The semantic segmentation task aims at dense classification at the pixel-wise level. Deep models exhibited progress in tackling this task. However, one remaining problem with these approaches is the loss of spatial precision, often produced at the segmented objects' boundaries. Our proposed model addresses this problem by providing an internal structure for the feature representations while extracting a global representation that supports the former. To fit the internal structure, during training, we predict a Gaussian Mixture Model from the data, which, merged with the skip connections and the decoding stage, helps avoid wrong inductive biases. Furthermore, our results show that we can improve semantic segmentation by providing both learning representations (global and local) with a clustering behavior and combining them. Finally, we present results demonstrating our advances in Cityscapes and Synthia datasets.
Recently vision transformers have been shown to be competitive with convolution-based methods (CNNs) broadly across multiple vision tasks. The less restrictive inductive bias of transformers endows greater representational capacity in comparison with CNNs. However, in the image classification setting this flexibility comes with a trade-off with respect to sample efficiency, where transformers require ImageNet-scale training. This notion has carried over to video where transformers have not yet been explored for video classification in the low-labeled or semi-supervised settings. Our work empirically explores the low data regime for video classification and discovers that, surprisingly, transformers perform extremely well in the low-labeled video setting compared to CNNs. We specifically evaluate video vision transformers across two contrasting video datasets (Kinetics-400 and SomethingSomething-V2) and perform thorough analysis and ablation studies to explain this observation using the predominant features of video transformer architectures. We even show that using just the labeled data, transformers significantly outperform complex semi-supervised CNN methods that leverage large-scale unlabeled data as well. Our experiments inform our recommendation that semi-supervised learning video work should consider the use of video transformers in the future.
Temporal action localization aims to predict the boundary and category of each action instance in untrimmed long videos. Most of previous methods based on anchors or proposals neglect the global-local context interaction in entire video sequences. Besides, their multi-stage designs cannot generate action boundaries and categories straightforwardly. To address the above issues, this paper proposes a end-to-end model, called Adaptive Perception transformer (AdaPerFormer for short). Specifically, AdaPerFormer explores a dual-branch attention mechanism. One branch takes care of the global perception attention, which can model entire video sequences and aggregate global relevant contexts. While the other branch concentrates on the local convolutional shift to aggregate intra-frame and inter-frame information through our bidirectional shift operation. The end-to-end nature produces the boundaries and categories of video actions without extra steps. Extensive experiments together with ablation studies are provided to reveal the effectiveness of our design. Our method obtains competitive performance on the THUMOS14 and ActivityNet-1.3 dataset.
Since the preparation of labeled data for training semantic segmentation networks of point clouds is a time-consuming process, weakly supervised approaches have been introduced to learn from only a small fraction of data. These methods are typically based on learning with contrastive losses while automatically deriving per-point pseudo-labels from a sparse set of user-annotated labels. In this paper, our key observation is that the selection of what samples to annotate is as important as how these samples are used for training. Thus, we introduce a method for weakly supervised segmentation of 3D scenes that combines self-training with active learning. The active learning selects points for annotation that likely result in performance improvements to the trained model, while the self-training makes efficient use of the user-provided labels for learning the model. We demonstrate that our approach leads to an effective method that provides improvements in scene segmentation over previous works and baselines, while requiring only a small number of user annotations.
Self-training has shown great potential in semi-supervised learning. Its core idea is to use the model learned on labeled data to generate pseudo-labels for unlabeled samples, and in turn teach itself. To obtain valid supervision, active attempts typically employ a momentum teacher for pseudo-label prediction yet observe the confirmation bias issue, where the incorrect predictions may provide wrong supervision signals and get accumulated in the training process. The primary cause of such a drawback is that the prevailing self-training framework acts as guiding the current state with previous knowledge, because the teacher is updated with the past student only. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel self-training strategy, which allows the model to learn from the future. Concretely, at each training step, we first virtually optimize the student (i.e., caching the gradients without applying them to the model weights), then update the teacher with the virtual future student, and finally ask the teacher to produce pseudo-labels for the current student as the guidance. In this way, we manage to improve the quality of pseudo-labels and thus boost the performance. We also develop two variants of our future-self-training (FST) framework through peeping at the future both deeply (FST-D) and widely (FST-W). Taking the tasks of unsupervised domain adaptive semantic segmentation and semi-supervised semantic segmentation as the instances, we experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our approach under a wide range of settings. Code will be made publicly available.
Image classification is one of the most important areas in computer vision. Hierarchical multi-label classification applies when a multi-class image classification problem is arranged into smaller ones based upon a hierarchy or taxonomy. Thus, hierarchical classification modes generally provide multiple class predictions on each instance, whereby these are expected to reflect the structure of image classes as related to one another. In this paper, we propose a multi-label capsule network (ML-CapsNet) for hierarchical classification. Our ML-CapsNet predicts multiple image classes based on a hierarchical class-label tree structure. To this end, we present a loss function that takes into account the multi-label predictions of the network. As a result, the training approach for our ML-CapsNet uses a coarse to fine paradigm while maintaining consistency with the structure in the classification levels in the label-hierarchy. We also perform experiments using widely available datasets and compare the model with alternatives elsewhere in the literature. In our experiments, our ML-CapsNet yields a margin of improvement with respect to these alternative methods.
Given an unlabeled dataset and an annotation budget, we study how to selectively label a fixed number of instances so that semi-supervised learning (SSL) on such a partially labeled dataset is most effective. We focus on selecting the right data to label, in addition to usual SSL's propagating labels from labeled data to the rest unlabeled data. This instance selection task is challenging, as without any labeled data we do not know what the objective of learning should be. Intuitively, no matter what the downstream task is, instances to be labeled must be representative and diverse: The former would facilitate label propagation to unlabeled data, whereas the latter would ensure coverage of the entire dataset. We capture this idea by selecting cluster prototypes, either in a pretrained feature space, or along with feature optimization, both without labels. Our unsupervised selective labeling consistently improves SSL methods over state-of-the-art active learning given labeled data, by 8 to 25 times in label efficiency. For example, it boosts FixMatch by 10% (14%) in accuracy on CIFAR-10 (ImageNet-1K) with 0.08% (0.2%) labeled data, demonstrating that small computation spent on selecting what data to label brings significant gain especially under a low annotation budget. Our work sets a new standard for practical and efficient SSL.
Deep learning-based semi-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms have led to promising results in medical images segmentation and can alleviate doctors' expensive annotations by leveraging unlabeled data. However, most of the existing SSL algorithms in literature tend to regularize the model training by perturbing networks and/or data. Observing that multi/dual-task learning attends to various levels of information which have inherent prediction perturbation, we ask the question in this work: can we explicitly build task-level regularization rather than implicitly constructing networks- and/or data-level perturbation-and-transformation for SSL? To answer this question, we propose a novel dual-task-consistency semi-supervised framework for the first time. Concretely, we use a dual-task deep network that jointly predicts a pixel-wise segmentation map and a geometry-aware level set representation of the target. The level set representation is converted to an approximated segmentation map through a differentiable task transform layer. Simultaneously, we introduce a dual-task consistency regularization between the level set-derived segmentation maps and directly predicted segmentation maps for both labeled and unlabeled data. Extensive experiments on two public datasets show that our method can largely improve the performance by incorporating the unlabeled data. Meanwhile, our framework outperforms the state-of-the-art semi-supervised medical image segmentation methods. Code is available at: //github.com/Luoxd1996/DTC
A key requirement for the success of supervised deep learning is a large labeled dataset - a condition that is difficult to meet in medical image analysis. Self-supervised learning (SSL) can help in this regard by providing a strategy to pre-train a neural network with unlabeled data, followed by fine-tuning for a downstream task with limited annotations. Contrastive learning, a particular variant of SSL, is a powerful technique for learning image-level representations. In this work, we propose strategies for extending the contrastive learning framework for segmentation of volumetric medical images in the semi-supervised setting with limited annotations, by leveraging domain-specific and problem-specific cues. Specifically, we propose (1) novel contrasting strategies that leverage structural similarity across volumetric medical images (domain-specific cue) and (2) a local version of the contrastive loss to learn distinctive representations of local regions that are useful for per-pixel segmentation (problem-specific cue). We carry out an extensive evaluation on three Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) datasets. In the limited annotation setting, the proposed method yields substantial improvements compared to other self-supervision and semi-supervised learning techniques. When combined with a simple data augmentation technique, the proposed method reaches within 8% of benchmark performance using only two labeled MRI volumes for training, corresponding to only 4% (for ACDC) of the training data used to train the benchmark.
Modern neural network training relies heavily on data augmentation for improved generalization. After the initial success of label-preserving augmentations, there has been a recent surge of interest in label-perturbing approaches, which combine features and labels across training samples to smooth the learned decision surface. In this paper, we propose a new augmentation method that leverages the first and second moments extracted and re-injected by feature normalization. We replace the moments of the learned features of one training image by those of another, and also interpolate the target labels. As our approach is fast, operates entirely in feature space, and mixes different signals than prior methods, one can effectively combine it with existing augmentation methods. We demonstrate its efficacy across benchmark data sets in computer vision, speech, and natural language processing, where it consistently improves the generalization performance of highly competitive baseline networks.
Medical image segmentation requires consensus ground truth segmentations to be derived from multiple expert annotations. A novel approach is proposed that obtains consensus segmentations from experts using graph cuts (GC) and semi supervised learning (SSL). Popular approaches use iterative Expectation Maximization (EM) to estimate the final annotation and quantify annotator's performance. Such techniques pose the risk of getting trapped in local minima. We propose a self consistency (SC) score to quantify annotator consistency using low level image features. SSL is used to predict missing annotations by considering global features and local image consistency. The SC score also serves as the penalty cost in a second order Markov random field (MRF) cost function optimized using graph cuts to derive the final consensus label. Graph cut obtains a global maximum without an iterative procedure. Experimental results on synthetic images, real data of Crohn's disease patients and retinal images show our final segmentation to be accurate and more consistent than competing methods.