arXiv subjects

Xiatian Zhu

Publications and source records attributed to Xiatian Zhu.

At least 163 records · Page 9Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Few-shot Action Recognition with Prototype-centered Attentive Learning

Few-shot action recognition aims to recognize action classes with few training samples. Most existing methods adopt a meta-learning approach with episodic training. In each episode, the few samples in a meta-training task are split into support and query sets. The former is used to build a classifier, which is then evaluated on the latter using a query-centered loss for model updating. There are however two major limitations: lack of data efficiency due to the query-centered only loss design and inability to deal with the support set outlying samples and inter-class distribution overlapping problems. In this paper, we overcome both limitations by proposing a new Prototype-centered Attentive Learning (PAL) model composed of two novel components. First, a prototype-centered contrastive learning loss is introduced to complement the conventional query-centered learning objective, in order to make full use of the limited training samples in each episode. Second, PAL further integrates a hybrid attentive learning mechanism that can minimize the negative impacts of outliers and promote class separation. Extensive experiments on four standard few-shot action benchmarks show that our method clearly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods, with the improvement particularly significant (10+\%) on the most challenging fine-grained action recognition benchmark.

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arXiv2021

Boundary-sensitive Pre-training for Temporal Localization in Videos

Many video analysis tasks require temporal localization thus detection of content changes. However, most existing models developed for these tasks are pre-trained on general video action classification tasks. This is because large scale annotation of temporal boundaries in untrimmed videos is expensive. Therefore no suitable datasets exist for temporal boundary-sensitive pre-training. In this paper for the first time, we investigate model pre-training for temporal localization by introducing a novel boundary-sensitive pretext (BSP) task. Instead of relying on costly manual annotations of temporal boundaries, we propose to synthesize temporal boundaries in existing video action classification datasets. With the synthesized boundaries, BSP can be simply conducted via classifying the boundary types. This enables the learning of video representations that are much more transferable to downstream temporal localization tasks. Extensive experiments show that the proposed BSP is superior and complementary to the existing action classification based pre-training counterpart, and achieves new state-of-the-art performance on several temporal localization tasks.

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arXiv2021

Few-Shot Website Fingerprinting Attack

This work introduces a novel data augmentation method for few-shot website fingerprinting (WF) attack where only a handful of training samples per website are available for deep learning model optimization. Moving beyond earlier WF methods relying on manually-engineered feature representations, more advanced deep learning alternatives demonstrate that learning feature representations automatically from training data is superior. Nonetheless, this advantage is subject to an unrealistic assumption that there exist many training samples per website, which otherwise will disappear. To address this, we introduce a model-agnostic, efficient, and Harmonious Data Augmentation (HDA) method that can improve deep WF attacking methods significantly. HDA involves both intra-sample and inter-sample data transformations that can be used in harmonious manner to expand a tiny training dataset to an arbitrarily large collection, therefore effectively and explicitly addressing the intrinsic data scarcity problem. We conducted expensive experiments to validate our HDA for boosting state-of-the-art deep learning WF attack models in both closed-world and open-world attacking scenarios, at absence and presence of strong defense. {For instance, in the more challenging and realistic evaluation scenario with WTF-PAD based defense, our HDA method surpasses the previous state-of-the-art results by more than 4% in absolute classification accuracy in the 20-shot learning case.

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arXiv2021

Intra-Camera Supervised Person Re-Identification

Existing person re-identification (re-id) methods mostly exploit a large set of cross-camera identity labelled training data. This requires a tedious data collection and annotation process, leading to poor scalability in practical re-id applications. On the other hand unsupervised re-id methods do not need identity label information, but they usually suffer from much inferior and insufficient model performance. To overcome these fundamental limitations, we propose a novel person re-identification paradigm based on an idea of independent per-camera identity annotation. This eliminates the most time-consuming and tedious inter-camera identity labelling process, significantly reducing the amount of human annotation efforts. Consequently, it gives rise to a more scalable and more feasible setting, which we call Intra-Camera Supervised (ICS) person re-id, for which we formulate a Multi-tAsk mulTi-labEl (MATE) deep learning method. Specifically, MATE is designed for self-discovering the cross-camera identity correspondence in a per-camera multi-task inference framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate the cost-effectiveness superiority of our method over the alternative approaches on three large person re-id datasets. For example, MATE yields 88.7% rank-1 score on Market-1501 in the proposed ICS person re-id setting, significantly outperforming unsupervised learning models and closely approaching conventional fully supervised learning competitors.

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arXiv2021

Unsupervised Noisy Tracklet Person Re-identification

Existing person re-identification (re-id) methods mostly rely on supervised model learning from a large set of person identity labelled training data per domain. This limits their scalability and usability in large scale deployments. In this work, we present a novel selective tracklet learning (STL) approach that can train discriminative person re-id models from unlabelled tracklet data in an unsupervised manner. This avoids the tedious and costly process of exhaustively labelling person image/tracklet true matching pairs across camera views. Importantly, our method is particularly more robust against arbitrary noisy data of raw tracklets therefore scalable to learning discriminative models from unconstrained tracking data. This differs from a handful of existing alternative methods that often assume the existence of true matches and balanced tracklet samples per identity class. This is achieved by formulating a data adaptive image-to-tracklet selective matching loss function explored in a multi-camera multi-task deep learning model structure. Extensive comparative experiments demonstrate that the proposed STL model surpasses significantly the state-of-the-art unsupervised learning and one-shot learning re-id methods on three large tracklet person re-id benchmarks.

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arXiv2020

Egocentric Action Recognition by Video Attention and Temporal Context

We present the submission of Samsung AI Centre Cambridge to the CVPR2020 EPIC-Kitchens Action Recognition Challenge. In this challenge, action recognition is posed as the problem of simultaneously predicting a single `verb' and `noun' class label given an input trimmed video clip. That is, a `verb' and a `noun' together define a compositional `action' class. The challenging aspects of this real-life action recognition task include small fast moving objects, complex hand-object interactions, and occlusions. At the core of our submission is a recently-proposed spatial-temporal video attention model, called `W3' (`What-Where-When') attention~\cite{perez2020knowing}. We further introduce a simple yet effective contextual learning mechanism to model `action' class scores directly from long-term temporal behaviour based on the `verb' and `noun' prediction scores. Our solution achieves strong performance on the challenge metrics without using object-specific reasoning nor extra training data. In particular, our best solution with multimodal ensemble achieves the 2$^{nd}$ best position for `verb', and 3$^{rd}$ best for `noun' and `action' on the Seen Kitchens test set.

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arXiv2020

Knowing What, Where and When to Look: Efficient Video Action Modeling with Attention

Attentive video modeling is essential for action recognition in unconstrained videos due to their rich yet redundant information over space and time. However, introducing attention in a deep neural network for action recognition is challenging for two reasons. First, an effective attention module needs to learn what (objects and their local motion patterns), where (spatially), and when (temporally) to focus on. Second, a video attention module must be efficient because existing action recognition models already suffer from high computational cost. To address both challenges, a novel What-Where-When (W3) video attention module is proposed. Departing from existing alternatives, our W3 module models all three facets of video attention jointly. Crucially, it is extremely efficient by factorizing the high-dimensional video feature data into low-dimensional meaningful spaces (1D channel vector for `what' and 2D spatial tensors for `where'), followed by lightweight temporal attention reasoning. Extensive experiments show that our attention model brings significant improvements to existing action recognition models, achieving new state-of-the-art performance on a number of benchmarks.

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arXiv2020

Joint COCO and Mapillary Workshop at ICCV 2019 Keypoint Detection Challenge Track Technical Report: Distribution-Aware Coordinate Representation for Human Pose Estimation

In this paper, we focus on the coordinate representation in human pose estimation. While being the standard choice, heatmap based representation has not been systematically investigated. We found that the process of coordinate decoding (i.e. transforming the predicted heatmaps to the coordinates) is surprisingly significant for human pose estimation performance, which nevertheless was not recognised before. In light of the discovered importance, we further probe the design limitations of the standard coordinate decoding method and propose a principled distribution-aware decoding method. Meanwhile, we improve the standard coordinate encoding process (i.e. transforming ground-truth coordinates to heatmaps) by generating accurate heatmap distributions for unbiased model training. Taking them together, we formulate a novel Distribution-Aware coordinate Representation for Keypoint (DARK) method. Serving as a model-agnostic plug-in, DARK significantly improves the performance of a variety of state-of-the-art human pose estimation models. Extensive experiments show that DARK yields the best results on COCO keypoint detection challenge, validating the usefulness and effectiveness of our novel coordinate representation idea. The project page containing more details is at https://ilovepose.github.io/coco

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arXiv2020

Incremental Few-Shot Object Detection

Most existing object detection methods rely on the availability of abundant labelled training samples per class and offline model training in a batch mode. These requirements substantially limit their scalability to open-ended accommodation of novel classes with limited labelled training data. We present a study aiming to go beyond these limitations by considering the Incremental Few-Shot Detection (iFSD) problem setting, where new classes must be registered incrementally (without revisiting base classes) and with few examples. To this end we propose OpeN-ended Centre nEt (ONCE), a detector designed for incrementally learning to detect novel class objects with few examples. This is achieved by an elegant adaptation of the CentreNet detector to the few-shot learning scenario, and meta-learning a class-specific code generator model for registering novel classes. ONCE fully respects the incremental learning paradigm, with novel class registration requiring only a single forward pass of few-shot training samples, and no access to base classes -- thus making it suitable for deployment on embedded devices. Extensive experiments conducted on both the standard object detection and fashion landmark detection tasks show the feasibility of iFSD for the first time, opening an interesting and very important line of research.

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arXiv2019

Characteristic Regularisation for Super-Resolving Face Images

Existing facial image super-resolution (SR) methods focus mostly on improving artificially down-sampled low-resolution (LR) imagery. Such SR models, although strong at handling artificial LR images, often suffer from significant performance drop on genuine LR test data. Previous unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods address this issue by training a model using unpaired genuine LR and HR data as well as cycle consistency loss formulation. However, this renders the model overstretched with two tasks: consistifying the visual characteristics and enhancing the image resolution. Importantly, this makes the end-to-end model training ineffective due to the difficulty of back-propagating gradients through two concatenated CNNs. To solve this problem, we formulate a method that joins the advantages of conventional SR and UDA models. Specifically, we separate and control the optimisations for characteristics consistifying and image super-resolving by introducing Characteristic Regularisation (CR) between them. This task split makes the model training more effective and computationally tractable. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the performance superiority of our method over state-of-the-art SR and UDA models on both genuine and artificial LR facial imagery data.

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arXiv2019

Distribution-Aware Coordinate Representation for Human Pose Estimation

While being the de facto standard coordinate representation in human pose estimation, heatmap is never systematically investigated in the literature, to our best knowledge. This work fills this gap by studying the coordinate representation with a particular focus on the heatmap. Interestingly, we found that the process of decoding the predicted heatmaps into the final joint coordinates in the original image space is surprisingly significant for human pose estimation performance, which nevertheless was not recognised before. In light of the discovered importance, we further probe the design limitations of the standard coordinate decoding method widely used by existing methods, and propose a more principled distribution-aware decoding method. Meanwhile, we improve the standard coordinate encoding process (i.e. transforming ground-truth coordinates to heatmaps) by generating accurate heatmap distributions for unbiased model training. Taking the two together, we formulate a novel Distribution-Aware coordinate Representation of Keypoint (DARK) method. Serving as a model-agnostic plug-in, DARK significantly improves the performance of a variety of state-of-the-art human pose estimation models. Extensive experiments show that DARK yields the best results on two common benchmarks, MPII and COCO, consistently validating the usefulness and effectiveness of our novel coordinate representation idea.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Intra-Camera Supervised Person Re-Identification: A New Benchmark

Existing person re-identification (re-id) methods rely mostly on a large set of inter-camera identity labelled training data, requiring a tedious data collection and annotation process therefore leading to poor scalability in practical re-id applications. To overcome this fundamental limitation, we consider person re-identification without inter-camera identity association but only with identity labels independently annotated within each individual camera-view. This eliminates the most time-consuming and tedious inter-camera identity labelling process in order to significantly reduce the amount of human efforts required during annotation. It hence gives rise to a more scalable and more feasible learning scenario, which we call Intra-Camera Supervised (ICS) person re-id. Under this ICS setting with weaker label supervision, we formulate a Multi-Task Multi-Label (MTML) deep learning method. Given no inter-camera association, MTML is specially designed for self-discovering the inter-camera identity correspondence. This is achieved by inter-camera multi-label learning under a joint multi-task inference framework. In addition, MTML can also efficiently learn the discriminative re-id feature representations by fully using the available identity labels within each camera-view. Extensive experiments demonstrate the performance superiority of our MTML model over the state-of-the-art alternative methods on three large-scale person re-id datasets in the proposed intra-camera supervised learning setting.

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arXiv2019

Universal Person Re-Identification

Most state-of-the-art person re-identification (re-id) methods depend on supervised model learning with a large set of cross-view identity labelled training data. Even worse, such trained models are limited to only the same-domain deployment with significantly degraded cross-domain generalization capability, i.e. "domain specific". To solve this limitation, there are a number of recent unsupervised domain adaptation and unsupervised learning methods that leverage unlabelled target domain training data. However, these methods need to train a separate model for each target domain as supervised learning methods. This conventional "{\em train once, run once}" pattern is unscalable to a large number of target domains typically encountered in real-world deployments. We address this problem by presenting a "train once, run everywhere" pattern industry-scale systems are desperate for. We formulate a "universal model learning' approach enabling domain-generic person re-id using only limited training data of a "{\em single}" seed domain. Specifically, we train a universal re-id deep model to discriminate between a set of transformed person identity classes. Each of such classes is formed by applying a variety of random appearance transformations to the images of that class, where the transformations simulate the camera viewing conditions of any domains for making the model training domain generic. Extensive evaluations show the superiority of our method for universal person re-id over a wide variety of state-of-the-art unsupervised domain adaptation and unsupervised learning re-id methods on five standard benchmarks: Market-1501, DukeMTMC, CUHK03, MSMT17, and VIPeR.

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arXiv2019

Unsupervised Deep Learning by Neighbourhood Discovery

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated remarkable success in computer vision by supervisedly learning strong visual feature representations. However, training CNNs relies heavily on the availability of exhaustive training data annotations, limiting significantly their deployment and scalability in many application scenarios. In this work, we introduce a generic unsupervised deep learning approach to training deep models without the need for any manual label supervision. Specifically, we progressively discover sample anchored/centred neighbourhoods to reason and learn the underlying class decision boundaries iteratively and accumulatively. Every single neighbourhood is specially formulated so that all the member samples can share the same unseen class labels at high probability for facilitating the extraction of class discriminative feature representations during training. Experiments on image classification show the performance advantages of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art unsupervised learning models on six benchmarks including both coarse-grained and fine-grained object image categorisation.

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arXiv2019

Single-Label Multi-Class Image Classification by Deep Logistic Regression

The objective learning formulation is essential for the success of convolutional neural networks. In this work, we analyse thoroughly the standard learning objective functions for multi-class classification CNNs: softmax regression (SR) for single-label scenario and logistic regression (LR) for multi-label scenario. Our analyses lead to an inspiration of exploiting LR for single-label classification learning, and then the disclosing of the negative class distraction problem in LR. To address this problem, we develop two novel LR based objective functions that not only generalise the conventional LR but importantly turn out to be competitive alternatives to SR in single label classification. Extensive comparative evaluations demonstrate the model learning advantages of the proposed LR functions over the commonly adopted SR in single-label coarse-grained object categorisation and cross-class fine-grained person instance identification tasks. We also show the performance superiority of our method on clothing attribute classification in comparison to the vanilla LR function.

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arXiv2019

Low-Resolution Face Recognition

Whilst recent face-recognition (FR) techniques have made significant progress on recognising constrained high-resolution web images, the same cannot be said on natively unconstrained low-resolution images at large scales. In this work, we examine systematically this under-studied FR problem, and introduce a novel Complement Super-Resolution and Identity (CSRI) joint deep learning method with a unified end-to-end network architecture. We further construct a new large-scale dataset TinyFace of native unconstrained low-resolution face images from selected public datasets, because none benchmark of this nature exists in the literature. With extensive experiments we show there is a significant gap between the reported FR performances on popular benchmarks and the results on TinyFace, and the advantages of the proposed CSRI over a variety of state-of-the-art FR and super-resolution deep models on solving this largely ignored FR scenario. The TinyFace dataset is released publicly at: https://qmul-tinyface.github.io/.

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arXiv2019

Fast Human Pose Estimation

Existing human pose estimation approaches often only consider how to improve the model generalisation performance, but putting aside the significant efficiency problem. This leads to the development of heavy models with poor scalability and cost-effectiveness in practical use. In this work, we investigate the under-studied but practically critical pose model efficiency problem. To this end, we present a new Fast Pose Distillation (FPD) model learning strategy. Specifically, the FPD trains a lightweight pose neural network architecture capable of executing rapidly with low computational cost. It is achieved by effectively transferring the pose structure knowledge of a strong teacher network. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the advantages of our FPD method over a broad range of state-of-the-art pose estimation approaches in terms of model cost-effectiveness on two standard benchmark datasets, MPII Human Pose and Leeds Sports Pose.

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arXiv2019

Unsupervised Tracklet Person Re-Identification

Most existing person re-identification (re-id) methods rely on supervised model learning on per-camera-pair manually labelled pairwise training data. This leads to poor scalability in a practical re-id deployment, due to the lack of exhaustive identity labelling of positive and negative image pairs for every camera-pair. In this work, we present an unsupervised re-id deep learning approach. It is capable of incrementally discovering and exploiting the underlying re-id discriminative information from automatically generated person tracklet data end-to-end. We formulate an Unsupervised Tracklet Association Learning (UTAL) framework. This is by jointly learning within-camera tracklet discrimination and cross-camera tracklet association in order to maximise the discovery of tracklet identity matching both within and across camera views. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model over the state-of-the-art unsupervised learning and domain adaptation person re-id methods on eight benchmarking datasets.

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