Diego Velazquez. (2023). Towards Robustness in Computer-based Image Understanding (Jordi Gonzalez, Josep M. Gonfaus, & Pau Rodriguez, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, IMPRIMA, .
Abstract: This thesis embarks on an exploratory journey into robustness in deep learning,
with a keen focus on the intertwining facets of generalization, explainability, and
edge cases within the realm of computer vision. In deep learning, robustness
epitomizes a model’s resilience and flexibility, grounded on its capacity to generalize across diverse data distributions, explain its predictions transparently, and navigate the intricacies of edge cases effectively. The challenges associated with robust generalization are multifaceted, encompassing the model’s performance on unseen data and its defense against out-of-distribution data and adversarial attacks. Bridging this gap, the potential of Embedding Propagation (EP) for improving out-of-distribution generalization is explored. EP is depicted as a powerful tool facilitating manifold smoothing, which in turn fortifies the model’s robustness against adversarial onslaughts and bolsters performance in few-shot and self-/semi-supervised learning scenarios. In the labyrinth of deep learning models, the path to robustness often intersects with explainability. As model complexity increases, so does the urgency to decipher their decision-making
processes. Acknowledging this, the thesis introduces a robust framework for
evaluating and comparing various counterfactual explanation methods, echoing
the imperative of explanation quality over quantity and spotlighting the intricacies of diversifying explanations. Simultaneously, the deep learning landscape is fraught with edge cases – anomalies in the form of small objects or rare instances in object detection tasks that defy the norm. Confronting this, the
thesis presents an extension of the DETR (DEtection TRansformer) model to enhance small object detection. The devised DETR-FP, embedding the Feature Pyramid technique, demonstrating improvement in small objects detection accuracy, albeit facing challenges like high computational costs. With emergence of foundation models in mind, the thesis unveils EarthView, the largest scale remote sensing dataset to date, built for the self-supervised learning of a robust foundational model for remote sensing. Collectively, these studies contribute to the grand narrative of robustness in deep learning, weaving together the strands of generalization, explainability, and edge case performance. Through these methodological advancements and novel datasets, the thesis calls for continued exploration, innovation, and refinement to fortify the bastion of robust computer vision.
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Debora Gil, Guillermo Torres, & Carles Sanchez. (2023). Transforming radiomic features into radiological words. In IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging.
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Dawid Rymarczyk, Joost van de Weijer, Bartosz Zielinski, & Bartlomiej Twardowski. (2023). ICICLE: Interpretable Class Incremental Continual Learning. Dawid Rymarczyk. In 20th IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (pp. 1887–1898).
Abstract: Continual learning enables incremental learning of new tasks without forgetting those previously learned, resulting in positive knowledge transfer that can enhance performance on both new and old tasks. However, continual learning poses new challenges for interpretability, as the rationale behind model predictions may change over time, leading to interpretability concept drift. We address this problem by proposing Interpretable Class-InCremental LEarning (ICICLE), an exemplar-free approach that adopts a prototypical part-based approach. It consists of three crucial novelties: interpretability regularization that distills previously learned concepts while preserving user-friendly positive reasoning; proximity-based prototype initialization strategy dedicated to the fine-grained setting; and task-recency bias compensation devoted to prototypical parts. Our experimental results demonstrate that ICICLE reduces the interpretability concept drift and outperforms the existing exemplar-free methods of common class-incremental learning when applied to concept-based models.
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David Pujol Perich, Albert Clapes, & Sergio Escalera. (2023). SADA: Semantic adversarial unsupervised domain adaptation for Temporal Action Localization.
Abstract: Temporal Action Localization (TAL) is a complex task that poses relevant challenges, particularly when attempting to generalize on new -- unseen -- domains in real-world applications. These scenarios, despite realistic, are often neglected in the literature, exposing these solutions to important performance degradation. In this work, we tackle this issue by introducing, for the first time, an approach for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) in sparse TAL, which we refer to as Semantic Adversarial unsupervised Domain Adaptation (SADA). Our contributions are threefold: (1) we pioneer the development of a domain adaptation model that operates on realistic sparse action detection benchmarks; (2) we tackle the limitations of global-distribution alignment techniques by introducing a novel adversarial loss that is sensitive to local class distributions, ensuring finer-grained adaptation; and (3) we present a novel set of benchmarks based on EpicKitchens100 and CharadesEgo, that evaluate multiple domain shifts in a comprehensive manner. Our experiments indicate that SADA improves the adaptation across domains when compared to fully supervised state-of-the-art and alternative UDA methods, attaining a performance boost of up to 6.14% mAP.
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David Dueñas, Mostafa Kamal, & Petia Radeva. (2023). Efficient Deep Learning Ensemble for Skin Lesion Classification. In Proceedings of the 18th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (pp. 303–314).
Abstract: Vision Transformers (ViTs) are deep learning techniques that have been gaining in popularity in recent years.
In this work, we study the performance of ViTs and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) on skin lesions classification tasks, specifically melanoma diagnosis. We show that regardless of the performance of both architectures, an ensemble of them can improve their generalization. We also present an adaptation to the Gram-OOD* method (detecting Out-of-distribution (OOD) using Gram matrices) for skin lesion images. Moreover, the integration of super-convergence was critical to success in building models with strict computing and training time constraints. We evaluated our ensemble of ViTs and CNNs, demonstrating that generalization is enhanced by placing first in the 2019 and third in the 2020 ISIC Challenge Live Leaderboards
(available at https://challenge.isic-archive.com/leaderboards/live/).
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Danna Xue, Luis Herranz, Javier Vazquez, & Yanning Zhang. (2023). Burst Perception-Distortion Tradeoff: Analysis and Evaluation. In IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing.
Abstract: Burst image restoration attempts to effectively utilize the complementary cues appearing in sequential images to produce a high-quality image. Most current methods use all the available images to obtain the reconstructed image. However, using more images for burst restoration is not always the best option regarding reconstruction quality and efficiency, as the images acquired by handheld imaging devices suffer from degradation and misalignment caused by the camera noise and shake. In this paper, we extend the perception-distortion tradeoff theory by introducing multiple-frame information. We propose the area of the unattainable region as a new metric for perception-distortion tradeoff evaluation and comparison. Based on this metric, we analyse the performance of burst restoration from the perspective of the perception-distortion tradeoff under both aligned bursts and misaligned bursts situations. Our analysis reveals the importance of inter-frame alignment for burst restoration and shows that the optimal burst length for the restoration model depends both on the degree of degradation and misalignment.
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Danna Xue, Javier Vazquez, Luis Herranz, Yang Zhang, & Michael S Brown. (2023). Integrating High-Level Features for Consistent Palette-based Multi-image Recoloring. CGF - Computer Graphics Forum, .
Abstract: Achieving visually consistent colors across multiple images is important when images are used in photo albums, websites, and brochures. Unfortunately, only a handful of methods address multi-image color consistency compared to one-to-one color transfer techniques. Furthermore, existing methods do not incorporate high-level features that can assist graphic designers in their work. To address these limitations, we introduce a framework that builds upon a previous palette-based color consistency method and incorporates three high-level features: white balance, saliency, and color naming. We show how these features overcome the limitations of the prior multi-consistency workflow and showcase the user-friendly nature of our framework.
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Daniel Marczak, Sebastian Cygert, Tomasz Trzcinski, & Bartlomiej Twardowski. (2023). Revisiting Supervision for Continual Representation Learning.
Abstract: In the field of continual learning, models are designed to learn tasks one after the other. While most research has centered on supervised continual learning, recent studies have highlighted the strengths of self-supervised continual representation learning. The improved transferability of representations built with self-supervised methods is often associated with the role played by the multi-layer perceptron projector. In this work, we depart from this observation and reexamine the role of supervision in continual representation learning. We reckon that additional information, such as human annotations, should not deteriorate the quality of representations. Our findings show that supervised models when enhanced with a multi-layer perceptron head, can outperform self-supervised models in continual representation learning.
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Daniel Marczak, Grzegorz Rypesc, Sebastian Cygert, Tomasz Trzcinski, & Bartłomiej Twardowski. (2023). Generalized Continual Category Discovery.
Abstract: Most of Continual Learning (CL) methods push the limit of supervised learning settings, where an agent is expected to learn new labeled tasks and not forget previous knowledge. However, these settings are not well aligned with real-life scenarios, where a learning agent has access to a vast amount of unlabeled data encompassing both novel (entirely unlabeled) classes and examples from known classes. Drawing inspiration from Generalized Category Discovery (GCD), we introduce a novel framework that relaxes this assumption. Precisely, in any task, we allow for the existence of novel and known classes, and one must use continual version of unsupervised learning methods to discover them. We call this setting Generalized Continual Category Discovery (GCCD). It unifies CL and GCD, bridging the gap between synthetic benchmarks and real-life scenarios. With a series of experiments, we present that existing methods fail to accumulate knowledge from subsequent tasks in which unlabeled samples of novel classes are present. In light of these limitations, we propose a method that incorporates both supervised and unsupervised signals and mitigates the forgetting through the use of centroid adaptation. Our method surpasses strong CL methods adopted for GCD techniques and presents a superior representation learning performance.
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Damian Sojka, Yuyang Liu, Dipam Goswami, Sebastian Cygert, Bartłomiej Twardowski, & Joost van de Weijer. (2023). Technical Report for ICCV 2023 Visual Continual Learning Challenge: Continuous Test-time Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation.
Abstract: The goal of the challenge is to develop a test-time adaptation (TTA) method, which could adapt the model to gradually changing domains in video sequences for semantic segmentation task. It is based on a synthetic driving video dataset – SHIFT. The source model is trained on images taken during daytime in clear weather. Domain changes at test-time are mainly caused by varying weather conditions and times of day. The TTA methods are evaluated in each image sequence (video) separately, meaning the model is reset to the source model state before the next sequence. Images come one by one and a prediction has to be made at the arrival of each frame. Each sequence is composed of 401 images and starts with the source domain, then gradually drifts to a different one (changing weather or time of day) until the middle of the sequence. In the second half of the sequence, the domain gradually shifts back to the source one. Ground truth data is available only for the validation split of the SHIFT dataset, in which there are only six sequences that start and end with the source domain. We conduct an analysis specifically on those sequences. Ground truth data for test split, on which the developed TTA methods are evaluated for leader board ranking, are not publicly available.
The proposed solution secured a 3rd place in a challenge and received an innovation award. Contrary to the solutions that scored better, we did not use any external pretrained models or specialized data augmentations, to keep the solutions as general as possible. We have focused on analyzing the distributional shift and developing a method that could adapt to changing data dynamics and generalize across different scenarios.
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Damian Sojka, Sebastian Cygert, Bartlomiej Twardowski, & Tomasz Trzcinski. (2023). AR-TTA: A Simple Method for Real-World Continual Test-Time Adaptation. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) Workshops (pp. 3491–3495).
Abstract: Test-time adaptation is a promising research direction that allows the source model to adapt itself to changes in data distribution without any supervision. Yet, current methods are usually evaluated on benchmarks that are only a simplification of real-world scenarios. Hence, we propose to validate test-time adaptation methods using the recently introduced datasets for autonomous driving, namely CLAD-C and SHIFT. We observe that current test-time adaptation methods struggle to effectively handle varying degrees of domain shift, often resulting in degraded performance that falls below that of the source model. We noticed that the root of the problem lies in the inability to preserve the knowledge of the source model and adapt to dynamically changing, temporally correlated data streams. Therefore, we enhance well-established self-training framework by incorporating a small memory buffer to increase model stability and at the same time perform dynamic adaptation based on the intensity of domain shift. The proposed method, named AR-TTA, outperforms existing approaches on both synthetic and more real-world benchmarks and shows robustness across a variety of TTA scenarios.
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Cristina Palmero, Oleg V Komogortsev, Sergio Escalera, & Sachin S Talathi. (2023). Multi-Rate Sensor Fusion for Unconstrained Near-Eye Gaze Estimation. In Proceedings of the 2023 Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications (pp. 1–8).
Abstract: The power requirements of video-oculography systems can be prohibitive for high-speed operation on portable devices. Recently, low-power alternatives such as photosensors have been evaluated, providing gaze estimates at high frequency with a trade-off in accuracy and robustness. Potentially, an approach combining slow/high-fidelity and fast/low-fidelity sensors should be able to exploit their complementarity to track fast eye motion accurately and robustly. To foster research on this topic, we introduce OpenSFEDS, a near-eye gaze estimation dataset containing approximately 2M synthetic camera-photosensor image pairs sampled at 500 Hz under varied appearance and camera position. We also formulate the task of sensor fusion for gaze estimation, proposing a deep learning framework consisting in appearance-based encoding and temporal eye-state dynamics. We evaluate several single- and multi-rate fusion baselines on OpenSFEDS, achieving 8.7% error decrease when tracking fast eye movements with a multi-rate approach vs. a gaze forecasting approach operating with a low-speed sensor alone.
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Cristhian A. Aguilera-Carrasco, Luis Felipe Gonzalez-Böhme, Francisco Valdes, Francisco Javier Quitral Zapata, & Bogdan Raducanu. (2023). A Hand-Drawn Language for Human–Robot Collaboration in Wood Stereotomy. ACCESS - IEEE Access, 11, 100975–100985.
Abstract: This study introduces a novel, hand-drawn language designed to foster human-robot collaboration in wood stereotomy, central to carpentry and joinery professions. Based on skilled carpenters’ line and symbol etchings on timber, this language signifies the location, geometry of woodworking joints, and timber placement within a framework. A proof-of-concept prototype has been developed, integrating object detectors, keypoint regression, and traditional computer vision techniques to interpret this language and enable an extensive repertoire of actions. Empirical data attests to the language’s efficacy, with the successful identification of a specific set of symbols on various wood species’ sawn surfaces, achieving a mean average precision (mAP) exceeding 90%. Concurrently, the system can accurately pinpoint critical positions that facilitate robotic comprehension of carpenter-indicated woodworking joint geometry. The positioning error, approximately 3 pixels, meets industry standards.
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Chuanming Tang, Kai Wang, Joost van de Weijer, Jianlin Zhang, & Yongmei Huang. (2023). Exploiting Image-Related Inductive Biases in Single-Branch Visual Tracking.
Abstract: Despite achieving state-of-the-art performance in visual tracking, recent single-branch trackers tend to overlook the weak prior assumptions associated with the Vision Transformer (ViT) encoder and inference pipeline. Moreover, the effectiveness of discriminative trackers remains constrained due to the adoption of the dual-branch pipeline. To tackle the inferior effectiveness of the vanilla ViT, we propose an Adaptive ViT Model Prediction tracker (AViTMP) to bridge the gap between single-branch network and discriminative models. Specifically, in the proposed encoder AViT-Enc, we introduce an adaptor module and joint target state embedding to enrich the dense embedding paradigm based on ViT. Then, we combine AViT-Enc with a dense-fusion decoder and a discriminative target model to predict accurate location. Further, to mitigate the limitations of conventional inference practice, we present a novel inference pipeline called CycleTrack, which bolsters the tracking robustness in the presence of distractors via bidirectional cycle tracking verification. Lastly, we propose a dual-frame update inference strategy that adeptively handles significant challenges in long-term scenarios. In the experiments, we evaluate AViTMP on ten tracking benchmarks for a comprehensive assessment, including LaSOT, LaSOTExtSub, AVisT, etc. The experimental results unequivocally establish that AViTMP attains state-of-the-art performance, especially on long-time tracking and robustness.
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ChuanMing Fang, Kai Wang, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2023). IterInv: Iterative Inversion for Pixel-Level T2I Models. In 37th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.
Abstract: Large-scale text-to-image diffusion models have been a ground-breaking development in generating convincing images following an input text prompt. The goal of image editing research is to give users control over the generated images by modifying the text prompt. Current image editing techniques are relying on DDIM inversion as a common practice based on the Latent Diffusion Models (LDM). However, the large pretrained T2I models working on the latent space as LDM suffer from losing details due to the first compression stage with an autoencoder mechanism. Instead, another mainstream T2I pipeline working on the pixel level, such as Imagen and DeepFloyd-IF, avoids this problem. They are commonly composed of several stages, normally with a text-to-image stage followed by several super-resolution stages. In this case, the DDIM inversion is unable to find the initial noise to generate the original image given that the super-resolution diffusion models are not compatible with the DDIM technique. According to our experimental findings, iteratively concatenating the noisy image as the condition is the root of this problem. Based on this observation, we develop an iterative inversion (IterInv) technique for this stream of T2I models and verify IterInv with the open-source DeepFloyd-IF model. By combining our method IterInv with a popular image editing method, we prove the application prospects of IterInv. The code will be released at \url{this https URL}.
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