The superiority of deeply learned pedestrian representations has been reported in very recent literature of person re-identification (re-ID). In this article, we consider the more pragmatic issue of learning a deep feature with no or only a few labels. We propose a progressive unsupervised learning (PUL) method to transfer pretrained deep representations to unseen domains. Our method is easy to implement and can be viewed as an effective baseline for unsupervised re-ID feature learning. Specifically, PUL iterates between (1) pedestrian clustering and (2) fine-tuning of the convolutional neural network (CNN) to improve the initialization model trained on the irrelevant labeled dataset. Since the clustering results can be very noisy, we add a selection operation between the clustering and fine-tuning. At the beginning, when the model is weak, CNN is fine-tuned on a small amount of reliable examples that locate near to cluster centroids in the feature space. As the model becomes stronger, in subsequent iterations, more images are being adaptively selected as CNN training samples. Progressively, pedestrian clustering and the CNN model are improved simultaneously until algorithm convergence. This process is naturally formulated as self-paced learning. We then point out promising directions that may lead to further improvement. Extensive experiments on three large-scale re-ID datasets demonstrate that PUL outputs discriminative features that improve the re-ID accuracy. Our code has been released at https://github.com/hehefan/Unsupervised-Person-Re-identification-Clustering-and-Fine-tuning.

We aim to significantly reduce the computational cost for classification of temporally untrimmed videos while retaining similar accuracy. Existing video classification methods sample frames with a predefined frequency over entire video. Differently, we propose an end-to-end deep reinforcement approach which enables an agent to classify videos by watching a very small portion of frames like what we do. We make two main contributions. First, information is not equally distributed in video frames along time. An agent needs to watch more carefully when a clip is informative and skip the frames if they are redundant or irrelevant. The proposed approach enables the agent to adapt sampling rate to video content and skip most of the frames without the loss of information. Second, in order to have a confident decision, the number of frames that should be watched by an agent varies greatly from one video to another. We incorporate an adaptive stop network to measure confidence score and generate timely trigger to stop the agent watching videos, which improves efficiency without loss of accuracy. Our approach reduces the computational cost significantly for the large-scale YouTube-8M dataset, while the accuracy remains the same.

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Due to domain bias, directly deploying a deep person re-identification (re-ID) model trained on one dataset often achieves considerably poor accuracy on another dataset. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Exploration (AE) method to address the domain-shift problem for re-ID in an unsupervised manner. Specifically, with supervised training on the source dataset, in the target domain, the re-ID model is inducted to 1) maximize distances between all person images and 2) minimize distances between similar person images. In the first case, by treating each person image as an individual class, a non-parametric classifier with a feature memory is exploited to encourage person images to move away from each other. In the second case, according to a similarity threshold, our method adaptively selects neighborhoods in the feature space for each person image. By treating these similar person images as the same class, the non-parametric classifier forces them to stay closer. However, a problem of adaptive selection is that, when an image has too many neighborhoods, it is more likely to attract other images as its neighborhoods. As a result, a minority of images may select a large number of neighborhoods while a majority of images has only a few neighborhoods. To address this issue, we additionally integrate a balance strategy into the adaptive selection. Extensive experiments on large-scale re-ID datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our code has been released at https://github.com/dyh127/ Adaptive-Exploration-for-Unsupervised-Person-Re-Identification.

Open set domain adaptation aims to diminish the domain shift across domains, with partially shared classes. There exist unknown target samples out of the knowledge of source domain. Compared to the close set setting, how to separate the unknown (unshared) class from the known (shared) ones plays a key role. Whereas, previous methods did not emphasize the semantic structure of the open set data, which may introduce bias into the domain alignment and confuse the classifier around the decision boundary. In this paper, we exploit the semantic structure of open set data from two aspects: 1) Semantic Categorical Alignment, which aims to achieve good separability of target known classes by categorically aligning the centroid of target with the source. 2) Semantic Contrastive Mapping, which aims to push the unknown class away from the decision boundary. Empirically, we demonstrate that our method performs favourably against the state-of-the-art methods on representative benchmarks, e.g. Digit datasets and Office-31 datasets.

Predicting future frames in videos has become a promising direction of research for both computer vision and robot learning communities. The core of this problem involves moving object capture and future motion prediction. While object capture specifies which objects are moving in videos, motion prediction describes their future dynamics. Motivated by this analysis, we propose a Cubic Long Short-Term Memory (Cu-bicLSTM) unit for video prediction. CubicLSTM consists of three branches, i.e., a spatial branch for capturing moving objects, a temporal branch for processing motions, and an output branch for combining the first two branches to generate predicted frames. Stacking multiple CubicLSTM units along the spatial branch and output branch, and then evolving along the temporal branch can form a cubic recurrent neural network (CubicRNN). Experiment shows that CubicRNN produces more accurate video predictions than prior methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

Image captioning, a challenging task where the machine automatically describes an image by sentences, has drawn significant attention in recent years. Despite the remarkable improvements of recent approaches, however, these methods are built upon a large set of training image-sentence pairs. The expensive labor efforts hence limit the captioning model to describe the wider world. In this paper, we present a novel network structure, Cascaded Revision Network, which aims at relieving the problem by equipping the model with outof-domain knowledge. CRN first tries its best to describe an image using the existing vocabulary from in-domain knowledge. Due to the lack of out-of-domain knowledge, the caption may be inaccurate or include ambiguous words for the image with unknown (novel) objects. We propose to re-edit the primary captioning sentence by a series of cascaded operations. We introduce a perplexity predictor to find out which words are most likely to be inaccurate given the input image. Thereafter, we utilize external knowledge from a pre-trained object detection model and select more accurate words from detection results by the visual matching module. In the last step, we design a semantic matching module to ensure that the novel object is fit in the right position. By this novel cascaded captioning-revising mechanism, CRN can accurately describe images with unseen objects. We validate the proposed method with state-of-the-art performance on the held-out MSCOCO dataset as well as scale to ImageNet, demonstrating the effectiveness of this method.

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