Regression-based methods have recently shown promising results in reconstructing human meshes from monocular images. By directly mapping raw pixels to model parameters, these methods can produce parametric models in a feed-forward manner via neural n
etworks. However, minor deviation in parameters may lead to noticeable misalignment between the estimated meshes and image evidences. To address this issue, we propose a Pyramidal Mesh Alignment Feedback (PyMAF) loop to leverage a feature pyramid and rectify the predicted parameters explicitly based on the mesh-image alignment status in our deep regressor. In PyMAF, given the currently predicted parameters, mesh-aligned evidences will be extracted from finer-resolution features accordingly and fed back for parameter rectification. To reduce noise and enhance the reliability of these evidences, an auxiliary pixel-wise supervision is imposed on the feature encoder, which provides mesh-image correspondence guidance for our network to preserve the most related information in spatial features. The efficacy of our approach is validated on several benchmarks, including Human3.6M, 3DPW, LSP, and COCO, where experimental results show that our approach consistently improves the mesh-image alignment of the reconstruction. The project page with code and video results can be found at https://hongwenzhang.github.io/pymaf.
In this paper, we propose a general and efficient pre-training paradigm, Montage pre-training, for object detection. Montage pre-training needs only the target detection dataset while taking only 1/4 computational resources compared to the widely ado
pted ImageNet pre-training.To build such an efficient paradigm, we reduce the potential redundancy by carefully extracting useful samples from the original images, assembling samples in a Montage manner as input, and using an ERF-adaptive dense classification strategy for model pre-training. These designs include not only a new input pattern to improve the spatial utilization but also a novel learning objective to expand the effective receptive field of the pretrained model. The efficiency and effectiveness of Montage pre-training are validated by extensive experiments on the MS-COCO dataset, where the results indicate that the models using Montage pre-training are able to achieve on-par or even better detection performances compared with the ImageNet pre-training.
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) achieves significant progress in many computer vision tasks. While many methods have been proposed to improve the efficiency of NAS, the search progress is still laborious because training and evaluating plausible arc
hitectures over large search space is time-consuming. Assessing network candidates under a proxy (i.e., computationally reduced setting) thus becomes inevitable. In this paper, we observe that most existing proxies exhibit different behaviors in maintaining the rank consistency among network candidates. In particular, some proxies can be more reliable -- the rank of candidates does not differ much comparing their reduced setting performance and final performance. In this paper, we systematically investigate some widely adopted reduction factors and report our observations. Inspired by these observations, we present a reliable proxy and further formulate a hierarchical proxy strategy. The strategy spends more computations on candidate networks that are potentially more accurate, while discards unpromising ones in early stage with a fast proxy. This leads to an economical evolutionary-based NAS (EcoNAS), which achieves an impressive 400x search time reduction in comparison to the evolutionary-based state of the art (8 vs. 3150 GPU days). Some new proxies led by our observations can also be applied to accelerate other NAS methods while still able to discover good candidate networks with performance matching those found by previous proxy strategies.
