Unleash the Power of Local Representations for Few-Shot Classification

Generalizing to novel classes unseen during training is a key challenge of few-shot classification. Recent metric-based methods try to address this by local representations. However, they are unable to take full advantage of them due to (i) improper supervision for pretraining the feature extractor, and (ii) lack of adaptability in the metric for handling various possible compositions of local feature sets. In this work, we unleash the power of local representations in improving novel-class generalization. For the feature extractor, we design a novel pretraining paradigm that learns randomly cropped patches by soft labels. It utilizes the class-level diversity of patches while diminishing the impact of their semantic misalignments to hard labels. To align network output with soft labels, we also propose a UniCon KL-Divergence that emphasizes the equal contribution of each base class in describing "non-base" patches. For the metric, we formulate measuring local feature sets as an entropy-regularized optimal transport problem to introduce the ability to handle sets consisting of homogeneous elements. Furthermore, we design a Modulate Module to endow the metric with the necessary adaptability. Our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on three popular benchmarks. Moreover, it exceeds state-of-the-art transductive and cross-modal methods in the fine-grained scenario.

Towards Fair and Comprehensive Comparisons for Image-Based 3D Object Detection

In this work, we build a modular-designed codebase, formulate strong training recipes, design an error diagnosis toolbox, and discuss current methods for image-based 3D object detection. In particular, different from other highly mature tasks, e.g., 2D object detection, the community of image-based 3D object detection is still evolving, where methods often adopt different training recipes and tricks resulting in unfair evaluations and comparisons. What is worse, these tricks may overwhelm their proposed designs in performance, even leading to wrong conclusions. To address this issue, we build a module-designed codebase and formulate unified training standards for the community. Furthermore, we also design an error diagnosis toolbox to measure the detailed characterization of detection models. Using these tools, we analyze current methods in-depth under varying settings and provide discussions for some open questions, e.g., discrepancies in conclusions on KITTI-3D and nuScenes datasets, which have led to different dominant methods for these datasets. We hope that this work will facilitate future research in image-based 3D object detection. Our codes will be released at \url{https://github.com/OpenGVLab/3dodi}

Rethinking Pseudo-LiDAR Representation

The recently proposed pseudo-LiDAR based 3D detectors greatly improve the benchmark of monocular/stereo 3D detection task. However, the underlying mechanism remains obscure to the research community. In this paper, we perform an in-depth investigation and observe that the efficacy of pseudo-LiDAR representation comes from the coordinate transformation, instead of data representation itself. Based on this observation, we design an image based CNN detector named Patch-Net, which is more generalized and can be instantiated as pseudo-LiDAR based 3D detectors. Moreover, the pseudo-LiDAR data in our PatchNet is organized as the image representation, which means existing 2D CNN designs can be easily utilized for extracting deep features from input data and boosting 3D detection performance. We conduct extensive experiments on the challenging KITTI dataset, where the proposed PatchNet outperforms all existing pseudo-LiDAR based counterparts. Code has been made available at: https://github.com/xinzhuma/patchnet.