Video snapshot compressive imaging (SCI) captures multiple sequential video frames by a single measurement using the idea of computational imaging. The underlying principle is to modulate high-speed frames through different masks and these modulated frames are summed to a single measurement captured by a low-speed 2D sensor (dubbed optical encoder); following this, algorithms are employed to reconstruct the desired high-speed frames (dubbed software decoder) if needed. In this paper, we consider the reconstruction algorithm in video SCI, i.e., recovering a series of video frames from a compressed measurement. Specifically, we propose a Spatial-Temporal transFormer (STFormer) to exploit the correlation in both spatial and temporal domains. STFormer network is composed of a token generation block, a video reconstruction block, and these two blocks are connected by a series of STFormer blocks. Each STFormer block consists of a spatial self-attention branch, a temporal self-attention branch and the outputs of these two branches are integrated by a fusion network. Extensive results on both simulated and real data demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of STFormer. The code and models are publicly available at //github.com/ucaswangls/STFormer.git
Imitation learning aims to extract knowledge from human experts' demonstrations or artificially created agents in order to replicate their behaviors. Its success has been demonstrated in areas such as video games, autonomous driving, robotic simulations and object manipulation. However, this replicating process could be problematic, such as the performance is highly dependent on the demonstration quality, and most trained agents are limited to perform well in task-specific environments. In this survey, we provide a systematic review on imitation learning. We first introduce the background knowledge from development history and preliminaries, followed by presenting different taxonomies within Imitation Learning and key milestones of the field. We then detail challenges in learning strategies and present research opportunities with learning policy from suboptimal demonstration, voice instructions and other associated optimization schemes.
Many real-world problems can be naturally described by mathematical formulas. The task of finding formulas from a set of observed inputs and outputs is called symbolic regression. Recently, neural networks have been applied to symbolic regression, among which the transformer-based ones seem to be the most promising. After training the transformer on a large number of formulas (in the order of days), the actual inference, i.e., finding a formula for new, unseen data, is very fast (in the order of seconds). This is considerably faster than state-of-the-art evolutionary methods. The main drawback of transformers is that they generate formulas without numerical constants, which have to be optimized separately, so yielding suboptimal results. We propose a transformer-based approach called SymFormer, which predicts the formula by outputting the individual symbols and the corresponding constants simultaneously. This leads to better performance in terms of fitting the available data. In addition, the constants provided by SymFormer serve as a good starting point for subsequent tuning via gradient descent to further improve the performance. We show on a set of benchmarks that SymFormer outperforms two state-of-the-art methods while having faster inference.
Training a large-scale deep neural network in a large-scale dataset is challenging and time-consuming. The recent breakthrough of large-batch optimization is a promising way to tackle this challenge. However, although the current advanced algorithms such as LARS and LAMB succeed in classification models, the complicated pipelines of dense visual predictions such as object detection and segmentation still suffer from the heavy performance drop in the large-batch training regime. To address this challenge, we propose a simple yet effective algorithm, named Adaptive Gradient Variance Modulator (AGVM), which can train dense visual predictors with very large batch size, enabling several benefits more appealing than prior arts. Firstly, AGVM can align the gradient variances between different modules in the dense visual predictors, such as backbone, feature pyramid network (FPN), detection, and segmentation heads. We show that training with a large batch size can fail with the gradient variances misaligned among them, which is a phenomenon primarily overlooked in previous work. Secondly, AGVM is a plug-and-play module that generalizes well to many different architectures (e.g., CNNs and Transformers) and different tasks (e.g., object detection, instance segmentation, semantic segmentation, and panoptic segmentation). It is also compatible with different optimizers (e.g., SGD and AdamW). Thirdly, a theoretical analysis of AGVM is provided. Extensive experiments on the COCO and ADE20K datasets demonstrate the superiority of AGVM. For example, it can train Faster R-CNN+ResNet50 in 4 minutes without losing performance. AGVM enables training an object detector with one billion parameters in just 3.5 hours, reducing the training time by 20.9x, whilst achieving 62.2 mAP on COCO. The deliverables are released at //github.com/Sense-X/AGVM.
Neural networks have recently been used to analyze diverse physical systems and to identify the underlying dynamics. While existing methods achieve impressive results, they are limited by their strong demand for training data and their weak generalization abilities to out-of-distribution data. To overcome these limitations, in this work we propose to combine neural implicit representations for appearance modeling with neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs) for modelling physical phenomena to obtain a dynamic scene representation that can be identified directly from visual observations. Our proposed model combines several unique advantages: (i) Contrary to existing approaches that require large training datasets, we are able to identify physical parameters from only a single video. (ii) The use of neural implicit representations enables the processing of high-resolution videos and the synthesis of photo-realistic images. (iii) The embedded neural ODE has a known parametric form that allows for the identification of interpretable physical parameters, and (iv) long-term prediction in state space. (v) Furthermore, the photo-realistic rendering of novel scenes with modified physical parameters becomes possible.
3D Time-of-Flight (ToF) image sensors are used widely in applications such as self-driving cars, Augmented Reality (AR) and robotics. When implemented with Single-Photon Avalanche Diodes (SPADs), compact, array format sensors can be made that offer accurate depth maps over long distances, without the need for mechanical scanning. However, array sizes tend to be small, leading to low lateral resolution, which combined with low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) levels under high ambient illumination, may lead to difficulties in scene interpretation. In this paper, we use synthetic depth sequences to train a 3D Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for denoising and upscaling (x4) depth data. Experimental results, based on synthetic as well as real ToF data, are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the scheme. With GPU acceleration, frames are processed at >30 frames per second, making the approach suitable for low-latency imaging, as required for obstacle avoidance.
Conventionally, spatiotemporal modeling network and its complexity are the two most concentrated research topics in video action recognition. Existing state-of-the-art methods have achieved excellent accuracy regardless of the complexity meanwhile efficient spatiotemporal modeling solutions are slightly inferior in performance. In this paper, we attempt to acquire both efficiency and effectiveness simultaneously. First of all, besides traditionally treating H x W x T video frames as space-time signal (viewing from the Height-Width spatial plane), we propose to also model video from the other two Height-Time and Width-Time planes, to capture the dynamics of video thoroughly. Secondly, our model is designed based on 2D CNN backbones and model complexity is well kept in mind by design. Specifically, we introduce a novel multi-view fusion (MVF) module to exploit video dynamics using separable convolution for efficiency. It is a plug-and-play module and can be inserted into off-the-shelf 2D CNNs to form a simple yet effective model called MVFNet. Moreover, MVFNet can be thought of as a generalized video modeling framework and it can specialize to be existing methods such as C2D, SlowOnly, and TSM under different settings. Extensive experiments are conducted on popular benchmarks (i.e., Something-Something V1 & V2, Kinetics, UCF-101, and HMDB-51) to show its superiority. The proposed MVFNet can achieve state-of-the-art performance with 2D CNN's complexity.
Transformer is a type of deep neural network mainly based on self-attention mechanism which is originally applied in natural language processing field. Inspired by the strong representation ability of transformer, researchers propose to extend transformer for computer vision tasks. Transformer-based models show competitive and even better performance on various visual benchmarks compared to other network types such as convolutional networks and recurrent networks. In this paper we provide a literature review of these visual transformer models by categorizing them in different tasks and analyze the advantages and disadvantages of these methods. In particular, the main categories include the basic image classification, high-level vision, low-level vision and video processing. Self-attention in computer vision is also briefly revisited as self-attention is the base component in transformer. Efficient transformer methods are included for pushing transformer into real applications. Finally, we give a discussion about the further research directions for visual transformer.
Spectral clustering (SC) is a popular clustering technique to find strongly connected communities on a graph. SC can be used in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to implement pooling operations that aggregate nodes belonging to the same cluster. However, the eigendecomposition of the Laplacian is expensive and, since clustering results are graph-specific, pooling methods based on SC must perform a new optimization for each new sample. In this paper, we propose a graph clustering approach that addresses these limitations of SC. We formulate a continuous relaxation of the normalized minCUT problem and train a GNN to compute cluster assignments that minimize this objective. Our GNN-based implementation is differentiable, does not require to compute the spectral decomposition, and learns a clustering function that can be quickly evaluated on out-of-sample graphs. From the proposed clustering method, we design a graph pooling operator that overcomes some important limitations of state-of-the-art graph pooling techniques and achieves the best performance in several supervised and unsupervised tasks.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely used in representation learning on graphs and achieved state-of-the-art performance in tasks such as node classification and link prediction. However, most existing GNNs are designed to learn node representations on the fixed and homogeneous graphs. The limitations especially become problematic when learning representations on a misspecified graph or a heterogeneous graph that consists of various types of nodes and edges. In this paper, we propose Graph Transformer Networks (GTNs) that are capable of generating new graph structures, which involve identifying useful connections between unconnected nodes on the original graph, while learning effective node representation on the new graphs in an end-to-end fashion. Graph Transformer layer, a core layer of GTNs, learns a soft selection of edge types and composite relations for generating useful multi-hop connections so-called meta-paths. Our experiments show that GTNs learn new graph structures, based on data and tasks without domain knowledge, and yield powerful node representation via convolution on the new graphs. Without domain-specific graph preprocessing, GTNs achieved the best performance in all three benchmark node classification tasks against the state-of-the-art methods that require pre-defined meta-paths from domain knowledge.
Recently, deep learning has achieved very promising results in visual object tracking. Deep neural networks in existing tracking methods require a lot of training data to learn a large number of parameters. However, training data is not sufficient for visual object tracking as annotations of a target object are only available in the first frame of a test sequence. In this paper, we propose to learn hierarchical features for visual object tracking by using tree structure based Recursive Neural Networks (RNN), which have fewer parameters than other deep neural networks, e.g. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). First, we learn RNN parameters to discriminate between the target object and background in the first frame of a test sequence. Tree structure over local patches of an exemplar region is randomly generated by using a bottom-up greedy search strategy. Given the learned RNN parameters, we create two dictionaries regarding target regions and corresponding local patches based on the learned hierarchical features from both top and leaf nodes of multiple random trees. In each of the subsequent frames, we conduct sparse dictionary coding on all candidates to select the best candidate as the new target location. In addition, we online update two dictionaries to handle appearance changes of target objects. Experimental results demonstrate that our feature learning algorithm can significantly improve tracking performance on benchmark datasets.