Papers

Best Paper

GIRAFFE: Representing Scenes As Compositional Generative Neural Feature Fields Michael Niemeyer, Andreas Geiger; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021, pp. 11453-11464 Abstract Deep generative models allow for photorealistic image synthesis at high resolutions. But for many applications, this is not enough: content creation also needs to be controllable. While several recent works investigate how to disentangle underlying factors of variation in the data, most of them operate in 2D and hence ignore that our world is three-dimensional. Further, only few works consider the compositional nature of scenes. Our key hypothesis is that incorporating a compositional 3D scene representation into the generative model leads to more controllable image synthesis. Representing scenes as compositional generative neural feature fields allows us to disentangle one or multiple objects from the background as well as individual objects' shapes and appearances while learning from unstructured and unposed image collections without any additional supervision. Combining this scene representation with a neural rendering pipeline yields a fast and realistic image synthesis model. As evidenced by our experiments, our model is able to disentangle individual objects and allows for translating and rotating them in the scene as well as changing the camera pose. Related Material [pdf]

Best Student Paper

Task Programming: Learning Data Efficient Behavior Representations Jennifer J. Sun, Ann Kennedy, Eric Zhan, David J. Anderson, Yisong Yue, Pietro Perona; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021, pp. 2876-2885 Abstract Specialized domain knowledge is often necessary to accurately annotate training sets for in-depth analysis, but can be burdensome and time-consuming to acquire from domain experts. This issue arises prominently in automated behavior analysis, in which agent movements or actions of interest are detected from video tracking data. To reduce annotation effort, we present TREBA: a method to learn annotation-sample efficient trajectory embedding for behavior analysis, based on multi-task self-supervised learning. The tasks in our method can be efficiently engineered by domain experts through a process we call "task programming", which uses programs to explicitly encode structured knowledge from domain experts. Total domain expert effort can be reduced by exchanging data annotation time for the construction of a small number of programmed tasks. We evaluate this trade-off using data from behavioral neuroscience, in which specialized domain knowledge is used to identify behaviors. We present experimental results in three datasets across two domains: mice and fruit flies. Using embeddings from TREBA, we reduce annotation burden by up to a factor of 10 without compromising accuracy compared to state-of-the-art features. Our results thus suggest that task programming and self-supervision can be an effective way to reduce annotation effort for domain experts. Related Material [pdf]

Best Student Honorable Mention

Less Is More: ClipBERT for Video-and-Language Learning via Sparse Sampling Jie Lei, Linjie Li, Luowei Zhou, Zhe Gan, Tamara L. Berg, Mohit Bansal, Jingjing Liu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021, pp. 7331-7341 Abstract The canonical approach to video-and-language learning (e.g., video question answering) dictates a neural model to learn from offline-extracted dense video features from vision models and text features from language models. These feature extractors are trained independently and usually on tasks different from the target domains, rendering these fixed features sub-optimal for downstream tasks. Moreover, due to the high computational overload of dense video features, it is often difficult (or infeasible) to plug feature extractors directly into existing approaches for easy finetuning. To provide a remedy to this dilemma, we propose a generic framework CLIPBERT that enables affordable end-to-end learning for video-and-language tasks, by employing sparse sampling, where only a single or a few sparsely sampled short clips from a video are used at each training step. Experiments on text-to-video retrieval and video question answering on six datasets demonstrate that CLIPBERT outperforms (or is on par with) existing methods that exploit full-length videos, suggesting that end-to-end learning with just a few sparsely sampled clips is often more accurate than using densely extracted offline features from full-length videos, proving the proverbial less-is-more principle. Videos in the datasets are from considerably different domains and lengths, ranging from 3-second generic-domain GIF videos to 180-second YouTube human activity videos, showing the generalization ability of our approach. Comprehensive ablation studies and thorough analyses are provided to dissect what factors lead to this success. Related Material [pdf]