Yixuan Wei

Bio: Yixuan Wei is an academic researcher from Microsoft. The author has contributed to research in topics: Computer science & Transformer (machine learning model). The author has an hindex of 6, co-authored 10 publications receiving 643 citations. Previous affiliations of Yixuan Wei include Tsinghua University.

Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows.

Abstract: This paper presents a new vision Transformer, called Swin Transformer, that capably serves as a general-purpose backbone for computer vision. Challenges in adapting Transformer from language to vision arise from differences between the two domains, such as large variations in the scale of visual entities and the high resolution of pixels in images compared to words in text. To address these differences, we propose a hierarchical Transformer whose representation is computed with shifted windows. The shifted windowing scheme brings greater efficiency by limiting self-attention computation to non-overlapping local windows while also allowing for cross-window connection. This hierarchical architecture has the flexibility to model at various scales and has linear computational complexity with respect to image size. These qualities of Swin Transformer make it compatible with a broad range of vision tasks, including image classification (86.4 top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K) and dense prediction tasks such as object detection (58.7 box AP and 51.1 mask AP on COCO test-dev) and semantic segmentation (53.5 mIoU on ADE20K val). Its performance surpasses the previous state-of-the-art by a large margin of +2.7 box AP and +2.6 mask AP on COCO, and +3.2 mIoU on ADE20K, demonstrating the potential of Transformer-based models as vision backbones. The code and models will be made publicly available at~\url{this https URL}.

DeepHuman: 3D Human Reconstruction From a Single Image

Abstract: We propose DeepHuman, an image-guided volume-to-volume translation CNN for 3D human reconstruction from a single RGB image. To reduce the ambiguities associated with the reconstruction of invisible areas, our method leverages a dense semantic representation generated from SMPL model as an additional input. One key feature of our network is that it fuses different scales of image features into the 3D space through volumetric feature transformation, which helps to recover accurate surface geometry. The surface details are further refined through a normal refinement network, which can be concatenated with the volume generation network using our proposed volumetric normal projection layer. We also contribute THuman, a 3D real-world human model dataset containing approximately 7000 models. The network is trained using training data generated from the dataset. Overall, due to the specific design of our network and the diversity in our dataset, our method enables 3D human model estimation given only a single image and outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.

DeepHuman: 3D Human Reconstruction from a Single Image

Abstract: We propose DeepHuman, an image-guided volume-to-volume translation CNN for 3D human reconstruction from a single RGB image. To reduce the ambiguities associated with the surface geometry reconstruction, even for the reconstruction of invisible areas, we propose and leverage a dense semantic representation generated from SMPL model as an additional input. One key feature of our network is that it fuses different scales of image features into the 3D space through volumetric feature transformation, which helps to recover accurate surface geometry. The visible surface details are further refined through a normal refinement network, which can be concatenated with the volume generation network using our proposed volumetric normal projection layer. We also contribute THuman, a 3D real-world human model dataset containing about 7000 models. The network is trained using training data generated from the dataset. Overall, due to the specific design of our network and the diversity in our dataset, our method enables 3D human model estimation given only a single image and outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.

Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer Using Shifted Windows

Abstract: This paper presents a new vision Transformer, called Swin Transformer, that capably serves as a general-purpose backbone for computer vision. Challenges in adapting Transformer from language to vision arise from differences between the two domains, such as large variations in the scale of visual entities and the high resolution of pixels in images compared to words in text. To address these differences, we propose a hierarchical Transformer whose representation is computed with shifted windows. The shifted windowing scheme brings greater efficiency by limiting self-attention computation to non-overlapping local windows while also allowing for cross-window connection. This hierarchical architecture has the flexibility to model at various scales and has linear computational complexity with respect to image size. These qualities of Swin Transformer make it compatible with a broad range of vision tasks, including image classification (86.4 top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K) and dense prediction tasks such as object detection (58.7 box AP and 51.1 mask AP on COCO test-dev) and semantic segmentation (53.5 mIoU on ADE20K val). Its performance surpasses the previous state-of-the-art by a large margin of +2.7 box AP and +2.6 mask AP on COCO, and +3.2 mIoU on ADE20K, demonstrating the potential of Transformer-based models as vision backbones. The code and models will be made publicly available at~\url{this https URL}.

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Pushing and Picking in Cluttered Environment

Abstract: In this paper, a novel robotic grasping system is established to automatically pick up objects in cluttered scenes. A composite robotic hand composed of a suction cup and a gripper is designed for grasping the object stably. The suction cup is used for lifting the object from the clutter first and the gripper for grasping the object accordingly. We utilize the affordance map to provide pixel-wise lifting point candidates for the suction cup. To obtain a good affordance map, the active exploration mechanism is introduced to the system. An effective metric is designed to calculate the reward for the current affordance map, and a deep Q-Network (DQN) is employed to guide the robotic hand to actively explore the environment until the generated affordance map is suitable for grasping. Experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed robotic grasping system is able to greatly increase the success rate of the robotic grasping in cluttered scenes.

A ConvNet for the 2020s

Abstract: The “Roaring 20s” of visual recognition began with the introduction of Vision Transformers (ViTs), which quickly superseded ConvNets as the state-of-the-art image classification model. A vanilla ViT, on the other hand, faces difficulties when applied to general computer vision tasks such as object detection and semantic segmentation. It is the hierarchical Transformers (e.g., Swin Transformers) that reintroduced several ConvNet priors, making Transformers practically viable as a generic vision backbone and demonstrating remarkable performance on a wide variety of vision tasks. However, the effectiveness of such hybrid approaches is still largely credited to the intrinsic superiority of Transformers, rather than the inherent inductive biases of convolutions. In this work, we reexamine the design spaces and test the limits of what a pure ConvNet can achieve. We gradually “modernize” a standard ResNet toward the design of a vision Transformer, and discover several key components that contribute to the performance difference along the way. The outcome of this exploration is a family of pure ConvNet models dubbed ConvNeXt. Constructed entirely from standard ConvNet modules, ConvNeXts compete favorably with Transformers in terms of accuracy and scalability, achieving 87.8% ImageNet top-1 accuracy and outperforming Swin Transformers on COCO detection and ADE20K segmentation, while maintaining the simplicity and efficiency of standard ConvNets.

PIFuHD: Multi-Level Pixel-Aligned Implicit Function for High-Resolution 3D Human Digitization

Abstract: Recent advances in image-based 3D human shape estimation have been driven by the significant improvement in representation power afforded by deep neural networks. Although current approaches have demonstrated the potential in real world settings, they still fail to produce reconstructions with the level of detail often present in the input images. We argue that this limitation stems primarily form two conflicting requirements; accurate predictions require large context, but precise predictions require high resolution. Due to memory limitations in current hardware, previous approaches tend to take low resolution images as input to cover large spatial context, and produce less precise (or low resolution) 3D estimates as a result. We address this limitation by formulating a multi-level architecture that is end-to-end trainable. A coarse level observes the whole image at lower resolution and focuses on holistic reasoning. This provides context to an fine level which estimates highly detailed geometry by observing higher-resolution images. We demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques on single image human shape reconstruction by fully leveraging 1k-resolution input images.

Sparse R-CNN: End-to-End Object Detection with Learnable Proposals

Abstract: We present Sparse R-CNN, a purely sparse method for object detection in images. Existing works on object detection heavily rely on dense object candidates, such as $k$ anchor boxes pre-defined on all grids of image feature map of size $H\times W$. In our method, however, a fixed sparse set of learned object proposals, total length of $N$, are provided to object recognition head to perform classification and location. By eliminating $HWk$ (up to hundreds of thousands) hand-designed object candidates to $N$ (e.g. 100) learnable proposals, Sparse R-CNN completely avoids all efforts related to object candidates design and many-to-one label assignment. More importantly, final predictions are directly output without non-maximum suppression post-procedure. Sparse R-CNN demonstrates accuracy, run-time and training convergence performance on par with the well-established detector baselines on the challenging COCO dataset, e.g., achieving 45.0 AP in standard $3\times$ training schedule and running at 22 fps using ResNet-50 FPN model. We hope our work could inspire re-thinking the convention of dense prior in object detectors. The code is available at: https://github.com/PeizeSun/SparseR-CNN.

Implicit Functions in Feature Space for 3D Shape Reconstruction and Completion

Abstract: While many works focus on 3D reconstruction from images, in this paper, we focus on 3D shape reconstruction and completion from a variety of 3D inputs, which are deficient in some respect: low and high resolution voxels, sparse and dense point clouds, complete or incomplete. Processing of such 3D inputs is an increasingly important problem as they are the output of 3D scanners, which are becoming more accessible, and are the intermediate output of 3D computer vision algorithms. Recently, learned implicit functions have shown great promise as they produce continuous reconstructions. However, we identified two limitations in reconstruction from 3D inputs: 1) details present in the input data are not retained, and 2) poor reconstruction of articulated humans. To solve this, we propose Implicit Feature Networks (IF-Nets), which deliver continuous outputs, can handle multiple topologies, and complete shapes for missing or sparse input data retaining the nice properties of recent learned implicit functions, but critically they can also retain detail when it is present in the input data, and can reconstruct articulated humans. Our work differs from prior work in two crucial aspects. First, instead of using a single vector to encode a 3D shape, we extract a learnable 3-dimensional multi-scale tensor of deep features, which is aligned with the original Euclidean space embedding the shape. Second, instead of classifying x-y-z point coordinates directly, we classify deep features extracted from the tensor at a continuous query point. We show that this forces our model to make decisions based on global and local shape structure, as opposed to point coordinates, which are arbitrary under Euclidean transformations. Experiments demonstrate that IF-Nets outperform prior work in 3D object reconstruction in ShapeNet, and obtain significantly more accurate 3D human reconstructions. Code and project website is available at https://virtualhumans.mpi-inf.mpg.de/ifnets/.

Neural Body: Implicit Neural Representations with Structured Latent Codes for Novel View Synthesis of Dynamic Humans

Abstract: This paper addresses the challenge of novel view synthesis for a human performer from a very sparse set of camera views. Some recent works have shown that learning implicit neural representations of 3D scenes achieves remarkable view synthesis quality given dense input views. However, the representation learning will be ill-posed if the views are highly sparse. To solve this ill-posed problem, our key idea is to integrate observations over video frames. To this end, we propose Neural Body, a new human body representation which assumes that the learned neural representations at different frames share the same set of latent codes anchored to a deformable mesh, so that the observations across frames can be naturally integrated. The deformable mesh also provides geometric guidance for the network to learn 3D representations more efficiently. To evaluate our approach, we create a multi-view dataset named ZJU-MoCap that captures performers with complex motions. Experiments on ZJU-MoCap show that our approach outperforms prior works by a large margin in terms of novel view synthesis quality. We also demonstrate the capability of our approach to reconstruct a moving person from a monocular video on the People-Snapshot dataset.