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Appropriate comments of code snippets provide insight for code functionality, which are helpful for program comprehension. However, due to the great cost of authoring with the comments, many code projects do not contain adequate comments. Automatic comment generation techniques have been proposed to generate comments from pieces of code in order to alleviate the human efforts in annotating the code. Most existing approaches attempt to exploit certain correlations (usually manually given) between code and generated comments, which could be easily violated if the coding patterns change and hence the performance of comment generation declines. In this paper, we first build C2CGit, a large dataset from open projects in GitHub, which is more than 20$\times$ larger than existing datasets. Then we propose a new attention module called Code Attention to translate code to comments, which is able to utilize the domain features of code snippets, such as symbols and identifiers. We make ablation studies to determine effects of different parts in Code Attention. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed module has better performance over existing approaches in both BLEU and METEOR.

Reusable model design becomes desirable with the rapid expansion of computer vision and machine learning applications. In this paper, we focus on the reusability of pre-trained deep convolutional models. Specifically, different from treating pre-trained models as feature extractors, we reveal more treasures beneath convolutional layers, i.e., the convolutional activations could act as a detector for the common object in the image co-localization problem. We propose a simple yet effective method, termed Deep Descriptor Transforming (DDT), for evaluating the correlations of descriptors and then obtaining the category-consistent regions, which can accurately locate the common object in a set of unlabeled images, i.e., unsupervised object discovery. Empirical studies validate the effectiveness of the proposed DDT method. On benchmark image co-localization datasets, DDT consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Moreover, DDT also demonstrates good generalization ability for unseen categories and robustness for dealing with noisy data. Beyond those, DDT can be also employed for harvesting web images into valid external data sources for improving performance of both image recognition and object detection., Comment: This paper is extended based on our preliminary work published in IJCAI 2017 [arXiv:1705.02758]

Object detection aims at high speed and accuracy simultaneously. However, fast models are usually less accurate, while accurate models cannot satisfy our need for speed. A fast model can be 10 times faster but 50\% less accurate than an accurate model. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Feeding (AF) to combine a fast (but less accurate) detector and an accurate (but slow) detector, by adaptively determining whether an image is easy or hard and choosing an appropriate detector for it. In practice, we build a cascade of detectors, including the AF classifier which make the easy vs. hard decision and the two detectors. The AF classifier can be tuned to obtain different tradeoff between speed and accuracy, which has negligible training time and requires no additional training data. Experimental results on the PASCAL VOC, MS COCO and Caltech Pedestrian datasets confirm that AF has the ability to achieve comparable speed as the fast detector and comparable accuracy as the accurate one at the same time. As an example, by combining the fast SSD300 with the accurate SSD500 detector, AF leads to 50\% speedup over SSD500 with the same precision on the VOC2007 test set., Comment: To appear in ICCV 2017

The difficulty of image recognition has gradually increased from general category recognition to fine-grained recognition and to the recognition of some subtle attributes such as temperature and geolocation. In this paper, we try to focus on the classification between sunrise and sunset and hope to give a hint about how to tell the difference in subtle attributes. Sunrise vs. sunset is a difficult recognition task, which is challenging even for humans. Towards understanding this new problem, we first collect a new dataset made up of over one hundred webcams from different places. Since existing algorithmic methods have poor accuracy, we propose a new pairwise learning strategy to learn features from selective pairs of images. Experiments show that our approach surpasses baseline methods by a large margin and achieves better results even compared with humans. We also apply our approach to existing subtle attribute recognition problems, such as temperature estimation, and achieve state-of-the-art results., Comment: accepted as a poster in BMVC 2017

We propose an efficient and unified framework, namely ThiNet, to simultaneously accelerate and compress CNN models in both training and inference stages. We focus on the filter level pruning, i.e., the whole filter would be discarded if it is less important. Our method does not change the original network structure, thus it can be perfectly supported by any off-the-shelf deep learning libraries. We formally establish filter pruning as an optimization problem, and reveal that we need to prune filters based on statistics information computed from its next layer, not the current layer, which differentiates ThiNet from existing methods. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of this strategy, which has advanced the state-of-the-art. We also show the performance of ThiNet on ILSVRC-12 benchmark. ThiNet achieves 3.31$\times$ FLOPs reduction and 16.63$\times$ compression on VGG-16, with only 0.52$\%$ top-5 accuracy drop. Similar experiments with ResNet-50 reveal that even for a compact network, ThiNet can also reduce more than half of the parameters and FLOPs, at the cost of roughly 1$\%$ top-5 accuracy drop. Moreover, the original VGG-16 model can be further pruned into a very small model with only 5.05MB model size, preserving AlexNet level accuracy but showing much stronger generalization ability., Comment: To appear in ICCV 2017

This paper aims to simultaneously accelerate and compress off-the-shelf CNN models via filter pruning strategy. The importance of each filter is evaluated by the proposed entropy-based method first. Then several unimportant filters are discarded to get a smaller CNN model. Finally, fine-tuning is adopted to recover its generalization ability which is damaged during filter pruning. Our method can reduce the size of intermediate activations, which would dominate most memory footprint during model training stage but is less concerned in previous compression methods. Experiments on the ILSVRC-12 benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Compared with previous filter importance evaluation criteria, our entropy-based method obtains better performance. We achieve 3.3x speed-up and 16.64x compression on VGG-16, 1.54x acceleration and 1.47x compression on ResNet-50, both with about 1% top-5 accuracy decrease.

Reusable model design becomes desirable with the rapid expansion of machine learning applications. In this paper, we focus on the reusability of pre-trained deep convolutional models. Specifically, different from treating pre-trained models as feature extractors, we reveal more treasures beneath convolutional layers, i.e., the convolutional activations could act as a detector for the common object in the image co-localization problem. We propose a simple but effective method, named Deep Descriptor Transforming (DDT), for evaluating the correlations of descriptors and then obtaining the category-consistent regions, which can accurately locate the common object in a set of images. Empirical studies validate the effectiveness of the proposed DDT method. On benchmark image co-localization datasets, DDT consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Moreover, DDT also demonstrates good generalization ability for unseen categories and robustness for dealing with noisy data., Comment: Accepted by IJCAI 2017

This paper addresses the problem of handling spatial misalignments due to camera-view changes or human-pose variations in person re-identification. We first introduce a boosting-based approach to learn a correspondence structure which indicates the patch-wise matching probabilities between images from a target camera pair. The learned correspondence structure can not only capture the spatial correspondence pattern between cameras but also handle the viewpoint or human-pose variation in individual images. We further introduce a global constraint-based matching process. It integrates a global matching constraint over the learned correspondence structure to exclude cross-view misalignments during the image patch matching process, hence achieving a more reliable matching score between images. Finally, we also extend our approach by introducing a multi-structure scheme, which learns a set of local correspondence structures to capture the spatial correspondence sub-patterns between a camera pair, so as to handle the spatial misalignments between individual images in a more precise way. Experimental results on various datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach., Comment: IEEE Trans. Image Processing, vol. 26, no. 5, pp. 2438-2453, 2017. The project page for this paper is available at http://min.sjtu.edu.cn/lwydemo/personReID.htm arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1504.06243

Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) have achieved excellent recognition performance in various visual recognition tasks. A large labeled training set is one of the most important factors for its success. However, it is difficult to collect sufficient training images with precise labels in some domains such as apparent age estimation, head pose estimation, multi-label classification and semantic segmentation. Fortunately, there is ambiguous information among labels, which makes these tasks different from traditional classification. Based on this observation, we convert the label of each image into a discrete label distribution, and learn the label distribution by minimizing a Kullback-Leibler divergence between the predicted and ground-truth label distributions using deep ConvNets. The proposed DLDL (Deep Label Distribution Learning) method effectively utilizes the label ambiguity in both feature learning and classifier learning, which help prevent the network from over-fitting even when the training set is small. Experimental results show that the proposed approach produces significantly better results than state-of-the-art methods for age estimation and head pose estimation. At the same time, it also improves recognition performance for multi-label classification and semantic segmentation tasks., Comment: Accepted by IEEE TIP 2017. Projects page, see http://lamda.nju.edu.cn/gaobb/projects/DLDL.html

Trajectory analysis is essential in many applications. In this paper, we address the problem of representing motion trajectories in a highly informative way, and consequently utilize it for analyzing trajectories. Our approach first leverages the complete information from given trajectories to construct a thermal transfer field which provides a context-rich way to describe the global motion pattern in a scene. Then, a 3D tube is derived which depicts an input trajectory by integrating its surrounding motion patterns contained in the thermal transfer field. The 3D tube effectively: 1) maintains the movement information of a trajectory, 2) embeds the complete contextual motion pattern around a trajectory, 3) visualizes information about a trajectory in a clear and unified way. We further introduce a droplet-based process. It derives a droplet vector from a 3D tube, so as to characterize the high-dimensional 3D tube information in a simple but effective way. Finally, we apply our tube-and-droplet representation to trajectory analysis applications including trajectory clustering, trajectory classification & abnormality detection, and 3D action recognition. Experimental comparisons with state-of-the-art algorithms demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach., Comment: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, DOI: 10.1109/TPAMI.2016.2608884, 2016. Code for our work is available at http://min.sjtu.edu.cn/lwydemo/Trajectory%20analysis.htm

Large receptive field and dense prediction are both important for achieving high accuracy in pixel labeling tasks such as semantic segmentation. These two properties, however, contradict with each other. A pooling layer (with stride 2) quadruples the receptive field size but reduces the number of predictions to 25\%. Some existing methods lead to dense predictions using computations that are not equivalent to the original model. In this paper, we propose the equivalent convolution (eConv) and equivalent pooling (ePool) layers, leading to predictions that are both dense and equivalent to the baseline CNN model. Dense prediction models learned using eConv and ePool can transfer the baseline CNN's parameters as a starting point, and can inverse transfer the learned parameters in a dense model back to the original one, which has both fast testing speed and high accuracy. The proposed eConv and ePool layers have achieved higher accuracy than baseline CNN in various tasks, including semantic segmentation, object localization, image categorization and apparent age estimation, not only in those tasks requiring dense pixel labeling., Comment: submitted to NIPS 2016

Fine-grained image recognition is a challenging computer vision problem, due to the small inter-class variations caused by highly similar subordinate categories, and the large intra-class variations in poses, scales and rotations. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end Mask-CNN model without the fully connected layers for fine-grained recognition. Based on the part annotations of fine-grained images, the proposed model consists of a fully convolutional network to both locate the discriminative parts (e.g., head and torso), and more importantly generate object/part masks for selecting useful and meaningful convolutional descriptors. After that, a four-stream Mask-CNN model is built for aggregating the selected object- and part-level descriptors simultaneously. The proposed Mask-CNN model has the smallest number of parameters, lowest feature dimensionality and highest recognition accuracy when compared with state-of-the-arts fine-grained approaches., Comment: Submitted to NIPS 2016

Deep convolutional neural network models pre-trained for the ImageNet classification task have been successfully adopted to tasks in other domains, such as texture description and object proposal generation, but these tasks require annotations for images in the new domain. In this paper, we focus on a novel and challenging task in the pure unsupervised setting: fine-grained image retrieval. Even with image labels, fine-grained images are difficult to classify, let alone the unsupervised retrieval task. We propose the Selective Convolutional Descriptor Aggregation (SCDA) method. SCDA firstly localizes the main object in fine-grained images, a step that discards the noisy background and keeps useful deep descriptors. The selected descriptors are then aggregated and dimensionality reduced into a short feature vector using the best practices we found. SCDA is unsupervised, using no image label or bounding box annotation. Experiments on six fine-grained datasets confirm the effectiveness of SCDA for fine-grained image retrieval. Besides, visualization of the SCDA features shows that they correspond to visual attributes (even subtle ones), which might explain SCDA's high mean average precision in fine-grained retrieval. Moreover, on general image retrieval datasets, SCDA achieves comparable retrieval results with state-of-the-art general image retrieval approaches., Comment: IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP), 2017, 26(6): 2868-2881

Recently recurrent neural networks (RNN) has been very successful in handling sequence data. However, understanding RNN and finding the best practices for RNN is a difficult task, partly because there are many competing and complex hidden units (such as LSTM and GRU). We propose a gated unit for RNN, named as Minimal Gated Unit (MGU), since it only contains one gate, which is a minimal design among all gated hidden units. The design of MGU benefits from evaluation results on LSTM and GRU in the literature. Experiments on various sequence data show that MGU has comparable accuracy with GRU, but has a simpler structure, fewer parameters, and faster training. Hence, MGU is suitable in RNN's applications. Its simple architecture also means that it is easier to evaluate and tune, and in principle it is easier to study MGU's properties theoretically and empirically.

Hashing methods aim to learn a set of hash functions which map the original features to compact binary codes with similarity preserving in the Hamming space. Hashing has proven a valuable tool for large-scale information retrieval. We propose a column generation based binary code learning framework for data-dependent hash function learning. Given a set of triplets that encode the pairwise similarity comparison information, our column generation based method learns hash functions that preserve the relative comparison relations within the large-margin learning framework. Our method iteratively learns the best hash functions during the column generation procedure. Existing hashing methods optimize over simple objectives such as the reconstruction error or graph Laplacian related loss functions, instead of the performance evaluation criteria of interest---multivariate performance measures such as the AUC and NDCG. Our column generation based method can be further generalized from the triplet loss to a general structured learning based framework that allows one to directly optimize multivariate performance measures. For optimizing general ranking measures, the resulting optimization problem can involve exponentially or infinitely many variables and constraints, which is more challenging than standard structured output learning. We use a combination of column generation and cutting-plane techniques to solve the optimization problem. To speed-up the training we further explore stage-wise training and propose to use a simplified NDCG loss for efficient inference. We demonstrate the generality of our method by applying it to ranking prediction and image retrieval, and show that it outperforms a few state-of-the-art hashing methods., Comment: 20 pages

This paper addresses the problem of detecting coherent motions in crowd scenes and presents its two applications in crowd scene understanding: semantic region detection and recurrent activity mining. It processes input motion fields (e.g., optical flow fields) and produces a coherent motion filed, named as thermal energy field. The thermal energy field is able to capture both motion correlation among particles and the motion trends of individual particles which are helpful to discover coherency among them. We further introduce a two-step clustering process to construct stable semantic regions from the extracted time-varying coherent motions. These semantic regions can be used to recognize pre-defined activities in crowd scenes. Finally, we introduce a cluster-and-merge process which automatically discovers recurrent activities in crowd scenes by clustering and merging the extracted coherent motions. Experiments on various videos demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach., Comment: This manuscript is the accepted version for TIP (IEEE Transactions on Image Processing), 2016

This paper addresses the problem of handling spatial misalignments due to camera-view changes or human-pose variations in person re-identification. We first introduce a boosting-based approach to learn a correspondence structure which indicates the patch-wise matching probabilities between images from a target camera pair. The learned correspondence structure can not only capture the spatial correspondence pattern between cameras but also handle the viewpoint or human-pose variation in individual images. We further introduce a global-based matching process. It integrates a global matching constraint over the learned correspondence structure to exclude cross-view misalignments during the image patch matching process, hence achieving a more reliable matching score between images. Experimental results on various datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown great performance as general feature representations for object recognition applications. However, for multi-label images that contain multiple objects from different categories, scales and locations, global CNN features are not optimal. In this paper, we incorporate local information to enhance the feature discriminative power. In particular, we first extract object proposals from each image. With each image treated as a bag and object proposals extracted from it treated as instances, we transform the multi-label recognition problem into a multi-class multi-instance learning problem. Then, in addition to extracting the typical CNN feature representation from each proposal, we propose to make use of ground-truth bounding box annotations (strong labels) to add another level of local information by using nearest-neighbor relationships of local regions to form a multi-view pipeline. The proposed multi-view multi-instance framework utilizes both weak and strong labels effectively, and more importantly it has the generalization ability to even boost the performance of unseen categories by partial strong labels from other categories. Our framework is extensively compared with state-of-the-art hand-crafted feature based methods and CNN based methods on two multi-label benchmark datasets. The experimental results validate the discriminative power and the generalization ability of the proposed framework. With strong labels, our framework is able to achieve state-of-the-art results in both datasets., Comment: Accepted in CVPR 2016

In this paper we show that by carefully making good choices for various detailed but important factors in a visual recognition framework using deep learning features, one can achieve a simple, efficient, yet highly accurate image classification system. We first list 5 important factors, based on both existing researches and ideas proposed in this paper. These important detailed factors include: 1) $\ell_2$ matrix normalization is more effective than unnormalized or $\ell_2$ vector normalization, 2) the proposed natural deep spatial pyramid is very effective, and 3) a very small $K$ in Fisher Vectors surprisingly achieves higher accuracy than normally used large $K$ values. Along with other choices (convolutional activations and multiple scales), the proposed DSP framework is not only intuitive and efficient, but also achieves excellent classification accuracy on many benchmark datasets. For example, DSP's accuracy on SUN397 is 59.78%, significantly higher than previous state-of-the-art (53.86%).

In this paper, we categorize fine-grained images without using any object / part annotation neither in the training nor in the testing stage, a step towards making it suitable for deployments. Fine-grained image categorization aims to classify objects with subtle distinctions. Most existing works heavily rely on object / part detectors to build the correspondence between object parts by using object or object part annotations inside training images. The need for expensive object annotations prevents the wide usage of these methods. Instead, we propose to select useful parts from multi-scale part proposals in objects, and use them to compute a global image representation for categorization. This is specially designed for the annotation-free fine-grained categorization task, because useful parts have shown to play an important role in existing annotation-dependent works but accurate part detectors can be hardly acquired. With the proposed image representation, we can further detect and visualize the key (most discriminative) parts in objects of different classes. In the experiment, the proposed annotation-free method achieves better accuracy than that of state-of-the-art annotation-free and most existing annotation-dependent methods on two challenging datasets, which shows that it is not always necessary to use accurate object / part annotations in fine-grained image categorization.

In computer vision, an entity such as an image or video is often represented as a set of instance vectors, which can be SIFT, motion, or deep learning feature vectors extracted from different parts of that entity. Thus, it is essential to design efficient and effective methods to compare two sets of instance vectors. Existing methods such as FV, VLAD or Super Vectors have achieved excellent results. However, this paper shows that these methods are designed based on a generative perspective, and a discriminative method can be more effective in categorizing images or videos. The proposed D3 (discriminative distribution distance) method effectively compares two sets as two distributions, and proposes a directional total variation distance (DTVD) to measure how separated are they. Furthermore, a robust classifier-based method is proposed to estimate DTVD robustly. The D3 method is evaluated in action and image recognition tasks and has achieved excellent accuracy and speed. D3 also has a synergy with FV. The combination of D3 and FV has advantages over D3, FV, and VLAD.

Expression cloning plays an important role in facial expression synthesis. In this paper, a novel algorithm is proposed for facial expression cloning. The proposed algorithm first introduces a new elastic model to balance the global and local warping effects, such that the impacts from facial feature diversity among people can be minimized, and thus more effective geometric warping results can be achieved. Furthermore, a muscle-distribution-based (MD) model is proposed, which utilizes the muscle distribution of the human face and results in more accurate facial illumination details. In addition, we also propose a new distance-based metric to automatically select the optimal parameters such that the global and local warping effects in the elastic model can be suitably balanced. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithm outperforms the existing methods., Comment: This manuscript is the accepted version for JVCI (Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation)

In this paper, a new network-transmission-based (NTB) algorithm is proposed for human activity recognition in videos. The proposed NTB algorithm models the entire scene as an error-free network. In this network, each node corresponds to a patch of the scene and each edge represents the activity correlation between the corresponding patches. Based on this network, we further model people in the scene as packages while human activities can be modeled as the process of package transmission in the network. By analyzing these specific "package transmission" processes, various activities can be effectively detected. The implementation of our NTB algorithm into abnormal activity detection and group activity recognition are described in detail in the paper. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm., Comment: This manuscript is the accepted version for TCSVT (IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology)

In this paper, a new heat-map-based (HMB) algorithm is proposed for group activity recognition. The proposed algorithm first models human trajectories as series of "heat sources" and then applies a thermal diffusion process to create a heat map (HM) for representing the group activities. Based on this heat map, a new key-point based (KPB) method is used for handling the alignments among heat maps with different scales and rotations. And a surface-fitting (SF) method is also proposed for recognizing group activities. Our proposed HM feature can efficiently embed the temporal motion information of the group activities while the proposed KPB and SF methods can effectively utilize the characteristics of the heat map for activity recognition. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms., Comment: This manuscript is the accepted version for TCSVT(IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology)