Though remarkable progress has been achieved in various vision tasks, deep neural networks still suffer obvious performance degradation when tested in out-ofdistribution scenarios. We argue that the feature statistics (mean and standard deviation), which carry the domain characteristics of the training data, can be properly manipulated to improve the generalization ability of deep learning models. Common methods often consider the feature statistics as deterministic values measured from the learned features and do not explicitly consider the uncertain statistics discrepancy caused by potential domain shifts during testing. In this paper, we improve the network generalization ability by modeling the uncertainty of domain shifts with synthesized feature statistics during training. Specifically, we hypothesize that the feature statistic, after considering the potential uncertainties, follows a multivariate Gaussian distribution. Hence, each feature statistic is no longer a deterministic value, but a probabilistic point with diverse distribution possibilities. With the uncertain feature statistics, the models can be trained to alleviate the domain perturbations and achieve better robustness against potential domain shifts. Our method can be readily integrated into networks without additional parameters. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method consistently improves the network generalization ability on multiple vision tasks, including image classification, semantic segmentation, and instance retrieval. The code will be released soon at https://github.com/lixiaotong97/DSU.
Vehicle Re-Identification (ReID) has attracted lots of research efforts due to its great significance to the public security. In vehicle ReID, we aim to learn features that are powerful in discriminating subtle differences between vehicles which are visually similar, and also robust against different orientations of the same vehicle. However, these two characteristics are hard to be encapsulated into a single feature representation simultaneously with unified supervision. Here we propose a Disentangled Feature Learning Network (DFLNet) to learn orientation specific and common features concurrently, which are discriminative at details and invariant to orientations, respectively. Moreover, to effectively use these two types of features for ReID, we further design a feature metric alignment scheme to ensure the consistency of the metric scales. The experiments show the effectiveness of our method that achieves state-of-the-art performance on three challenging datasets.
Cross-domain person re-identification (re-ID), such as unsupervised domain adaptive re-ID (UDA re-ID), aims to transfer the identity-discriminative knowledge from the source to the target domain. Existing methods commonly consider the source and target domains are isolated from each other, i.e., no intermediate status is modeled between the source and target domains. Directly transferring the knowledge between two isolated domains can be very difficult, especially when the domain gap is large. This paper, from a novel perspective, assumes these two domains are not completely isolated, but can be connected through a series of intermediate domains. Instead of directly aligning the source and target domains against each other, we propose to align the source and target domains against their intermediate domains so as to facilitate a smooth knowledge transfer. To discover and utilize these intermediate domains, this paper proposes an Intermediate Domain Module (IDM) and a Mirrors Generation Module (MGM). IDM has two functions: 1) it generates multiple intermediate domains by mixing the hidden-layer features from source and target domains and 2) it dynamically reduces the domain gap between the source / target domain features and the intermediate domain features. While IDM achieves good domain alignment effect, it introduces a side effect, i.e., the mix-up operation may mix the identities into a new identity and lose the original identities. Accordingly, MGM is introduced to compensate the loss of the original identity by mapping the features into the IDM-generated intermediate domains without changing their original identity. It allows to focus on minimizing domain variations to further promote the alignment between the source / target domain and intermediate domains, which reinforces IDM into IDM++. We extensively evaluate our method under both the UDA and domain generalization (DG) scenarios and observe that IDM++ yields consistent (and usually significant) performance improvement for cross-domain re-ID, achieving new state of the art. For example, on the challenging MSMT17 benchmark, IDM++ surpasses the prior state of the art by a large margin (e.g., up to 9.9% and 7.8% rank-1 accuracy) for UDA and DG scenarios, respectively. Code will be publicly available.
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