This is a brief list on some CVPR papers in 2021. [Continuing...]
Neural Architecture Search with Random Labels
Keywords: NAS, RLNAS, Convergence Hypothesis
In this paper, we investigate a new variant of neural architecture search (NAS) paradigm -- searching with random labels (RLNAS). The task sounds counter-intuitive for most existing NAS algorithms since random label provides few information on the performance of each candidate architecture. Instead, we propose a novel NAS framework based on ease-of-convergence hypothesis, which requires only random labels during searching. The algorithm involves two steps: first, we train a SuperNet using random labels; second, from the SuperNet we extract the sub-network whose weights change most significantly during the training. Extensive experiments are evaluated on multiple datasets (e.g. NAS-Bench-201 and ImageNet) and multiple search spaces (e.g. DARTS-like and MobileNet-like). Very surprisingly, RLNAS achieves comparable or even better results compared with state-of-the-art NAS methods such as PC-DARTS, Single Path One-Shot, even though the counterparts utilize full ground truth labels for searching. We hope our finding could inspire new understandings on the essential of NAS.
Rethinking the Heatmap Regression for Bottom-up Human Pose Estimation
Keywords: Human Pose Estimation, Bottom-up, SAHR, WAHR
Heatmap regression has become the most prevalent choice for nowadays human pose estimation methods. The ground-truth heatmaps are usually constructed via covering all skeletal keypoints by 2D gaussian kernels. The standard deviations of these kernels are fixed. However, for bottom-up methods, which need to handle a large variance of human scales and labeling ambiguities, the current practice seems unreasonable. To better cope with these problems, we propose the scale-adaptive heatmap regression (SAHR) method, which can adaptively adjust the standard deviation for each keypoint. In this way, SAHR is more tolerant of various human scales and labeling ambiguities. However, SAHR may aggravate the imbalance between fore-background samples, which potentially hurts the improvement of SAHR. Thus, we further introduce the weight-adaptive heatmap regression (WAHR) to help balance the fore-background samples. Extensive experiments show that SAHR together with WAHR largely improves the accuracy of bottom-up human pose estimation. As a result, we finally outperform the state-of-the-art model by +1.5AP and achieve 72.0AP on COCO test-dev2017, which is com-arable with the performances of most top-down methods. Source codes are available at this https URL.
Code: github.com/greatlog/SW…
General Instance Distillation for Object Detection
Keywords: Object Detection, Knowledge Distillation
In recent years, knowledge distillation has been proved to be an effective solution for model compression. This approach can make lightweight student models acquire the knowledge extracted from cumbersome teacher models. However, previous distillation methods of detection have weak generalization for different detection frameworks and rely heavily on ground truth (GT), ignoring the valuable relation information between instances. Thus, we propose a novel distillation method for detection tasks based on discriminative instances without considering the positive or negative distinguished by GT, which is called general instance distillation (GID). Our approach contains a general instance selection module (GISM) to make full use of feature-based, relation-based and response-based knowledge for distillation. Extensive results demonstrate that the student model achieves significant AP improvement and even outperforms the teacher in various detection frameworks. Specifically, RetinaNet with ResNet-50 achieves 39.1% in mAP with GID on COCO dataset, which surpasses the baseline 36.2% by 2.9%, and even better than the ResNet-101 based teacher model with 38.1% AP.
Activate or Not: Learning Customized Activation
Keywords: Activation Function, ACON
Modern activation layers use non-linear functions to activate the neurons. In this paper, we present a simple but effective activation function we term ACON which learns to activate the neurons or not. Surprisingly, we find Swish, the recent popular NAS-searched activation, can be interpreted as a smooth approximation to ReLU. Intuitively, in the same way, we approximate the variants in the ReLU family to the Swish family, we call ACON, which makes Swish a special case of ACON and remarkably improves the performance. Next, we present meta-ACON, which explicitly learns to optimize the parameter switching between non-linear (activate) and linear (inactivate) and provides a new design space. By simply changing the activation function, we improve the ImageNet top-1 accuracy rate by 6.7% and 1.8% on MobileNet-0.25 and ResNet-152, respectively.
You Only Look One-level Feature
Keywords: One-stage Detection, Optimization, Single-level Feature Manner
This paper revisits feature pyramids networks (FPN) for one-stage detectors and points out that the success of FPN is due to its divide-and-conquer solution to the optimization problem in object detection rather than multi-scale feature fusion. From the perspective of optimization, we introduce an alternative way to address the problem instead of adopting the complex feature pyramids - {utilizing only one-level feature for detection}. Based on the simple and efficient solution, we present You Only Look One-level Feature (YOLOF). In our method, two key components, Dilated Encoder and Uniform Matching, are proposed and bring considerable improvements. Extensive experiments on the COCO benchmark prove the effectiveness of the proposed model. Our YOLOF achieves comparable results with its feature pyramids counterpart RetinaNet while being 2.5× faster. Without transformer layers, YOLOF can match the performance of DETR in a single-level feature manner with 7× less training epochs. With an image size of 608×608, YOLOF achieves 44.3 mAP running at 60 fps on 2080Ti, which is 13% faster than YOLOv4.
Code: github.com/megvii-mode…
UPFlow: Upsampling Pyramid for Unsupervised Optical Flow Learning
Keywords: Optical Flow Estimation, Self-guided Upsample, Pyramid Distillation Loss
We present an unsupervised learning approach for optical flow estimation by improving the upsampling and learning of pyramid network. We design a self-guided upsample module to tackle the interpolation blur problem caused by bilinear upsampling between pyramid levels. Moreover, we propose a pyramid distillation loss to add supervision for intermediate levels via distilling the finest flow as pseudo labels. By integrating these two components together, our method achieves the best performance for unsupervised optical flow learning on multiple leading benchmarks, including MPI-SIntel, KITTI 2012 and KITTI 2015. In particular, we achieve EPE=1.4 on KITTI 2012 and F1=9.38% on KITTI 2015, which outperform the previous state-of-the-art methods by 22.2% and 15.7%, respectively.
NBNet: Noise Basis Learning for Image Denoising with Subspace Projection
Keywords: NBNet, Image Denoising
In this paper, we introduce NBNet, a novel framework for image denoising. Unlike previous works, we propose to tackle this challenging problem from a new perspective: noise reduction by image-adaptive projection. Specifically, we propose to train a network that can separate signal and noise by learning a set of reconstruction basis in the feature space. Subsequently, image denosing can be achieved by selecting corresponding basis of the signal subspace and projecting the input into such space. Our key insight is that projection can naturally maintain the local structure of input signal, especially for areas with low light or weak textures. Towards this end, we propose SSA, a non-local subspace attention module designed explicitly to learn the basis generation as well as the subspace projection. We further incorporate SSA with NBNet, a UNet structured network designed for end-to-end image denosing. We conduct evaluations on benchmarks, including SIDD and DND, and NBNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on PSNR and SSIM with significantly less computational cost.