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In unconstrained scenarios, face recognition remains challenging, particularly when faces are occluded. Existing methods generalize poorly due to the distribution distortion induced by unpredictable occlusions. To tackle this problem, we propose a hierarchical segmentation-based mask learning strategy for face recognition, enhancing occlusion-robustness by integrating segmentation representations of occlusion into face recognition in the latent space. We present a novel multi-scale segmentation-based mask learning (MSML) network, which consists of a face recognition branch (FRB), an occlusion segmentation branch (OSB), and hierarchical elaborate feature masking (FM) operators. With the guidance of hierarchical segmentation representations of occlusion learned by the OSB, the FM operators can generate multi-scale latent masks to eliminate mistaken responses introduced by occlusions and purify the contaminated facial features at multiple layers. In this way, the proposed MSML network can effectively identify and remove the occlusions from feature representations at multiple levels and aggregate features from visible facial areas. Experiments on face verification and recognition under synthetic or realistic occlusions demonstrate the effectiveness of our method compared to state-of-the-art methods.

AAAI 2022

MSML: Enhancing Occlusion-Robustness by Multi-Scale Segmentation-Based Mask Learning for Face Recognition

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.<br><br><br><br>

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

AAAI 2024

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

Many well-established anomaly detection methods use the distance of a sample to those in its local neighbourhood: so-called `local outlier methods', such as LOF and DBSCAN. They are popular for their simple principles and strong performance on unstructured, feature-based data that is commonplace in many practical applications. However, they cannot learn to adapt for a particular set of data due to their lack of trainable parameters. In this paper, we begin by unifying local outlier methods by showing that they are particular cases of the more general message passing framework used in graph neural networks. This allows us to introduce learnability into local outlier methods, in the form of a neural network, for greater flexibility and expressivity: specifically, we propose LUNAR, a novel, graph neural network-based anomaly detection method. LUNAR learns to use information from the nearest neighbours of each node in a trainable way to find anomalies. We show that our method performs significantly better than existing local outlier methods, as well as state-of-the-art deep baselines. We also show that the performance of our method is much more robust to different settings of the local neighbourhood size.

LUNAR: Unifying Local Outlier Detection Methods via Graph Neural Networks

Vector graphics is broadly used in a variety of forms, such as illustrations, logos, posters, billboards, and printed ads. Despite its broad use, many artists still prefer to draw with pen and paper, which leads to a high demand of converting raster designs into the vector form. In particular, line drawing is a primary art and attracts many research efforts in automatically converting raster line drawings to vector form. However, the existing methods generally adopt a two-step approach, stroke segmentation and vectorization. Without vector guidance, the raster-based stroke segmentation frequently obtains unsatisfying segmentation results, such as over-grouped strokes and broken strokes. In this paper, we make an attempt in proposing an end-to-end vectorization method which directly generates vectorized stroke primitives from raster line drawing in one step. We propose a Transformer-based framework to perform stroke tracing like human does in an automatic stroke-by-stroke way with a novel stroke feature representation and multi-modal supervision to achieve vectorization with high quality and fidelity. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations show that our method achieves state of the art performance.

End-to-End Line Drawing Vectorization

Single image deraining is an important and challenging task for some downstream artificial intelligence applications such as video surveillance and self-driving systems.
Most of the existing deep-learning-based methods constrain the network to generate derained images but few of them explore features from intermediate layers, different levels, and different modules which are beneficial for rain streaks removal.
In this paper, we propose a high-order collaborative network with multi-scale compact constraints and a bidirectional scale-content similarity mining module to exploit features from deep networks externally and internally for rain streaks removal.
Externally, we design a deraining framework with three sub-networks trained in a collaborative manner, where the bottom network transmits intermediate features to the middle network which also receives shallower rainy features from the top network and sends back features to the bottom network.
Internally, we enforce multi-scale compact constraints on the intermediate layers of deep networks to learn useful features via a Laplacian pyramid.
Further, we develop a bidirectional scale-content similarity mining module to explore features at different scales in a down-to-up and up-to-down manner.
To improve the model performance on real-world images, we propose an online-update learning approach, which uses real-world rainy images to fine-tune the network and update the deraining results in a self-supervised manner.
Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method performs favorably against eleven state-of-the-art methods on five public synthetic datasets and one real-world dataset.

Online-Updated High-Order Collaborative Networks for Single Image Deraining

Data-free knowledge distillation (DFKD) has recently been attracting increasing attention from research communities, attributed to its capability to compress a model only using synthetic data. Despite the encouraging results achieved, state-of-the-art DFKD methods still suffer from the inefficiency of data synthesis, making the data-free training process extremely time-consuming and thus inapplicable for large-scale tasks. In this work, we introduce an efficacious scheme, termed as FastDFKD, that allows us to accelerate DFKD by a factor of orders of magnitude. At the heart of our approach is a novel strategy to reuse the shared common features in training data so as to synthesize different data instances. Unlike prior methods that optimize a set of data independently, we propose to learn a meta-synthesizer that seeks common features as the initialization for the fast data synthesis. As a result, FastDFKD achieves data synthesis within only a few steps,  significantly enhancing the efficiency of data-free training. Experiments over CIFAR, NYUv2, and ImageNet demonstrate that the proposed FastDFKD achieves 10x and even 100x acceleration while preserving  performances on par with state of the art. Code is available at https://github.com/zju-vipa/Fast-Datafree.

Up to 100$\times$ Faster Data-Free Knowledge Distillation

Data in the real world tends to exhibit a long-tailed label distribution, which poses great challenges for the training of neural networks in visual recognition. Existing methods tackle this problem mainly from the perspective of data quantity, i.e., the number of samples in each class. To be specific, they pay more attention to tail classes, like applying larger adjustments to the logit. However, in the training process, the quantity and difficulty of data are two intertwined and equally crucial problems. For some tail classes, the features of their instances are distinct and discriminative, which can also bring satisfactory accuracy; for some head classes, although with sufficient samples, the high semantic similarity with other classes and lack of discriminative features will bring bad accuracy. Based on these observations, we propose Adaptive Logit Adjustment Loss (ALA Loss) to apply an adaptive adjusting term to the logit. The adaptive adjusting term is composed of two complementary factors: 1) quantity factor, which pays more attention to tail classes, and 2) difficulty factor, which adaptively pays more attention to hard instances in the training process. The difficulty factor can alleviate the over-optimization on tail yet easy instances and under-optimization on head yet hard instances. The synergy of the two factors can not only advance the performance on tail classes even further, but also promote the accuracy on head classes. Unlike previous logit adjusting methods that only concerned about data quantity, ALA Loss tackles the long-tailed problem from a more comprehensive, fine-grained and adaptive perspective. Extensive experimental results show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on challenging recognition benchmarks, including ImageNet-LT, iNaturalist 2018, and Places-LT.

Adaptive Logit Adjustment Loss for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition

Few-shot object detection (FSOD) aims to detect objects using only a few examples. How to adapt state-of-the-art object detectors to the few-shot domain remains challenging. Object proposal is a key ingredient in modern object detectors. However, the quality of proposals generated for few-shot classes using existing methods is far worse than that of many-shot classes, e.g., missing boxes for few-shot classes due to misclassification or inaccurate spatial locations with respect to true objects. To address the noisy proposal problem, we propose a novel meta-learning based FSOD model by jointly optimizing the few-shot proposal generation and fine-grained few-shot proposal classification. To improve proposal generation for few-shot classes, we propose to learn a lightweight metric-learning based prototype matching network, instead of the conventional simple linear object/nonobject classifier, e.g., used in RPN. Our non-linear classifier with the feature fusion network could improve the discriminative prototype matching and the proposal recall for few-shot classes. To improve the fine-grained few-shot proposal classification, we propose a novel attentive feature alignment method to address the spatial misalignment between the noisy proposals and few-shot classes, thus improving the performance of few-shot object detection. Meanwhile we learn a separate Faster R-CNN detection head for many-shot base classes and show strong performance of maintaining base-classes knowledge. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple FSOD benchmarks over most of the shots and metrics.

Meta Faster R-CNN: Towards Accurate Few-Shot Object Detection with Attentive Feature Alignment

In order to fully perceive the surrounding environment, many intelligent robots and self-driving cars are equipped with a multi-camera system. Based on this system, the structure-from-motion (SfM) technology is used to realize scene reconstruction, but the fixed relative poses between cameras in the multi-camera system are usually not considered. This paper presents a tailor-made multi-camera based motion averaging system, where the fixed relative poses are utilized to improve the accuracy and robustness of SfM. Our approach starts by dividing the images into reference images and non-reference images, and edges in view-graph are divided into four categories accordingly. Then, a multi-camera based rotating averaging problem is formulated and solved in two stages, where an iterative re-weighted least squares scheme is used to deal with outliers. Finally, a multi-camera based translation averaging problem is formulated and a l1-norm based optimization scheme is proposed to compute the relative translations of multi-camera system and reference camera positions simultaneously. Experiments demonstrate that our algorithm achieves superior accuracy and robustness on various data sets compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

MMA: Multi-Camera Based Global Motion Averaging

We propose a new object-centric framework for learning-based stereo 3D object detection. Previous studies build scene-centric representations that do not consider the significant variation among outdoor instances and thus lack the flexibility and functionalities that an instance-level model can offer. We build such an instance-level model by formulating and tackling a local update problem, i.e., how to predict a refined update given an initial 3D cuboid guess. We demonstrate how solving this problem can complement scene-centric approaches in (i) building a coarse-to-fine multi-resolution system, (ii) performing model-agnostic object location refinement, and (iii) conducting stereo 3D tracking-by-detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI benchmark. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/Nicholasli1995/SNVC.

Stereo Neural Vernier Caliper

Within the field of face recognition (FR), it is widely accepted that the key objective is to optimize the entire feature space in the training process and acquire robust feature representations. However, most real-world FR systems tend to operate at a pre-defined False Accept Rate (FAR), and the corresponding True Accept Rate (TAR) represents the performance of the FR systems, which indicates that the optimization on the pre-defined FAR is more meaningful and important in the practical evaluation process. In this paper, we call the predefined FAR as Anchor FAR, and we argue that the existing FR loss functions cannot guarantee the optimal TAR under the Anchor FAR, which impedes further improvements of FR systems. To this end, we propose AnchorFace to bridge the aforementioned gap between the training and practical evaluation process for FR. Given the Anchor FAR, AnchorFace can boost the performance of FR systems by directly optimizing
the non-differentiable FR evaluation metrics. Specifically, in AnchorFace, we first calculate the similarities of the positive and negative pairs based on both the features of the current batch and the stored features in the maintained online-updating set. Then, we generate the differentiable TAR loss and FAR loss using a soften strategy. Our AnchorFace can be readily integrated into most existing FR loss functions, and extensive experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of AnchorFace.

AnchorFace: Boosting TAR@FAR for Practical Face Recognition

Transfer adversarial attack is a non-trivial black-box adversarial attack that aims to craft adversarial perturbations on the surrogate model and then apply such perturbations to the victim model. However, the transferability of perturbations from existing methods is still limited, since the adversarial perturbations are easily overï¬tting with a single surrogate model and speciï¬c data pattern. In this paper, we propose a Learning to Learn Transferable Attack (LLTA) method, which makes the adversarial perturbations more generalized via learning from both data and model augmentation. For data augmentation, we adopt simple random resizing and padding. For model augmentation, we randomly alter the back propagation instead of the forward propagation to eliminate the effect on the model prediction. By treating the attack of both speciï¬c data and a modiï¬ed model as a task, we expect the adversarial perturbations to adopt enough tasks for generalization. To this end, the meta-learning algorithm is further introduced during the iteration of perturbation generation. Empirical results on the widely-used dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our attack method with a 12.85% higher success rate of transfer attack compared with the state-of-the-art methods. We also evaluate our method on the real-world online system, i.e., Google Cloud Vision API, to further show the practical potentials of our method.

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