as depth and infrared data is an effective way to handle imaging limitations of individual sources, but multi-modal imaging platforms usually require elaborate designs and cannot be applied in many real-world applications at present. Near-infrared (NIR) imaging becomes an essential part of many surveillance cameras, whose imaging is switchable between RGB and NIR based on the light intensity. These two modalities are heterogeneous with very different visual properties and thus bring big challenges for visual tracking. However, existing works have not studied this challenging problem. In this work, we address the cross-modal object tracking problem and contribute a new video dataset, including 654 cross-modal image sequences with over 481K frames in total, and the average video length is more than 735 frames. To promote the research and development of cross-modal object tracking, we propose a new algorithm, which learns the modality-aware target representation to mitigate the appearance gap between RGB and NIR modalities in the tracking process. It is plug-and-play and could thus be flexibly embedded into different tracking frameworks. Extensive experiments on the dataset are conducted, and we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in two representative tracking frameworks against 17 state-of-the-art tracking methods. We will release the dataset for free academic usage, dataset download link and code will be released soon.
Images can convey rich semantics and induce various emotions in viewers. Recently, with the rapid advancement of emotional intelligence and the explosive growth of visual data, extensive research efforts have been dedicated to affective image content analysis (AICA). In this survey, we will comprehensively review the development of AICA in the recent two decades, especially focusing on the state-of-the-art methods with respect to three main challenges -- the affective gap, perception subjectivity, and label noise and absence. We begin with an introduction to the key emotion representation models that have been widely employed in AICA and description of available datasets for performing evaluation with quantitative comparison of label noise and dataset bias. We then summarize and compare the representative approaches on (1) emotion feature extraction, including both handcrafted and deep features, (2) learning methods on dominant emotion recognition, personalized emotion prediction, emotion distribution learning, and learning from noisy data or few labels, and (3) AICA based applications. Finally, we discuss some challenges and promising research directions in the future, such as image content and context understanding, group emotion clustering, and viewer-image interaction.
GAN inversion aims to invert a given image back into the latent space of a pretrained GAN model, for the image to be faithfully reconstructed from the inverted code by the generator. As an emerging technique to bridge the real and fake image domains, GAN inversion plays an essential role in enabling the pretrained GAN models such as StyleGAN and BigGAN to be used for real image editing applications. Meanwhile, GAN inversion also provides insights on the interpretation of GAN's latent space and how the realistic images can be generated. In this paper, we provide an overview of GAN inversion with a focus on its recent algorithms and applications. We cover important techniques of GAN inversion and their applications to image restoration and image manipulation. We further elaborate on some trends and challenges for future directions.
Backdoor attack intends to embed hidden backdoor into deep neural networks (DNNs), such that the attacked model performs well on benign samples, whereas its prediction will be maliciously changed if the hidden backdoor is activated by the attacker-defined trigger. Backdoor attack could happen when the training process is not fully controlled by the user, such as training on third-party datasets or adopting third-party models, which poses a new and realistic threat. Although backdoor learning is an emerging and rapidly growing research area, its systematic review, however, remains blank. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive survey of this realm. We summarize and categorize existing backdoor attacks and defenses based on their characteristics, and provide a unified framework for analyzing poisoning-based backdoor attacks. Besides, we also analyze the relation between backdoor attacks and the relevant fields ($i.e.,$ adversarial attack and data poisoning), and summarize the benchmark datasets. Finally, we briefly outline certain future research directions relying upon reviewed works.
Joint image-text embedding is the bedrock for most Vision-and-Language (V+L) tasks, where multimodality inputs are jointly processed for visual and textual understanding. In this paper, we introduce UNITER, a UNiversal Image-TExt Representation, learned through large-scale pre-training over four image-text datasets (COCO, Visual Genome, Conceptual Captions, and SBU Captions), which can power heterogeneous downstream V+L tasks with joint multimodal embeddings. We design three pre-training tasks: Masked Language Modeling (MLM), Image-Text Matching (ITM), and Masked Region Modeling (MRM, with three variants). Different from concurrent work on multimodal pre-training that apply joint random masking to both modalities, we use conditioned masking on pre-training tasks (i.e., masked language/region modeling is conditioned on full observation of image/text). Comprehensive analysis shows that conditioned masking yields better performance than unconditioned masking. We also conduct a thorough ablation study to find an optimal setting for the combination of pre-training tasks. Extensive experiments show that UNITER achieves new state of the art across six V+L tasks (over nine datasets), including Visual Question Answering, Image-Text Retrieval, Referring Expression Comprehension, Visual Commonsense Reasoning, Visual Entailment, and NLVR2.
We present MMKG, a collection of three knowledge graphs that contain both numerical features and (links to) images for all entities as well as entity alignments between pairs of KGs. Therefore, multi-relational link prediction and entity matching communities can benefit from this resource. We believe this data set has the potential to facilitate the development of novel multi-modal learning approaches for knowledge graphs.We validate the utility ofMMKG in the sameAs link prediction task with an extensive set of experiments. These experiments show that the task at hand benefits from learning of multiple feature types.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can produce images of surprising complexity and realism, but are generally modeled to sample from a single latent source ignoring the explicit spatial interaction between multiple entities that could be present in a scene. Capturing such complex interactions between different objects in the world, including their relative scaling, spatial layout, occlusion, or viewpoint transformation is a challenging problem. In this work, we propose to model object composition in a GAN framework as a self-consistent composition-decomposition network. Our model is conditioned on the object images from their marginal distributions to generate a realistic image from their joint distribution by explicitly learning the possible interactions. We evaluate our model through qualitative experiments and user evaluations in both the scenarios when either paired or unpaired examples for the individual object images and the joint scenes are given during training. Our results reveal that the learned model captures potential interactions between the two object domains given as input to output new instances of composed scene at test time in a reasonable fashion.
Distant supervision can effectively label data for relation extraction, but suffers from the noise labeling problem. Recent works mainly perform soft bag-level noise reduction strategies to find the relatively better samples in a sentence bag, which is suboptimal compared with making a hard decision of false positive samples in sentence level. In this paper, we introduce an adversarial learning framework, which we named DSGAN, to learn a sentence-level true-positive generator. Inspired by Generative Adversarial Networks, we regard the positive samples generated by the generator as the negative samples to train the discriminator. The optimal generator is obtained until the discrimination ability of the discriminator has the greatest decline. We adopt the generator to filter distant supervision training dataset and redistribute the false positive instances into the negative set, in which way to provide a cleaned dataset for relation classification. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy significantly improves the performance of distant supervision relation extraction comparing to state-of-the-art systems.
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have gained significant traction in the field of machine learning, particularly due to their high accuracy in visual recognition. Recent works have pushed the performance of GPU implementations of CNNs to significantly improve their classification and training times. With these improvements, many frameworks have become available for implementing CNNs on both CPUs and GPUs, with no support for FPGA implementations. In this work we present a modified version of the popular CNN framework Caffe, with FPGA support. This allows for classification using CNN models and specialized FPGA implementations with the flexibility of reprogramming the device when necessary, seamless memory transactions between host and device, simple-to-use test benches, and the ability to create pipelined layer implementations. To validate the framework, we use the Xilinx SDAccel environment to implement an FPGA-based Winograd convolution engine and show that the FPGA layer can be used alongside other layers running on a host processor to run several popular CNNs (AlexNet, GoogleNet, VGG A, Overfeat). The results show that our framework achieves 50 GFLOPS across 3x3 convolutions in the benchmarks. This is achieved within a practical framework, which will aid in future development of FPGA-based CNNs.