Weakly-supervised object localization aims to indicate the category as well as the scope of an object in an image given only the image-level labels. Most of the existing works are based on Class Activation Mapping (CAM) and endeavor to enlarge the discriminative area inside the activation map to perceive the whole object, yet ignore the co-occurrence confounder of the object and context (e.g., fish and water), which makes the model inspection hard to distinguish object boundaries. Besides, the use of CAM also brings a dilemma problem that the classification and localization always suffer from a performance gap and can not reach their highest accuracy simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a casual knowledge distillation method, dubbed KD-CI-CAM, to address these two under-explored issues in one go. More specifically, we tackle the co-occurrence context confounder problem via causal intervention (CI), which explores the causalities among image features, contexts, and categories to eliminate the biased object-context entanglement in the class activation maps. Based on the de-biased object feature, we additionally propose a multi-teacher causal distillation framework to balance the absorption of classification knowledge and localization knowledge during model training. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of KD-CI-CAM in learning clear object boundaries from confounding contexts and addressing the dilemma problem between classification and localization performance.

In the scenario of black-box adversarial attack, the target model's parameters are unknown, and the attacker aims to find a successful adversarial perturbation based on query feedback under a query budget. Due to the limited feedback information, existing query-based black-box attack methods often require many queries for attacking each benign example. To reduce query cost, we propose to utilize the feedback information across historical attacks, dubbed example-level adversarial transferability. Specifically, by treating the attack on each benign example as one task, we develop a meta-learning framework by training a meta-generator to produce perturbations conditioned on benign examples. When attacking a new benign example, the meta generator can be quickly fine-tuned based on the feedback information of the new task as well as a few historical attacks to produce effective perturbations. Moreover, since the meta-train procedure consumes many queries to learn a generalizable generator, we utilize model-level adversarial transferability to train the meta-generator on a white-box surrogate model, then transfer it to help the attack against the target model. The proposed framework with the two types of adversarial transferability can be naturally combined with any off-the-shelf query-based attack methods to boost their performance, which is verified by extensive experiments.

This paper as technology report is focusing on evaluation and performance about depth estimations based on lidar data and stereo images(front left and front right). The lidar 3d cloud data and stereo images are provided by ford. In addition, this paper also will explain some details about optimization for depth estimation performance. And some reasons why not use machine learning to do depth estimation, replaced by pure mathmatics to do stereo depth estimation. The structure of this paper is made of by following:(1) Performance: to discuss and evaluate about depth maps created from stereo images and 3D cloud points, and relationships analysis for alignment and errors;(2) Depth estimation by stereo images: to explain the methods about how to use stereo images to estimate depth;(3)Depth estimation by lidar: to explain the methods about how to use 3d cloud datas to estimate depth;In summary, this report is mainly to show the performance of depth maps and their approaches, analysis for them.

Lane detection is a long-standing task and a basic module in autonomous driving. The task is to detect the lane of the current driving road, and provide relevant information such as the ID, direction, curvature, width, length, with visualization. Our work is based on CNN backbone DLA-34, along with Affinity Fields, aims to achieve robust detection of various lanes without assuming the number of lanes. Besides, we investigate novel decoding methods to achieve more efficient lane detection algorithm.

Group sparse representation has shown promising results in image debulrring and image inpainting in GSR [3] , the main reason that lead to the success is by exploiting Sparsity and Nonlocal self-similarity (NSS) between patches on natural images, and solve a regularized optimization problem. However, directly adapting GSR[3] in image denoising yield very unstable and non-satisfactory results, to overcome these issues, this paper proposes a progressive image denoising algorithm that successfully adapt GSR [3] model and experiments shows the superior performance than some of the state-of-the-art methods.

Level 5 Autonomous Driving, a technology that a fully automated vehicle (AV) requires no human intervention, has raised serious concerns on safety and stability before widespread use. The capability of understanding and predicting future motion trajectory of road objects can help AV plan a path that is safe and easy to control. In this paper, we propose a network architecture that parallelizes multiple convolutional neural network backbones and fuses features to make multi-mode trajectory prediction. In the 2020 ICRA Nuscene Prediction challenge, our model ranks 15th on the leaderboard across all teams.

Causal inference is the process of using assumptions, study designs, and estimation strategies to draw conclusions about the causal relationships between variables based on data. This allows researchers to better understand the underlying mechanisms at work in complex systems and make more informed decisions. In many settings, we may not fully observe all the confounders that affect both the treatment and outcome variables, complicating the estimation of causal effects. To address this problem, a growing literature in both causal inference and machine learning proposes to use Instrumental Variables (IV). This paper serves as the first effort to systematically and comprehensively introduce and discuss the IV methods and their applications in both causal inference and machine learning. First, we provide the formal definition of IVs and discuss the identification problem of IV regression methods under different assumptions. Second, we categorize the existing work on IV methods into three streams according to the focus on the proposed methods, including two-stage least squares with IVs, control function with IVs, and evaluation of IVs. For each stream, we present both the classical causal inference methods, and recent developments in the machine learning literature. Then, we introduce a variety of applications of IV methods in real-world scenarios and provide a summary of the available datasets and algorithms. Finally, we summarize the literature, discuss the open problems and suggest promising future research directions for IV methods and their applications. We also develop a toolkit of IVs methods reviewed in this survey at https://github.com/causal-machine-learning-lab/mliv.

The success of deep learning is partly attributed to the availability of massive data downloaded freely from the Internet. However, it also means that users' private data may be collected by commercial organizations without consent and used to train their models. Therefore, it's important and necessary to develop a method or tool to prevent unauthorized data exploitation. In this paper, we propose ConfounderGAN, a generative adversarial network (GAN) that can make personal image data unlearnable to protect the data privacy of its owners. Specifically, the noise produced by the generator for each image has the confounder property. It can build spurious correlations between images and labels, so that the model cannot learn the correct mapping from images to labels in this noise-added dataset. Meanwhile, the discriminator is used to ensure that the generated noise is small and imperceptible, thereby remaining the normal utility of the encrypted image for humans. The experiments are conducted in six image classification datasets, consisting of three natural object datasets and three medical datasets. The results demonstrate that our method not only outperforms state-of-the-art methods in standard settings, but can also be applied to fast encryption scenarios. Moreover, we show a series of transferability and stability experiments to further illustrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method.

Graph neural networks have achieved significant success in representation learning. However, the performance gains come at a cost; acquiring comprehensive labeled data for training can be prohibitively expensive. Active learning mitigates this issue by searching the unexplored data space and prioritizing the selection of data to maximize model's performance gain. In this paper, we propose a novel method SMARTQUERY, a framework to learn a graph neural network with very few labeled nodes using a hybrid uncertainty reduction function. This is achieved using two key steps: (a) design a multi-stage active graph learning framework by exploiting diverse explicit graph information and (b) introduce label propagation to efficiently exploit known labels to assess the implicit embedding information. Using a comprehensive set of experiments on three network datasets, we demonstrate the competitive performance of our method against state-of-the-arts on very few labeled data (up to 5 labeled nodes per class).

Data uncertainty is commonly observed in the images for face recognition (FR). However, deep learning algorithms often make predictions with high confidence even for uncertain or irrelevant inputs. Intuitively, FR algorithms can benefit from both the estimation of uncertainty and the detection of out-of-distribution (OOD) samples. Taking a probabilistic view of the current classification model, the temperature scalar is exactly the scale of uncertainty noise implicitly added in the softmax function. Meanwhile, the uncertainty of images in a dataset should follow a prior distribution. Based on the observation, a unified framework for uncertainty modeling and FR, Random Temperature Scaling (RTS), is proposed to learn a reliable FR algorithm. The benefits of RTS are two-fold. (1) In the training phase, it can adjust the learning strength of clean and noisy samples for stability and accuracy. (2) In the test phase, it can provide a score of confidence to detect uncertain, low-quality and even OOD samples, without training on extra labels. Extensive experiments on FR benchmarks demonstrate that the magnitude of variance in RTS, which serves as an OOD detection metric, is closely related to the uncertainty of the input image. RTS can achieve top performance on both the FR and OOD detection tasks. Moreover, the model trained with RTS can perform robustly on datasets with noise. The proposed module is light-weight and only adds negligible computation cost to the model.