Yongqin Xian (Postdoc)

B-cos Networks have been shown to be effective for obtaining highly human
interpretable explanations of model decisions by architecturally enforcing
stronger alignment between inputs and weight. B-cos variants of convolutional
networks (CNNs) and vision transformers (ViTs), which primarily replace linear
layers with B-cos transformations, perform competitively to their respective
standard variants while also yielding explanations that are faithful by design.
However, it has so far been necessary to train these models from scratch, which
is increasingly infeasible in the era of large, pre-trained foundation models.
In this work, inspired by the architectural similarities in standard DNNs and
B-cos networks, we propose 'B-cosification', a novel approach to transform
existing pre-trained models to become inherently interpretable. We perform a
thorough study of design choices to perform this conversion, both for
convolutional neural networks and vision transformers. We find that
B-cosification can yield models that are on par with B-cos models trained from
scratch in terms of interpretability, while often outperforming them in terms
of classification performance at a fraction of the training cost. Subsequently,
we apply B-cosification to a pretrained CLIP model, and show that, even with
limited data and compute cost, we obtain a B-cosified version that is highly
interpretable and competitive on zero shot performance across a variety of
datasets. We release our code and pre-trained model weights at
github.com/shrebox/B-cosification.

In this work, we introduce Scribbles for All, a label and training data
generation algorithm for semantic segmentation trained on scribble labels.
Training or fine-tuning semantic segmentation models with weak supervision has
become an important topic recently and was subject to significant advances in
model quality. In this setting, scribbles are a promising label type to achieve
high quality segmentation results while requiring a much lower annotation
effort than usual pixel-wise dense semantic segmentation annotations. The main
limitation of scribbles as source for weak supervision is the lack of
challenging datasets for scribble segmentation, which hinders the development
of novel methods and conclusive evaluations. To overcome this limitation,
Scribbles for All provides scribble labels for several popular segmentation
datasets and provides an algorithm to automatically generate scribble labels
for any dataset with dense annotations, paving the way for new insights and
model advancements in the field of weakly supervised segmentation. In addition
to providing datasets and algorithm, we evaluate state-of-the-art segmentation
models on our datasets and show that models trained with our synthetic labels
perform competitively with respect to models trained on manual labels. Thus,
our datasets enable state-of-the-art research into methods for scribble-labeled
semantic segmentation. The datasets, scribble generation algorithm, and
baselines are publicly available at github.com/wbkit/Scribbles4All

Low-dimensional embeddings (LDEs) of high-dimensional data are ubiquitous in
science and engineering. They allow us to quickly understand the main
properties of the data, identify outliers and processing errors, and inform the
next steps of data analysis. As such, LDEs have to be faithful to the original
high-dimensional data, i.e., they should represent the relationships that are
encoded in the data, both at a local as well as global scale. The current
generation of LDE approaches focus on reconstructing local distances between
any pair of samples correctly, often out-performing traditional approaches
aiming at all distances. For these approaches, global relationships are,
however, usually strongly distorted, often argued to be an inherent trade-off
between local and global structure learning for embeddings. We suggest a new
perspective on LDE learning, reconstructing angles between data points. We show
that this approach, Mercat, yields good reconstruction across a diverse set of
experiments and metrics, and preserve structures well across all scales.
Compared to existing work, our approach also has a simple formulation,
facilitating future theoretical analysis and algorithmic improvements.

Deep learning is increasingly relevant in our daily lives, as it simplifies tedious tasks and enhances quality of life across various domains such as entertainment, learning, automatic assistance, and autonomous driving. However, the demand for more data to train models for emerging tasks is increasing dramatically. Deep learning models heavily depend on the quality and quantity of data, necessitating high-quality labeled datasets. Yet, each task requires different types of annotations for training and evaluation, posing challenges in obtaining comprehensive supervision. The acquisition of annotations is not only resource-intensive in terms of time and cost but also introduces biases, such as granularity in classification, where distinctions like specific breeds versus generic categories may arise. Furthermore, the dynamic nature of the world causes the challenge that previously annotated data becomes potentially irrelevant, and new categories and rare occurrences continually emerge, making it impossible to label every aspect of the world.
Therefore, this thesis aims to explore various supervision scenarios to mitigate the need for full supervision and reduce data acquisition costs. Specifically, we investigate learning without labels, referred to as self-supervised and unsupervised methods, to better understand video and image representations. To learn from data without labels, we leverage injected priors such as motion speed, direction, action order in videos, or semantic information granularity to obtain powerful data representations. Further, we study scenarios involving reduced supervision levels. To reduce annotation costs, first, we propose to omit precise annotations for one modality in multimodal learning, namely in text-video and image-video settings, and transfer available knowledge to large copora of video data. Second, we study semi-supervised learning scenarios, where only a subset of annotated data alongside unlabeled data is available, and propose to revisit regularization constraints and improve generalization to unlabeled data. Additionally, we address scenarios where parts of available data is inherently limited due to privacy and security reasons or naturally rare events, which not only restrict annotations but also limit the overall data volume. For these scenarios, we propose methods that carefully balance between previously obtained knowledge and incoming limited data by introducing a calibration method or combining a space reservation technique with orthogonality constraints. Finally, we explore multimodal and unimodal open-world scenarios where the model is asked to generalize beyond the given set of object or action classes. Specifically, we propose a new challenging setting on multimodal egocentric videos and propose an adaptation method for vision-language models to generalize on egocentric domain. Moreover, we study unimodal image recognition in an open-set setting and propose to disentangle open-set detection and image classification tasks that effectively improve generalization in different settings.
In summary, this thesis investigates challenges arising when full supervision for training models is not available. We develop methods to understand learning dynamics and the role of biases in data, while also proposing novel setups to advance training with less supervision.

Reasoning over sports videos for question answering is an important task with
numerous applications, such as player training and information retrieval.
However, this task has not been explored due to the lack of relevant datasets
and the challenging nature it presents. Most datasets for video question
answering (VideoQA) focus mainly on general and coarse-grained understanding of
daily-life videos, which is not applicable to sports scenarios requiring
professional action understanding and fine-grained motion analysis. In this
paper, we introduce the first dataset, named Sports-QA, specifically designed
for the sports VideoQA task. The Sports-QA dataset includes various types of
questions, such as descriptions, chronologies, causalities, and counterfactual
conditions, covering multiple sports. Furthermore, to address the
characteristics of the sports VideoQA task, we propose a new Auto-Focus
Transformer (AFT) capable of automatically focusing on particular scales of
temporal information for question answering. We conduct extensive experiments
on Sports-QA, including baseline studies and the evaluation of different
methods. The results demonstrate that our AFT achieves state-of-the-art
performance.

Multiple object tracking in complex scenarios - such as coordinated dance
performances, team sports, or dynamic animal groups - presents unique
challenges. In these settings, objects frequently move in coordinated patterns,
occlude each other, and exhibit long-term dependencies in their trajectories.
However, it remains a key open research question on how to model long-range
dependencies within tracklets, interdependencies among tracklets, and the
associated temporal occlusions. To this end, we introduce Samba, a novel
linear-time set-of-sequences model designed to jointly process multiple
tracklets by synchronizing the multiple selective state-spaces used to model
each tracklet. Samba autoregressively predicts the future track query for each
sequence while maintaining synchronized long-term memory representations across
tracklets. By integrating Samba into a tracking-by-propagation framework, we
propose SambaMOTR, the first tracker effectively addressing the aforementioned
issues, including long-range dependencies, tracklet interdependencies, and
temporal occlusions. Additionally, we introduce an effective technique for
dealing with uncertain observations (MaskObs) and an efficient training recipe
to scale SambaMOTR to longer sequences. By modeling long-range dependencies and
interactions among tracked objects, SambaMOTR implicitly learns to track
objects accurately through occlusions without any hand-crafted heuristics. Our
approach significantly surpasses prior state-of-the-art on the DanceTrack, BFT,
and SportsMOT datasets.

Transformers have become the predominant architecture in foundation models
due to their excellent performance across various domains. However, the
substantial cost of scaling these models remains a significant concern. This
problem arises primarily from their dependence on a fixed number of parameters
within linear projections. When architectural modifications (e.g., channel
dimensions) are introduced, the entire model typically requires retraining from
scratch. As model sizes continue growing, this strategy results in increasingly
high computational costs and becomes unsustainable. To overcome this problem,
we introduce TokenFormer, a natively scalable architecture that leverages the
attention mechanism not only for computations among input tokens but also for
interactions between tokens and model parameters, thereby enhancing
architectural flexibility. By treating model parameters as tokens, we replace
all the linear projections in Transformers with our token-parameter attention
layer, where input tokens act as queries and model parameters as keys and
values. This reformulation allows for progressive and efficient scaling without
necessitating retraining from scratch. Our model scales from 124M to 1.4B
parameters by incrementally adding new key-value parameter pairs, achieving
performance comparable to Transformers trained from scratch while greatly
reducing training costs. Code and models are available at
\url{https://github.com/Haiyang-W/TokenFormer}.

We introduce FaceGPT, a self-supervised learning framework for Large
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to reason about 3D human faces from images and
text. Typical 3D face reconstruction methods are specialized algorithms that
lack semantic reasoning capabilities. FaceGPT overcomes this limitation by
embedding the parameters of a 3D morphable face model (3DMM) into the token
space of a VLM, enabling the generation of 3D faces from both textual and
visual inputs. FaceGPT is trained in a self-supervised manner as a model-based
autoencoder from in-the-wild images. In particular, the hidden state of LLM is
projected into 3DMM parameters and subsequently rendered as 2D face image to
guide the self-supervised learning process via image-based reconstruction.
Without relying on expensive 3D annotations of human faces, FaceGPT obtains a
detailed understanding about 3D human faces, while preserving the capacity to
understand general user instructions. Our experiments demonstrate that FaceGPT
not only achieves high-quality 3D face reconstructions but also retains the
ability for general-purpose visual instruction following. Furthermore, FaceGPT
learns fully self-supervised to generate 3D faces based on complex textual
inputs, which opens a new direction in human face analysis.

Video Large Language Models (Vid-LLMs) have made remarkable advancements in
comprehending video content for QA dialogue. However, they struggle to extend
this visual understanding to tasks requiring precise temporal localization,
known as Video Temporal Grounding (VTG). To address this gap, we introduce
Number-Prompt (NumPro), a novel method that empowers Vid-LLMs to bridge visual
comprehension with temporal grounding by adding unique numerical identifiers to
each video frame. Treating a video as a sequence of numbered frame images,
NumPro transforms VTG into an intuitive process: flipping through manga panels
in sequence. This allows Vid-LLMs to "read" event timelines, accurately linking
visual content with corresponding temporal information. Our experiments
demonstrate that NumPro significantly boosts VTG performance of top-tier
Vid-LLMs without additional computational cost. Furthermore, fine-tuning on a
NumPro-enhanced dataset defines a new state-of-the-art for VTG, surpassing
previous top-performing methods by up to 6.9\% in mIoU for moment retrieval and
8.5\% in mAP for highlight detection. The code will be available at
github.com/yongliang-wu/NumPro.

Deep learning models have proven to be successful in a wide
range of machine learning tasks. Yet, they are often highly sensitive to
perturbations on the input data which can lead to incorrect decisions
with high confidence, hampering their deployment for practical
use-cases. Thus, finding architectures that are (more) robust against
perturbations has received much attention in recent years. Just like the
search for well-performing architectures in terms of clean accuracy,
this usually involves a tedious trial-and-error process with one
additional challenge: the evaluation of a network's robustness is
significantly more expensive than its evaluation for clean accuracy.
Thus, the aim of this paper is to facilitate better streamlined research
on architectural design choices with respect to their impact on
robustness as well as, for example, the evaluation of surrogate measures
for robustness. We therefore borrow one of the most commonly considered
search spaces for neural architecture search for image classification,
NAS-Bench-201, which contains a manageable size of 6466 non-isomorphic
network designs. We evaluate all these networks on a range of common
adversarial attacks and corruption types and introduce a database on
neural architecture design and robustness evaluations. We further
present three exemplary use cases of this dataset, in which we (i)
benchmark robustness measurements based on Jacobian and Hessian matrices
for their robustness predictability, (ii) perform neural architecture
search on robust accuracies, and (iii) provide an initial analysis of
how architectural design choices affect robustness. We find that
carefully crafting the topology of a network can have substantial impact
on its robustness, where networks with the same parameter count range in
mean adversarial robust accuracy from 20%-41%.

Local coherence is essential for long-form text generation models. We identify two important aspects of local coherence within the visual storytelling task: (1) the model needs to represent re-occurrences of characters within the image sequence in order to mention them correctly in the story; (2) character representations should enable us to find instances of the same characters and distinguish different characters. In this paper, we propose a loss function inspired by a linguistic theory of coherence for self-supervised learning for image sequence representations. We further propose combining features from an object and a face detector to construct stronger character features. To evaluate input-output relevance that current reference-based metrics don't measure, we propose a character matching metric to check whether the models generate referring expressions correctly for characters in input image sequences. Experiments on a visual story generation dataset show that our proposed features and loss function are effective for generating more coherent and visually grounded stories.

Human performance capture is a highly important computer vision problem with
many applications in movie production and virtual/augmented reality. Many
previous performance capture approaches either required expensive multi-view
setups or did not recover dense space-time coherent geometry with
frame-to-frame correspondences. We propose a novel deep learning approach for
monocular dense human performance capture. Our method is trained in a weakly
supervised manner based on multi-view supervision completely removing the need
for training data with 3D ground truth annotations. The network architecture is
based on two separate networks that disentangle the task into a pose estimation
and a non-rigid surface deformation step. Extensive qualitative and
quantitative evaluations show that our approach outperforms the state of the
art in terms of quality and robustness. This work is an extended version of
DeepCap where we provide more detailed explanations, comparisons and results as
well as applications.

Minimum cost lifted multicut problem is a generalization of the multicut problem and is a means to optimizing a decomposition of a graph w.r.t. both positive and negative edge costs. Its main advantage is that multicut-based formulations do not require the number of components given a priori; instead, it is deduced from the solution. However, the standard multicut cost function is limited to pairwise relationships between nodes, while several important applications either require or can benefit from a higher-order cost function, i.e. hyper-edges. In this paper, we propose a pseudo-boolean formulation for a multiple model fitting problem. It is based on a formulation of any-order minimum cost lifted multicuts, which allows to partition an undirected graph with pairwise connectivity such as to minimize costs defined over any set of hyper-edges. As the proposed formulation is NP-hard and the branch-and-bound algorithm is too slow in practice, we propose an efficient local search algorithm for inference into resulting problems. We demonstrate versatility and effectiveness of our approach in several applications: geometric multiple model fitting, homography and motion estimation, motion segmentation.

Transformers increasingly dominate the machine learning landscape across many
tasks and domains, which increases the importance for understanding their
outputs. While their attention modules provide partial insight into their inner
workings, the attention scores have been shown to be insufficient for
explaining the models as a whole. To address this, we propose B-cos
transformers, which inherently provide holistic explanations for their
decisions. Specifically, we formulate each model component - such as the
multi-layer perceptrons, attention layers, and the tokenisation module - to be
dynamic linear, which allows us to faithfully summarise the entire transformer
via a single linear transform. We apply our proposed design to Vision
Transformers (ViTs) and show that the resulting models, dubbed Bcos-ViTs, are
highly interpretable and perform competitively to baseline ViTs on ImageNet.
Code will be made available soon.

Zero-shot semantic segmentation (ZS3) aims to segment the novel categories
that have not been seen in the training. Existing works formulate ZS3 as a
pixel-level zero-shot classification problem, and transfer semantic knowledge
from seen classes to unseen ones with the help of language models pre-trained
only with texts. While simple, the pixel-level ZS3 formulation shows the
limited capability to integrate vision-language models that are often
pre-trained with image-text pairs and currently demonstrate great potential for
vision tasks. Inspired by the observation that humans often perform
segment-level semantic labeling, we propose to decouple the ZS3 into two
sub-tasks: 1) a class-agnostic grouping task to group the pixels into segments.
2) a zero-shot classification task on segments. The former sub-task does not
involve category information and can be directly transferred to group pixels
for unseen classes. The latter subtask performs at segment-level and provides a
natural way to leverage large-scale vision-language models pre-trained with
image-text pairs (e.g. CLIP) for ZS3. Based on the decoupling formulation, we
propose a simple and effective zero-shot semantic segmentation model, called
ZegFormer, which outperforms the previous methods on ZS3 standard benchmarks by
large margins, e.g., 35 points on the PASCAL VOC and 3 points on the COCO-Stuff
in terms of mIoU for unseen classes. Code will be released at
github.com/dingjiansw101/ZegFormer.

In this paper, we propose a novel co-learning framework (CoSSL) with
decoupled representation learning and classifier learning for imbalanced SSL.
To handle the data imbalance, we devise Tail-class Feature Enhancement (TFE)
for classifier learning. Furthermore, the current evaluation protocol for
imbalanced SSL focuses only on balanced test sets, which has limited
practicality in real-world scenarios. Therefore, we further conduct a
comprehensive evaluation under various shifted test distributions. In
experiments, we show that our approach outperforms other methods over a large
range of shifted distributions, achieving state-of-the-art performance on
benchmark datasets ranging from CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet, to Food-101. Our
code will be made publicly available.

As acquiring pixel-wise annotations of real-world images for semantic
segmentation is a costly process, a model can instead be trained with more
accessible synthetic data and adapted to real images without requiring their
annotations. This process is studied in unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA).
Even though a large number of methods propose new adaptation strategies, they
are mostly based on outdated network architectures. As the influence of recent
network architectures has not been systematically studied, we first benchmark
different network architectures for UDA and then propose a novel UDA method,
DAFormer, based on the benchmark results. The DAFormer network consists of a
Transformer encoder and a multi-level context-aware feature fusion decoder. It
is enabled by three simple but crucial training strategies to stabilize the
training and to avoid overfitting DAFormer to the source domain: While the Rare
Class Sampling on the source domain improves the quality of pseudo-labels by
mitigating the confirmation bias of self-training towards common classes, the
Thing-Class ImageNet Feature Distance and a learning rate warmup promote
feature transfer from ImageNet pretraining. DAFormer significantly improves the
state-of-the-art performance by 10.8 mIoU for GTA->Cityscapes and 5.4 mIoU for
Synthia->Cityscapes and enables learning even difficult classes such as train,
bus, and truck well. The implementation is available at
github.com/lhoyer/DAFormer.

Although considerable progress has been made in semantic scene understanding
under clear weather, it is still a tough problem under adverse weather
conditions, such as dense fog, due to the uncertainty caused by imperfect
observations. Besides, difficulties in collecting and labeling foggy images
hinder the progress of this field. Considering the success in semantic scene
understanding under clear weather, we think it is reasonable to transfer
knowledge learned from clear images to the foggy domain. As such, the problem
becomes to bridge the domain gap between clear images and foggy images. Unlike
previous methods that mainly focus on closing the domain gap caused by fog --
defogging the foggy images or fogging the clear images, we propose to alleviate
the domain gap by considering fog influence and style variation simultaneously.
The motivation is based on our finding that the style-related gap and the
fog-related gap can be divided and closed respectively, by adding an
intermediate domain. Thus, we propose a new pipeline to cumulatively adapt
style, fog and the dual-factor (style and fog). Specifically, we devise a
unified framework to disentangle the style factor and the fog factor
separately, and then the dual-factor from images in different domains.
Furthermore, we collaborate the disentanglement of three factors with a novel
cumulative loss to thoroughly disentangle these three factors. Our method
achieves the state-of-the-art performance on three benchmarks and shows
generalization ability in rainy and snowy scenes.

Multi-Camera Multi-Object Tracking is currently drawing attention in the
computer vision field due to its superior performance in real-world
applications such as video surveillance with crowded scenes or in vast space.
In this work, we propose a mathematically elegant multi-camera multiple object
tracking approach based on a spatial-temporal lifted multicut formulation. Our
model utilizes state-of-the-art tracklets produced by single-camera trackers as
proposals. As these tracklets may contain ID-Switch errors, we refine them
through a novel pre-clustering obtained from 3D geometry projections. As a
result, we derive a better tracking graph without ID switches and more precise
affinity costs for the data association phase. Tracklets are then matched to
multi-camera trajectories by solving a global lifted multicut formulation that
incorporates short and long-range temporal interactions on tracklets located in
the same camera as well as inter-camera ones. Experimental results on the
WildTrack dataset yield near-perfect result, outperforming state-of-the-art
trackers on Campus while being on par on the PETS-09 dataset. We will make our
implementations available upon acceptance of the paper.

3D human motion capture from monocular RGB images respecting interactions of
a subject with complex and possibly deformable environments is a very
challenging, ill-posed and under-explored problem. Existing methods address it
only weakly and do not model possible surface deformations often occurring when
humans interact with scene surfaces. In contrast, this paper proposes
MoCapDeform, i.e., a new framework for monocular 3D human motion capture that
is the first to explicitly model non-rigid deformations of a 3D scene for
improved 3D human pose estimation and deformable environment reconstruction.
MoCapDeform accepts a monocular RGB video and a 3D scene mesh aligned in the
camera space. It first localises a subject in the input monocular video along
with dense contact labels using a new raycasting based strategy. Next, our
human-environment interaction constraints are leveraged to jointly optimise
global 3D human poses and non-rigid surface deformations. MoCapDeform achieves
superior accuracy than competing methods on several datasets, including our
newly recorded one with deforming background scenes.

The minimum cost multicut problem is the NP-hard/APX-hard combinatorial
optimization problem of partitioning a real-valued edge-weighted graph such as
to minimize the total cost of the partition. While graph convolutional neural
networks (GNN) have proven to be promising in the context of combinatorial
optimization, most of them are only tailored to or tested on positive-valued
edge weights, i.e. they do not comply to the nature of the multicut problem. We
therefore adapt various GNN architectures including Graph Convolutional
Networks, Signed Graph Convolutional Networks and Graph Isomorphic Networks to
facilitate the efficient encoding of real-valued edge costs. Moreover, we
employ a reformulation of the multicut ILP constraints to a polynomial program
as loss function that allows to learn feasible multicut solutions in a scalable
way. Thus, we provide the first approach towards end-to-end trainable
multicuts. Our findings support that GNN approaches can produce good solutions
in practice while providing lower computation times and largely improved
scalability compared to LP solvers and optimized heuristics, especially when
considering large instances.

The Minimum Cost Multicut Problem (MP) is a popular way for obtaining a graph
decomposition by optimizing binary edge labels over edge costs. While the
formulation of a MP from independently estimated costs per edge is highly
flexible and intuitive, solving the MP is NP-hard and time-expensive. As a
remedy, recent work proposed to predict edge probabilities with awareness to
potential conflicts by incorporating cycle constraints in the prediction
process. We argue that such formulation, while providing a first step towards
end-to-end learnable edge weights, is suboptimal, since it is built upon a
loose relaxation of the MP. We therefore propose an adaptive CRF that allows to
progressively consider more violated constraints and, in consequence, to issue
solutions with higher validity. Experiments on the BSDS500 benchmark for
natural image segmentation as well as on electron microscopic recordings show
that our approach yields more precise edge detection and image segmentation.

Planning an optimal route in a complex environment requires efficient
reasoning about the surrounding scene. While human drivers prioritize important
objects and ignore details not relevant to the decision, learning-based
planners typically extract features from dense, high-dimensional grid
representations containing all vehicle and road context information. In this
paper, we propose PlanT, a novel approach for planning in the context of
self-driving that uses a standard transformer architecture. PlanT is based on
imitation learning with a compact object-level input representation. On the
Longest6 benchmark for CARLA, PlanT outperforms all prior methods (matching the
driving score of the expert) while being 5.3x faster than equivalent
pixel-based planning baselines during inference. Combining PlanT with an
off-the-shelf perception module provides a sensor-based driving system that is
more than 10 points better in terms of driving score than the existing state of
the art. Furthermore, we propose an evaluation protocol to quantify the ability
of planners to identify relevant objects, providing insights regarding their
decision-making. Our results indicate that PlanT can focus on the most relevant
object in the scene, even when this object is geometrically distant.

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has shown great promise in leveraging
unlabeled data to improve model performance. While standard SSL assumes uniform
data distribution, we consider a more realistic and challenging setting called
imbalanced SSL, where imbalanced class distributions occur in both labeled and
unlabeled data. Although there are existing endeavors to tackle this challenge,
their performance degenerates when facing severe imbalance since they can not
reduce the class imbalance sufficiently and effectively. In this paper, we
study a simple yet overlooked baseline -- SimiS -- which tackles data imbalance
by simply supplementing labeled data with pseudo-labels, according to the
difference in class distribution from the most frequent class. Such a simple
baseline turns out to be highly effective in reducing class imbalance. It
outperforms existing methods by a significant margin, e.g., 12.8%, 13.6%, and
16.7% over previous SOTA on CIFAR100-LT, FOOD101-LT, and ImageNet127
respectively. The reduced imbalance results in faster convergence and better
pseudo-label accuracy of SimiS. The simplicity of our method also makes it
possible to be combined with other re-balancing techniques to improve the
performance further. Moreover, our method shows great robustness to a wide
range of data distributions, which holds enormous potential in practice. Code
will be publicly available.

Unintentional actions are rare occurrences that are difficult to define
precisely and that are highly dependent on the temporal context of the action.
In this work, we explore such actions and seek to identify the points in videos
where the actions transition from intentional to unintentional. We propose a
multi-stage framework that exploits inherent biases such as motion speed,
motion direction, and order to recognize unintentional actions. To enhance
representations via self-supervised training for the task of unintentional
action recognition we propose temporal transformations, called Temporal
Transformations of Inherent Biases of Unintentional Actions (T2IBUA). The
multi-stage approach models the temporal information on both the level of
individual frames and full clips. These enhanced representations show strong
performance for unintentional action recognition tasks. We provide an extensive
ablation study of our framework and report results that significantly improve
over the state-of-the-art.

Improving model's generalizability against domain shifts is crucial,
especially for safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving.
Real-world domain styles can vary substantially due to environment changes and
sensor noises, but deep models only know the training domain style. Such domain
style gap impedes model generalization on diverse real-world domains. Our
proposed Normalization Perturbation (NP) can effectively overcome this domain
style overfitting problem. We observe that this problem is mainly caused by the
biased distribution of low-level features learned in shallow CNN layers. Thus,
we propose to perturb the channel statistics of source domain features to
synthesize various latent styles, so that the trained deep model can perceive
diverse potential domains and generalizes well even without observations of
target domain data in training. We further explore the style-sensitive channels
for effective style synthesis. Normalization Perturbation only relies on a
single source domain and is surprisingly effective and extremely easy to
implement. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of our method for
generalizing models under real-world domain shifts.

In everyday lives, humans naturally modify the surrounding environment
through interactions, e.g., moving a chair to sit on it. To reproduce such
interactions in virtual spaces (e.g., metaverse), we need to be able to capture
and model them, including changes in the scene geometry, ideally from
ego-centric input alone (head camera and body-worn inertial sensors). This is
an extremely hard problem, especially since the object/scene might not be
visible from the head camera (e.g., a human not looking at a chair while
sitting down, or not looking at the door handle while opening a door). In this
paper, we present HOPS, the first method to capture interactions such as
dragging objects and opening doors from ego-centric data alone. Central to our
method is reasoning about human-object interactions, allowing to track objects
even when they are not visible from the head camera. HOPS localizes and
registers both the human and the dynamic object in a pre-scanned static scene.
HOPS is an important first step towards advanced AR/VR applications based on
immersive virtual universes, and can provide human-centric training data to
teach machines to interact with their surroundings. The supplementary video,
data, and code will be available on our project page at
virtualhumans.mpi-inf.mpg.de/hops/

This paper introduces DGNet, a novel deep framework that exploits object
gradient supervision for camouflaged object detection (COD). It decouples the
task into two connected branches, i.e., a context and a texture encoder. The
essential connection is the gradient-induced transition, representing a soft
grouping between context and texture features. Benefiting from the simple but
efficient framework, DGNet outperforms existing state-of-the-art COD models by
a large margin. Notably, our efficient version, DGNet-S, runs in real-time (80
fps) and achieves comparable results to the cutting-edge model
JCSOD-CVPR$_{21}$ with only 6.82% parameters. Application results also show
that the proposed DGNet performs well in polyp segmentation, defect detection,
and transparent object segmentation tasks. Codes will be made available at
github.com/GewelsJI/DGNet.

In this report, we present the 1st place solution for motion prediction track
in 2022 Waymo Open Dataset Challenges. We propose a novel Motion Transformer
framework for multimodal motion prediction, which introduces a small set of
novel motion query pairs for generating better multimodal future trajectories
by jointly performing the intention localization and iterative motion
refinement. A simple model ensemble strategy with non-maximum-suppression is
adopted to further boost the final performance. Our approach achieves the 1st
place on the motion prediction leaderboard of 2022 Waymo Open Dataset
Challenges, outperforming other methods with remarkable margins. Code will be
available at github.com/sshaoshuai/MTR.

Deep learning is becoming increasingly relevant for many high-stakes applications such as autonomous driving or medical diagnosis where wrong decisions can have massive impact on human lives. Unfortunately, deep neural networks are typically assessed solely based on generalization, e.g., accuracy on a fixed test set. However, this is clearly insufficient for safe deployment as potential malicious actors and distribution shifts or the effects of quantization and unreliable hardware are disregarded. Thus, recent work additionally evaluates performance on potentially manipulated or corrupted inputs as well as after quantization and deployment on specialized hardware. In such settings, it is also important to obtain reasonable estimates of the model's confidence alongside its predictions. This thesis studies robustness and uncertainty estimation in deep learning along three main directions: First, we consider so-called adversarial examples, slightly perturbed inputs causing severe drops in accuracy. Second, we study weight perturbations, focusing particularly on bit errors in quantized weights. This is relevant for deploying models on special-purpose hardware for efficient inference, so-called accelerators. Finally, we address uncertainty estimation to improve robustness and provide meaningful statistical performance guarantees for safe deployment. In detail, we study the existence of adversarial examples with respect to the underlying data manifold. In this context, we also investigate adversarial training which improves robustness by augmenting training with adversarial examples at the cost of reduced accuracy. We show that regular adversarial examples leave the data manifold in an almost orthogonal direction. While we find no inherent trade-off between robustness and accuracy, this contributes to a higher sample complexity as well as severe overfitting of adversarial training. Using a novel measure of flatness in the robust loss landscape with respect to weight changes, we also show that robust overfitting is caused by converging to particularly sharp minima. In fact, we find a clear correlation between flatness and good robust generalization. Further, we study random and adversarial bit errors in quantized weights. In accelerators, random bit errors occur in the memory when reducing voltage with the goal of improving energy-efficiency. Here, we consider a robust quantization scheme, use weight clipping as regularization and perform random bit error training to improve bit error robustness, allowing considerable energy savings without requiring hardware changes. In contrast, adversarial bit errors are maliciously introduced through hardware- or software-based attacks on the memory, with severe consequences on performance. We propose a novel adversarial bit error attack to study this threat and use adversarial bit error training to improve robustness and thereby also the accelerator's security. Finally, we view robustness in the context of uncertainty estimation. By encouraging low-confidence predictions on adversarial examples, our confidence-calibrated adversarial training successfully rejects adversarial, corrupted as well as out-of-distribution examples at test time. Thereby, we are also able to improve the robustness-accuracy trade-off compared to regular adversarial training. However, even robust models do not provide any guarantee for safe deployment. To address this problem, conformal prediction allows the model to predict confidence sets with user-specified guarantee of including the true label. Unfortunately, as conformal prediction is usually applied after training, the model is trained without taking this calibration step into account. To address this limitation, we propose conformal training which allows training conformal predictors end-to-end with the underlying model. This not only improves the obtained uncertainty estimates but also enables optimizing application-specific objectives without losing the provided guarantee. Besides our work on robustness or uncertainty, we also address the problem of 3D shape completion of partially observed point clouds. Specifically, we consider an autonomous driving or robotics setting where vehicles are commonly equipped with LiDAR or depth sensors and obtaining a complete 3D representation of the environment is crucial. However, ground truth shapes that are essential for applying deep learning techniques are extremely difficult to obtain. Thus, we propose a weakly-supervised approach that can be trained on the incomplete point clouds while offering efficient inference. In summary, this thesis contributes to our understanding of robustness against both input and weight perturbations. To this end, we also develop methods to improve robustness alongside uncertainty estimation for safe deployment of deep learning methods in high-stakes applications. In the particular context of autonomous driving, we also address 3D shape completion of sparse point clouds.

Structured prediction problems are one of the fundamental tools in machine
learning. In order to facilitate algorithm development for their numerical
solution, we collect in one place a large number of datasets in easy to read
formats for a diverse set of problem classes. We provide archival links to
datasets, description of the considered problems and problem formats, and a
short summary of problem characteristics including size, number of instances
etc. For reference we also give a non-exhaustive selection of algorithms
proposed in the literature for their solution. We hope that this central
repository will make benchmarking and comparison to established works easier.
We welcome submission of interesting new datasets and algorithms for inclusion
in our archive.

Modern deep learning architecture utilize batch normalization (BN) to
stabilize training and improve accuracy. It has been shown that the BN layers
alone are surprisingly expressive. In the context of robustness against
adversarial examples, however, BN is argued to increase vulnerability. That is,
BN helps to learn fragile features. Nevertheless, BN is still used in
adversarial training, which is the de-facto standard to learn robust features.
In order to shed light on the role of BN in adversarial training, we
investigate to what extent the expressiveness of BN can be used to robustify
fragile features in comparison to random features. On CIFAR10, we find that
adversarially fine-tuning just the BN layers can result in non-trivial
adversarial robustness. Adversarially training only the BN layers from scratch,
in contrast, is not able to convey meaningful adversarial robustness. Our
results indicate that fragile features can be used to learn models with
moderate adversarial robustness, while random features cannot

Current efficient LiDAR-based detection frameworks are lacking in exploiting
object relations, which naturally present in both spatial and temporal manners.
To this end, we introduce a simple, efficient, and effective two-stage
detector, termed as Ret3D. At the core of Ret3D is the utilization of novel
intra-frame and inter-frame relation modules to capture the spatial and
temporal relations accordingly. More Specifically, intra-frame relation module
(IntraRM) encapsulates the intra-frame objects into a sparse graph and thus
allows us to refine the object features through efficient message passing. On
the other hand, inter-frame relation module (InterRM) densely connects each
object in its corresponding tracked sequences dynamically, and leverages such
temporal information to further enhance its representations efficiently through
a lightweight transformer network. We instantiate our novel designs of IntraRM
and InterRM with general center-based or anchor-based detectors and evaluate
them on Waymo Open Dataset (WOD). With negligible extra overhead, Ret3D
achieves the state-of-the-art performance, being 5.5% and 3.2% higher than the
recent competitor in terms of the LEVEL 1 and LEVEL 2 mAPH metrics on vehicle
detection, respectively.

We present TOCH, a method for refining incorrect 3D hand-object interaction
sequences using a data prior. Existing hand trackers, especially those that
rely on very few cameras, often produce visually unrealistic results with
hand-object intersection or missing contacts. Although correcting such errors
requires reasoning about temporal aspects of interaction, most previous work
focus on static grasps and contacts. The core of our method are TOCH fields, a
novel spatio-temporal representation for modeling correspondences between hands
and objects during interaction. The key component is a point-wise
object-centric representation which encodes the hand position relative to the
object. Leveraging this novel representation, we learn a latent manifold of
plausible TOCH fields with a temporal denoising auto-encoder. Experiments
demonstrate that TOCH outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) 3D hand-object
interaction models, which are limited to static grasps and contacts. More
importantly, our method produces smooth interactions even before and after
contact. Using a single trained TOCH model, we quantitatively and qualitatively
demonstrate its usefulness for 1) correcting erroneous reconstruction results
from off-the-shelf RGB/RGB-D hand-object reconstruction methods, 2) de-noising,
and 3) grasp transfer across objects. We will release our code and trained
model on our project page at virtualhumans.mpi-inf.mpg.de/toch/

Skeleton-based action recognition aims to predict human actions given human
joint coordinates with skeletal interconnections. To model such off-grid data
points and their co-occurrences, Transformer-based formulations would be a
natural choice. However, Transformers still lag behind state-of-the-art methods
using graph convolutional networks (GCNs). Transformers assume that the input
is permutation-invariant and homogeneous (partially alleviated by positional
encoding), which ignores an important characteristic of skeleton data, i.e.,
bone connectivity. Furthermore, each type of body joint has a clear physical
meaning in human motion, i.e., motion retains an intrinsic relationship
regardless of the joint coordinates, which is not explored in Transformers. In
fact, certain re-occurring groups of body joints are often involved in specific
actions, such as the subconscious hand movement for keeping balance. Vanilla
attention is incapable of describing such underlying relations that are
persistent and beyond pair-wise. In this work, we aim to exploit these unique
aspects of skeleton data to close the performance gap between Transformers and
GCNs. Specifically, we propose a new self-attention (SA) extension, named
Hypergraph Self-Attention (HyperSA), to incorporate inherently higher-order
relations into the model. The K-hop relative positional embeddings are also
employed to take bone connectivity into account. We name the resulting model
Hyperformer, and it achieves comparable or better performance w.r.t. accuracy
and efficiency than state-of-the-art GCN architectures on NTU RGB+D, NTU RGB+D
120, and Northwestern-UCLA datasets. On the largest NTU RGB+D 120 dataset, the
significantly improved performance reached by our Hyperformer demonstrates the
underestimated potential of Transformer models in this field.