No Arabic abstract
Representation learning promises to unlock deep learning for the long tail of vision tasks without expensive labelled datasets. Yet, the absence of a unified evaluation for general visual representations hinders progress. Popular protocols are often too constrained (linear classification), limited in diversity (ImageNet, CIFAR, Pascal-VOC), or only weakly related to representation quality (ELBO, reconstruction error). We present the Visual Task Adaptation Benchmark (VTAB), which defines good representations as those that adapt to diverse, unseen tasks with few examples. With VTAB, we conduct a large-scale study of many popular publicly-available representation learning algorithms. We carefully control confounders such as architecture and tuning budget. We address questions like: How effective are ImageNet representations beyond standard natural datasets? How do representations trained via generative and discriminative models compare? To what extent can self-supervision replace labels? And, how close are we to general visual representations?
We present a large-scale study on unsupervised spatiotemporal representation learning from videos. With a unified perspective on four recent image-based frameworks, we study a simple objective that can easily generalize all these methods to space-time. Our objective encourages temporally-persistent features in the same video, and in spite of its simplicity, it works surprisingly well across: (i) different unsupervised frameworks, (ii) pre-training datasets, (iii) downstream datasets, and (iv) backbone architectures. We draw a series of intriguing observations from this study, e.g., we discover that encouraging long-spanned persistency can be effective even if the timespan is 60 seconds. In addition to state-of-the-art results in multiple benchmarks, we report a few promising cases in which unsupervised pre-training can outperform its supervised counterpart. Code is made available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/SlowFast
This paper considers the problem of inferring image labels from images when only a few annotated examples are available at training time. This setup is often referred to as low-shot learning, where a standard approach is to re-train the last few layers of a convolutional neural network learned on separate classes for which training examples are abundant. We consider a semi-supervised setting based on a large collection of images to support label propagation. This is possible by leveraging the recent advances on large-scale similarity graph construction. We show that despite its conceptual simplicity, scaling label propagation up to hundred millions of images leads to state of the art accuracy in the low-shot learning regime.
Crowd counting is a fundamental yet challenging task, which desires rich information to generate pixel-wise crowd density maps. However, most previous methods only used the limited information of RGB images and cannot well discover potential pedestrians in unconstrained scenarios. In this work, we find that incorporating optical and thermal information can greatly help to recognize pedestrians. To promote future researches in this field, we introduce a large-scale RGBT Crowd Counting (RGBT-CC) benchmark, which contains 2,030 pairs of RGB-thermal images with 138,389 annotated people. Furthermore, to facilitate the multimodal crowd counting, we propose a cross-modal collaborative representation learning framework, which consists of multiple modality-specific branches, a modality-shared branch, and an Information Aggregation-Distribution Module (IADM) to capture the complementary information of different modalities fully. Specifically, our IADM incorporates two collaborative information transfers to dynamically enhance the modality-shared and modality-specific representations with a dual information propagation mechanism. Extensive experiments conducted on the RGBT-CC benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework for RGBT crowd counting. Moreover, the proposed approach is universal for multimodal crowd counting and is also capable to achieve superior performance on the ShanghaiTechRGBD dataset. Finally, our source code and benchmark are released at {url{http://lingboliu.com/RGBT_Crowd_Counting.html}}.
The natural association between visual observations and their corresponding sound provides powerful self-supervisory signals for learning video representations, which makes the ever-growing amount of online videos an attractive source of training data. However, large portions of online videos contain irrelevant audio-visual signals because of edited/overdubbed audio, and models trained on such uncurated videos have shown to learn suboptimal representations. Therefore, existing approaches rely almost exclusively on datasets with predetermined taxonomies of semantic concepts, where there is a high chance of audio-visual correspondence. Unfortunately, constructing such datasets require labor intensive manual annotation and/or verification, which severely limits the utility of online videos for large-scale learning. In this work, we present an automatic dataset curation approach based on subset optimization where the objective is to maximize the mutual information between audio and visual channels in videos. We demonstrate that our approach finds videos with high audio-visual correspondence and show that self-supervised models trained on our data achieve competitive performances compared to models trained on existing manually curated datasets. The most significant benefit of our approach is scalability: We release ACAV100M that contains 100 million videos with high audio-visual correspondence, ideal for self-supervised video representation learning.
Domain adaptation is an important but challenging task. Most of the existing domain adaptation methods struggle to extract the domain-invariant representation on the feature space with entangling domain information and semantic information. Different from previous efforts on the entangled feature space, we aim to extract the domain invariant semantic information in the latent disentangled semantic representation (DSR) of the data. In DSR, we assume the data generation process is controlled by two independent sets of variables, i.e., the semantic latent variables and the domain latent variables. Under the above assumption, we employ a variational auto-encoder to reconstruct the semantic latent variables and domain latent variables behind the data. We further devise a dual adversarial network to disentangle these two sets of reconstructed latent variables. The disentangled semantic latent variables are finally adapted across the domains. Experimental studies testify that our model yields state-of-the-art performance on several domain adaptation benchmark datasets.