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State-of-the-art generative text-to-image models are known to exhibit social biases and over-represent certain groups like people of perceived lighter skin tones and men in their outcomes. In this work, we propose a method to mitigate such biases and ensure that the outcomes are fair across different groups of people. We do this by finetuning text-to-image models on synthetic data that varies in perceived skin tones and genders constructed from diverse text prompts. These text prompts are constructed from multiplicative combinations of ethnicities, genders, professions, age groups, and so on, resulting in diverse synthetic data. Our diversity finetuned (DFT) model improves the group fairness metric by 150% for perceived skin tone and 97.7% for perceived gender. Compared to baselines, DFT models generate more people with perceived darker skin tone and more women. To foster open research, we will release all text prompts and code to generate training images., Comment: 4 figures, 8 pages

Perception-based image analysis technologies can be used to help visually impaired people take better quality pictures by providing automated guidance, thereby empowering them to interact more confidently on social media. The photographs taken by visually impaired users often suffer from one or both of two kinds of quality issues: technical quality (distortions), and semantic quality, such as framing and aesthetic composition. Here we develop tools to help them minimize occurrences of common technical distortions, such as blur, poor exposure, and noise. We do not address the complementary problems of semantic quality, leaving that aspect for future work. The problem of assessing and providing actionable feedback on the technical quality of pictures captured by visually impaired users is hard enough, owing to the severe, commingled distortions that often occur. To advance progress on the problem of analyzing and measuring the technical quality of visually impaired user-generated content (VI-UGC), we built a very large and unique subjective image quality and distortion dataset. This new perceptual resource, which we call the LIVE-Meta VI-UGC Database, contains $40$K real-world distorted VI-UGC images and $40$K patches, on which we recorded $2.7$M human perceptual quality judgments and $2.7$M distortion labels. Using this psychometric resource we also created an automatic blind picture quality and distortion predictor that learns local-to-global spatial quality relationships, achieving state-of-the-art prediction performance on VI-UGC pictures, significantly outperforming existing picture quality models on this unique class of distorted picture data. We also created a prototype feedback system that helps to guide users to mitigate quality issues and take better quality pictures, by creating a multi-task learning framework.

Current dataset collection methods typically scrape large amounts of data from the web. While this technique is extremely scalable, data collected in this way tends to reinforce stereotypical biases, can contain personally identifiable information, and typically originates from Europe and North America. In this work, we rethink the dataset collection paradigm and introduce GeoDE, a geographically diverse dataset with 61,940 images from 40 classes and 6 world regions, and no personally identifiable information, collected through crowd-sourcing. We analyse GeoDE to understand differences in images collected in this manner compared to web-scraping. Despite the smaller size of this dataset, we demonstrate its use as both an evaluation and training dataset, highlight shortcomings in current models, as well as show improved performances when even small amounts of GeoDE (1000 - 2000 images per region) are added to a training dataset. We release the full dataset and code at https://geodiverse-data-collection.cs.princeton.edu/

Video conferencing, which includes both video and audio content, has contributed to dramatic increases in Internet traffic, as the COVID-19 pandemic forced millions of people to work and learn from home. Global Internet traffic of video conferencing has dramatically increased Because of this, efficient and accurate video quality tools are needed to monitor and perceptually optimize telepresence traffic streamed via Zoom, Webex, Meet, etc. However, existing models are limited in their prediction capabilities on multi-modal, live streaming telepresence content. Here we address the significant challenges of Telepresence Video Quality Assessment (TVQA) in several ways. First, we mitigated the dearth of subjectively labeled data by collecting ~2k telepresence videos from different countries, on which we crowdsourced ~80k subjective quality labels. Using this new resource, we created a first-of-a-kind online video quality prediction framework for live streaming, using a multi-modal learning framework with separate pathways to compute visual and audio quality predictions. Our all-in-one model is able to provide accurate quality predictions at the patch, frame, clip, and audiovisual levels. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on both existing quality databases and our new TVQA database, at a considerably lower computational expense, making it an attractive solution for mobile and embedded systems., Comment: ECCV 2022

A visual counterfactual explanation replaces image regions in a query image with regions from a distractor image such that the system's decision on the transformed image changes to the distractor class. In this work, we present a novel framework for computing visual counterfactual explanations based on two key ideas. First, we enforce that the replaced and replacer regions contain the same semantic part, resulting in more semantically consistent explanations. Second, we use multiple distractor images in a computationally efficient way and obtain more discriminative explanations with fewer region replacements. Our approach is 27 % more semantically consistent and an order of magnitude faster than a competing method on three fine-grained image recognition datasets. We highlight the utility of our counterfactuals over existing works through machine teaching experiments where we teach humans to classify different bird species. We also complement our explanations with the vocabulary of parts and attributes that contributed the most to the system's decision. In this task as well, we obtain state-of-the-art results when using our counterfactual explanations relative to existing works, reinforcing the importance of semantically consistent explanations. Source code is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/visual-counterfactuals., Comment: Camera-ready version ECCV 2022

This paper presents a novel task together with a new benchmark for detecting generic, taxonomy-free event boundaries that segment a whole video into chunks. Conventional work in temporal video segmentation and action detection focuses on localizing pre-defined action categories and thus does not scale to generic videos. Cognitive Science has known since last century that humans consistently segment videos into meaningful temporal chunks. This segmentation happens naturally, without pre-defined event categories and without being explicitly asked to do so. Here, we repeat these cognitive experiments on mainstream CV datasets; with our novel annotation guideline which addresses the complexities of taxonomy-free event boundary annotation, we introduce the task of Generic Event Boundary Detection (GEBD) and the new benchmark Kinetics-GEBD. Our Kinetics-GEBD has the largest number of boundaries (e.g. 32 of ActivityNet, 8 of EPIC-Kitchens-100) which are in-the-wild, taxonomy-free, cover generic event change, and respect human perception diversity. We view GEBD as an important stepping stone towards understanding the video as a whole, and believe it has been previously neglected due to a lack of proper task definition and annotations. Through experiment and human study we demonstrate the value of the annotations. Further, we benchmark supervised and un-supervised GEBD approaches on the TAPOS dataset and our Kinetics-GEBD. We release our annotations and baseline codes at CVPR'21 LOVEU Challenge: https://sites.google.com/view/loveucvpr21., Comment: ICCV 2021

No-reference (NR) perceptual video quality assessment (VQA) is a complex, unsolved, and important problem to social and streaming media applications. Efficient and accurate video quality predictors are needed to monitor and guide the processing of billions of shared, often imperfect, user-generated content (UGC). Unfortunately, current NR models are limited in their prediction capabilities on real-world, "in-the-wild" UGC video data. To advance progress on this problem, we created the largest (by far) subjective video quality dataset, containing 39, 000 realworld distorted videos and 117, 000 space-time localized video patches ('v-patches'), and 5.5M human perceptual quality annotations. Using this, we created two unique NR-VQA models: (a) a local-to-global region-based NR VQA architecture (called PVQ) that learns to predict global video quality and achieves state-of-the-art performance on 3 UGC datasets, and (b) a first-of-a-kind space-time video quality mapping engine (called PVQ Mapper) that helps localize and visualize perceptual distortions in space and time. We will make the new database and prediction models available immediately following the review process.

One of the factors that have hindered progress in the areas of sign language recognition, translation, and production is the absence of large annotated datasets. Towards this end, we introduce How2Sign, a multimodal and multiview continuous American Sign Language (ASL) dataset, consisting of a parallel corpus of more than 80 hours of sign language videos and a set of corresponding modalities including speech, English transcripts, and depth. A three-hour subset was further recorded in the Panoptic studio enabling detailed 3D pose estimation. To evaluate the potential of How2Sign for real-world impact, we conduct a study with ASL signers and show that synthesized videos using our dataset can indeed be understood. The study further gives insights on challenges that computer vision should address in order to make progress in this field. Dataset website: http://how2sign.github.io/, Comment: Accepted at CVPR 2021. Dataset website: http://how2sign.github.io/

Existing models often leverage co-occurrences between objects and their context to improve recognition accuracy. However, strongly relying on context risks a model's generalizability, especially when typical co-occurrence patterns are absent. This work focuses on addressing such contextual biases to improve the robustness of the learnt feature representations. Our goal is to accurately recognize a category in the absence of its context, without compromising on performance when it co-occurs with context. Our key idea is to decorrelate feature representations of a category from its co-occurring context. We achieve this by learning a feature subspace that explicitly represents categories occurring in the absence of context along side a joint feature subspace that represents both categories and context. Our very simple yet effective method is extensible to two multi-label tasks -- object and attribute classification. On 4 challenging datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in reducing contextual bias., Comment: CVPR 2020

Blind or no-reference (NR) perceptual picture quality prediction is a difficult, unsolved problem of great consequence to the social and streaming media industries that impacts billions of viewers daily. Unfortunately, popular NR prediction models perform poorly on real-world distorted pictures. To advance progress on this problem, we introduce the largest (by far) subjective picture quality database, containing about 40000 real-world distorted pictures and 120000 patches, on which we collected about 4M human judgments of picture quality. Using these picture and patch quality labels, we built deep region-based architectures that learn to produce state-of-the-art global picture quality predictions as well as useful local picture quality maps. Our innovations include picture quality prediction architectures that produce global-to-local inferences as well as local-to-global inferences (via feedback).

Pre-training convolutional neural networks with weakly-supervised and self-supervised strategies is becoming increasingly popular for several computer vision tasks. However, due to the lack of strong discriminative signals, these learned representations may overfit to the pre-training objective (e.g., hashtag prediction) and not generalize well to downstream tasks. In this work, we present a simple strategy - ClusterFit (CF) to improve the robustness of the visual representations learned during pre-training. Given a dataset, we (a) cluster its features extracted from a pre-trained network using k-means and (b) re-train a new network from scratch on this dataset using cluster assignments as pseudo-labels. We empirically show that clustering helps reduce the pre-training task-specific information from the extracted features thereby minimizing overfitting to the same. Our approach is extensible to different pre-training frameworks -- weak- and self-supervised, modalities -- images and videos, and pre-training tasks -- object and action classification. Through extensive transfer learning experiments on 11 different target datasets of varied vocabularies and granularities, we show that ClusterFit significantly improves the representation quality compared to the state-of-the-art large-scale (millions / billions) weakly-supervised image and video models and self-supervised image models.

Current fully-supervised video datasets consist of only a few hundred thousand videos and fewer than a thousand domain-specific labels. This hinders the progress towards advanced video architectures. This paper presents an in-depth study of using large volumes of web videos for pre-training video models for the task of action recognition. Our primary empirical finding is that pre-training at a very large scale (over 65 million videos), despite on noisy social-media videos and hashtags, substantially improves the state-of-the-art on three challenging public action recognition datasets. Further, we examine three questions in the construction of weakly-supervised video action datasets. First, given that actions involve interactions with objects, how should one construct a verb-object pre-training label space to benefit transfer learning the most? Second, frame-based models perform quite well on action recognition; is pre-training for good image features sufficient or is pre-training for spatio-temporal features valuable for optimal transfer learning? Finally, actions are generally less well-localized in long videos vs. short videos; since action labels are provided at a video level, how should one choose video clips for best performance, given some fixed budget of number or minutes of videos?

Weakly supervised object detection aims at reducing the amount of supervision required to train detection models. Such models are traditionally learned from images/videos labelled only with the object class and not the object bounding box. In our work, we try to leverage not only the object class labels but also the action labels associated with the data. We show that the action depicted in the image/video can provide strong cues about the location of the associated object. We learn a spatial prior for the object dependent on the action (e.g. "ball" is closer to "leg of the person" in "kicking ball"), and incorporate this prior to simultaneously train a joint object detection and action classification model. We conducted experiments on both video datasets and image datasets to evaluate the performance of our weakly supervised object detection model. Our approach outperformed the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) method by more than 6% in mAP on the Charades video dataset., Comment: CVPR'19 camera ready

Highlight detection has the potential to significantly ease video browsing, but existing methods often suffer from expensive supervision requirements, where human viewers must manually identify highlights in training videos. We propose a scalable unsupervised solution that exploits video duration as an implicit supervision signal. Our key insight is that video segments from shorter user-generated videos are more likely to be highlights than those from longer videos, since users tend to be more selective about the content when capturing shorter videos. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a novel ranking framework that prefers segments from shorter videos, while properly accounting for the inherent noise in the (unlabeled) training data. We use it to train a highlight detector with 10M hashtagged Instagram videos. In experiments on two challenging public video highlight detection benchmarks, our method substantially improves the state-of-the-art for unsupervised highlight detection., Comment: To appear in CVPR 2019

Current top-performing blind perceptual image quality prediction models are generally trained on legacy databases of human quality opinion scores on synthetically distorted images. Therefore they learn image features that effectively predict human visual quality judgments of inauthentic, and usually isolated (single) distortions. However, real-world images usually contain complex, composite mixtures of multiple distortions. We study the perceptually relevant natural scene statistics of such authentically distorted images, in different color spaces and transform domains. We propose a bag of feature-maps approach which avoids assumptions about the type of distortion(s) contained in an image, focusing instead on capturing consistencies, or departures therefrom, of the statistics of real world images. Using a large database of authentically distorted images, human opinions of them, and bags of features computed on them, we train a regressor to conduct image quality prediction. We demonstrate the competence of the features towards improving automatic perceptual quality prediction by testing a learned algorithm using them on a benchmark legacy database as well as on a newly introduced distortion-realistic resource called the LIVE In the Wild Image Quality Challenge Database. We extensively evaluate the perceptual quality prediction model and algorithm and show that it is able to achieve good quality prediction power that is better than other leading models.

Most publicly available image quality databases have been created under highly controlled conditions by introducing graded simulated distortions onto high-quality photographs. However, images captured using typical real-world mobile camera devices are usually afflicted by complex mixtures of multiple distortions, which are not necessarily well-modeled by the synthetic distortions found in existing databases. The originators of existing legacy databases usually conducted human psychometric studies to obtain statistically meaningful sets of human opinion scores on images in a stringently controlled visual environment, resulting in small data collections relative to other kinds of image analysis databases. Towards overcoming these limitations, we designed and created a new database that we call the LIVE In the Wild Image Quality Challenge Database, which contains widely diverse authentic image distortions on a large number of images captured using a representative variety of modern mobile devices. We also designed and implemented a new online crowdsourcing system, which we have used to conduct a very large-scale, multi-month image quality assessment subjective study. Our database consists of over 350000 opinion scores on 1162 images evaluated by over 7000 unique human observers. Despite the lack of control over the experimental environments of the numerous study participants, we demonstrate excellent internal consistency of the subjective dataset. We also evaluate several top-performing blind Image Quality Assessment algorithms on it and present insights on how mixtures of distortions challenge both end users as well as automatic perceptual quality prediction models., Comment: 16 pages