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Gaze Target Detection (GTD), i.e., determining where a person is looking within a scene from an external viewpoint, is a challenging task, particularly in 3D space. Existing approaches heavily rely on analyzing the person's appearance, primarily focusing on their face to predict the gaze target. This paper presents a novel approach to tackle this problem by utilizing the person's upper-body pose and available depth maps to extract a 3D gaze direction and employing a multi-stage or an end-to-end pipeline to predict the gazed target. When predicted accurately, the human body pose can provide valuable information about the head pose, which is a good approximation of the gaze direction, as well as the position of the arms and hands, which are linked to the activity the person is performing and the objects they are likely focusing on. Consequently, in addition to performing gaze estimation in 3D, we are also able to perform GTD simultaneously. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results on the most comprehensive publicly accessible 3D gaze target detection dataset without requiring images of the person's face, thus promoting privacy preservation in various application contexts. The code is available at https://github.com/intelligolabs/privacy-gtd-3D., Comment: Accepted in the T-CAP workshop at ECCV 2024

In the last few years, due to the broad applicability of deep learning to downstream tasks and end-to-end training capabilities, increasingly more concerns about potential biases to specific, non-representative patterns have been raised. Many works focusing on unsupervised debiasing usually leverage the tendency of deep models to learn ``easier'' samples, for example by clustering the latent space to obtain bias pseudo-labels. However, the interpretation of such pseudo-labels is not trivial, especially for a non-expert end user, as it does not provide semantic information about the bias features. To address this issue, we introduce ``Say My Name'' (SaMyNa), the first tool to identify biases within deep models semantically. Unlike existing methods, our approach focuses on biases learned by the model. Our text-based pipeline enhances explainability and supports debiasing efforts: applicable during either training or post-hoc validation, our method can disentangle task-related information and proposes itself as a tool to analyze biases. Evaluation on traditional benchmarks demonstrates its effectiveness in detecting biases and even disclaiming them, showcasing its broad applicability for model diagnosis.

Deep Neural Networks are well known for efficiently fitting training data, yet experiencing poor generalization capabilities whenever some kind of bias dominates over the actual task labels, resulting in models learning "shortcuts". In essence, such models are often prone to learn spurious correlations between data and labels. In this work, we tackle the problem of learning from biased data in the very realistic unsupervised scenario, i.e., when the bias is unknown. This is a much harder task as compared to the supervised case, where auxiliary, bias-related annotations, can be exploited in the learning process. This paper proposes a novel 2-stage learning pipeline featuring a data augmentation strategy able to regularize the training. First, biased/unbiased samples are identified by training over-biased models. Second, such subdivision (typically noisy) is exploited within a data augmentation framework, properly combining the original samples while learning mixing parameters, which has a regularization effect. Experiments on synthetic and realistic biased datasets show state-of-the-art classification accuracy, outperforming competing methods, ultimately proving robust performance on both biased and unbiased examples. Notably, being our training method totally agnostic to the level of bias, it also positively affects performance for any, even apparently unbiased, dataset, thus improving the model generalization regardless of the level of bias (or its absence) in the data.

It is widely recognized that deep neural networks are sensitive to bias in the data. This means that during training these models are likely to learn spurious correlations between data and labels, resulting in limited generalization abilities and low performance. In this context, model debiasing approaches can be devised aiming at reducing the model's dependency on such unwanted correlations, either leveraging the knowledge of bias information or not. In this work, we focus on the latter and more realistic scenario, showing the importance of accurately predicting the bias-conflicting and bias-aligned samples to obtain compelling performance in bias mitigation. On this ground, we propose to conceive the problem of model bias from an out-of-distribution perspective, introducing a new bias identification method based on anomaly detection. We claim that when data is mostly biased, bias-conflicting samples can be regarded as outliers with respect to the bias-aligned distribution in the feature space of a biased model, thus allowing for precisely detecting them with an anomaly detection method. Coupling the proposed bias identification approach with bias-conflicting data upsampling and augmentation in a two-step strategy, we reach state-of-the-art performance on synthetic and real benchmark datasets. Ultimately, our proposed approach shows that the data bias issue does not necessarily require complex debiasing methods, given that an accurate bias identification procedure is defined., Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures

This paper presents a classification framework based on learnable data augmentation to tackle the One-Shot Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (OS-UDA) problem. OS-UDA is the most challenging setting in Domain Adaptation, as only one single unlabeled target sample is assumed to be available for model adaptation. Driven by such single sample, our method LearnAug-UDA learns how to augment source data, making it perceptually similar to the target. As a result, a classifier trained on such augmented data will generalize well for the target domain. To achieve this, we designed an encoder-decoder architecture that exploits a perceptual loss and style transfer strategies to augment the source data. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on two well-known Domain Adaptation benchmarks, DomainNet and VisDA. The project code is available at https://github.com/IIT-PAVIS/LearnAug-UDA, Comment: Accepted to The 34th British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC 2023)

Objects are crucial for understanding human-object interactions. By identifying the relevant objects, one can also predict potential future interactions or actions that may occur with these objects. In this paper, we study the problem of Short-Term Object interaction anticipation (STA) and propose NAOGAT (Next-Active-Object Guided Anticipation Transformer), a multi-modal end-to-end transformer network, that attends to objects in observed frames in order to anticipate the next-active-object (NAO) and, eventually, to guide the model to predict context-aware future actions. The task is challenging since it requires anticipating future action along with the object with which the action occurs and the time after which the interaction will begin, a.k.a. the time to contact (TTC). Compared to existing video modeling architectures for action anticipation, NAOGAT captures the relationship between objects and the global scene context in order to predict detections for the next active object and anticipate relevant future actions given these detections, leveraging the objects' dynamics to improve accuracy. One of the key strengths of our approach, in fact, is its ability to exploit the motion dynamics of objects within a given clip, which is often ignored by other models, and separately decoding the object-centric and motion-centric information. Through our experiments, we show that our model outperforms existing methods on two separate datasets, Ego4D and EpicKitchens-100 ("Unseen Set"), as measured by several additional metrics, such as time to contact, and next-active-object localization. The code will be available upon acceptance., Comment: Accepted in WACV'24

In this technical report, we describe the Guided-Attention mechanism based solution for the short-term anticipation (STA) challenge for the EGO4D challenge. It combines the object detections, and the spatiotemporal features extracted from video clips, enhancing the motion and contextual information, and further decoding the object-centric and motion-centric information to address the problem of STA in egocentric videos. For the challenge, we build our model on top of StillFast with Guided Attention applied on fast network. Our model obtains better performance on the validation set and also achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on the challenge test set for EGO4D Short-Term Object Interaction Anticipation Challenge., Comment: Winner of CVPR@2023 Ego4D STA challenge. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2305.12953

Short-term action anticipation (STA) in first-person videos is a challenging task that involves understanding the next active object interactions and predicting future actions. Existing action anticipation methods have primarily focused on utilizing features extracted from video clips, but often overlooked the importance of objects and their interactions. To this end, we propose a novel approach that applies a guided attention mechanism between the objects, and the spatiotemporal features extracted from video clips, enhancing the motion and contextual information, and further decoding the object-centric and motion-centric information to address the problem of STA in egocentric videos. Our method, GANO (Guided Attention for Next active Objects) is a multi-modal, end-to-end, single transformer-based network. The experimental results performed on the largest egocentric dataset demonstrate that GANO outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods for the prediction of the next active object label, its bounding box location, the corresponding future action, and the time to contact the object. The ablation study shows the positive contribution of the guided attention mechanism compared to other fusion methods. Moreover, it is possible to improve the next active object location and class label prediction results of GANO by just appending the learnable object tokens with the region of interest embeddings., Comment: Accepted to IEEE ICIP 2023, see project page here : https://sanketsans.github.io/guided-attention-egocentric.html

In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for the challenging problem of One-Shot Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (OSUDA), which aims to adapt to a target domain with only a single unlabeled target sample. Unlike existing approaches that rely on large labeled source and unlabeled target data, our Target-driven One-Shot UDA (TOS-UDA) approach employs a learnable augmentation strategy guided by the target sample's style to align the source distribution with the target distribution. Our method consists of three modules: an augmentation module, a style alignment module, and a classifier. Unlike existing methods, our augmentation module allows for strong transformations of the source samples, and the style of the single target sample available is exploited to guide the augmentation by ensuring perceptual similarity. Furthermore, our approach integrates augmentation with style alignment, eliminating the need for separate pre-training on additional datasets. Our method outperforms or performs comparably to existing OS-UDA methods on the Digits and DomainNet benchmarks., Comment: Accepted to 22nd International Conference on IMAGE ANALYSIS AND PROCESSING (ICIAP) 2023

Existing Source-free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (SUDA) approaches inherently exhibit catastrophic forgetting. Typically, models trained on a labeled source domain and adapted to unlabeled target data improve performance on the target while dropping performance on the source, which is not available during adaptation. In this study, our goal is to cope with the challenging problem of SUDA in a continual learning setting, i.e., adapting to the target(s) with varying distributional shifts while maintaining performance on the source. The proposed framework consists of two main stages: i) a SUDA model yielding cleaner target labels -- favoring good performance on target, and ii) a novel method for synthesizing class-conditioned source-style images by leveraging only the source model and pseudo-labeled target data as a prior. An extensive pool of experiments on major benchmarks, e.g., PACS, Visda-C, and DomainNet demonstrates that the proposed Continual SUDA (C-SUDA) framework enables preserving satisfactory performance on the source domain without exploiting the source data at all., Comment: Accepted at International Conference on Image Analysis and Processing, 2023

Planning the evacuation of people from crowded places, such as squares, stadiums, or indoor arenas during emergency scenarios is a fundamental task that authorities must deal with. This article summarizes the work of the authors to simulate an emergency scenario in a square using NetLogo, a multi-agent programmable modeling environment. The emergency scenario is based on a real event, which took place in Piazza San Carlo, Turin, on the 3rd of June 2017. The authors have developed a model and conducted various experiments, the results of which are presented, discussed and analyzed. The article concludes by offering suggestions for further research and summarizing the key takeaways.

This paper addresses the problem of anticipating the next-active-object location in the future, for a given egocentric video clip where the contact might happen, before any action takes place. The problem is considerably hard, as we aim at estimating the position of such objects in a scenario where the observed clip and the action segment are separated by the so-called ``time to contact'' (TTC) segment. Many methods have been proposed to anticipate the action of a person based on previous hand movements and interactions with the surroundings. However, there have been no attempts to investigate the next possible interactable object, and its future location with respect to the first-person's motion and the field-of-view drift during the TTC window. We define this as the task of Anticipating the Next ACTive Object (ANACTO). To this end, we propose a transformer-based self-attention framework to identify and locate the next-active-object in an egocentric clip. We benchmark our method on three datasets: EpicKitchens-100, EGTEA+ and Ego4D. We also provide annotations for the first two datasets. Our approach performs best compared to relevant baseline methods. We also conduct ablation studies to understand the effectiveness of the proposed and baseline methods on varying conditions. Code and ANACTO task annotations will be made available upon paper acceptance., Comment: Accepted by IEEE ACCESS, this paper carries the Manuscript DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3395282. The complete peer-reviewed version is available via this DOI, while the arXiv version is a post-author manuscript without peer-review

Over the last few years, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) techniques have acquired remarkable importance and popularity in computer vision. However, when compared to the extensive literature available for images, the field of videos is still relatively unexplored. On the other hand, the performance of a model in action recognition is heavily affected by domain shift. In this paper, we propose a simple and novel UDA approach for video action recognition. Our approach leverages recent advances on spatio-temporal transformers to build a robust source model that better generalises to the target domain. Furthermore, our architecture learns domain invariant features thanks to the introduction of a novel alignment loss term derived from the Information Bottleneck principle. We report results on two video action recognition benchmarks for UDA, showing state-of-the-art performance on HMDB$\leftrightarrow$UCF, as well as on Kinetics$\rightarrow$NEC-Drone, which is more challenging. This demonstrates the effectiveness of our method in handling different levels of domain shift. The source code is available at https://github.com/vturrisi/UDAVT., Comment: Accepted at ICPR 2022

The concept of compressing deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) is essential to use limited computation, power, and memory resources on embedded devices. However, existing methods achieve this objective at the cost of a drop in inference accuracy in computer vision tasks. To address such a drawback, we propose a framework that leverages knowledge distillation along with customizable block-wise optimization to learn a lightweight CNN structure while preserving better control over the compression-performance tradeoff. Considering specific resource constraints, e.g., floating-point operations per inference (FLOPs) or model-parameters, our method results in a state of the art network compression while being capable of achieving better inference accuracy. In a comprehensive evaluation, we demonstrate that our method is effective, robust, and consistent with results over a variety of network architectures and datasets, at negligible training overhead. In particular, for the already compact network MobileNet_v2, our method offers up to 2x and 5.2x better model compression in terms of FLOPs and model-parameters, respectively, while getting 1.05% better model performance than the baseline network., Comment: This paper has been accepted to ICPR 2020

The majority of existing Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) methods presumes source and target domain data to be simultaneously available during training. Such an assumption may not hold in practice, as source data is often inaccessible (e.g., due to privacy reasons). On the contrary, a pre-trained source model is always considered to be available, even though performing poorly on target due to the well-known domain shift problem. This translates into a significant amount of misclassifications, which can be interpreted as structured noise affecting the inferred target pseudo-labels. In this work, we cast UDA as a pseudo-label refinery problem in the challenging source-free scenario. We propose a unified method to tackle adaptive noise filtering and pseudo-label refinement. A novel Negative Ensemble Learning technique is devised to specifically address noise in pseudo-labels, by enhancing diversity in ensemble members with different stochastic (i) input augmentation and (ii) feedback. In particular, the latter is achieved by leveraging the novel concept of Disjoint Residual Labels, which allow diverse information to be fed to the different members. A single target model is eventually trained with the refined pseudo-labels, which leads to a robust performance on the target domain. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method, named Adaptive Pseudo-Label Refinement, achieves state-of-the-art performance on major UDA benchmarks, such as Digit5, PACS, Visda-C, and DomainNet, without using source data at all.

In Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (GZSL), unseen categories (for which no visual data are available at training time) can be predicted by leveraging their class embeddings (e.g., a list of attributes describing them) together with a complementary pool of seen classes (paired with both visual data and class embeddings). Despite GZSL is arguably challenging, we posit that knowing in advance the class embeddings, especially for unseen categories, is an actual limit of the applicability of GZSL towards real-world scenarios. To relax this assumption, we propose Open Zero-Shot Learning (OZSL) to extend GZSL towards the open-world settings. We formalize OZSL as the problem of recognizing seen and unseen classes (as in GZSL) while also rejecting instances from unknown categories, for which neither visual data nor class embeddings are provided. We formalize the OZSL problem introducing evaluation protocols, error metrics and benchmark datasets. We also suggest to tackle the OZSL problem by proposing the idea of performing unknown feature generation (instead of only unseen features generation as done in GZSL). We achieve this by optimizing a generative process to sample unknown class embeddings as complementary to the seen and the unseen. We intend these results to be the ground to foster future research, extending the standard closed-world zero-shot learning (GZSL) with the novel open-world counterpart (OZSL).

In this paper, we address zero-shot learning (ZSL), the problem of recognizing categories for which no labeled visual data are available during training. We focus on the transductive setting, in which unlabelled visual data from unseen classes is available. State-of-the-art paradigms in ZSL typically exploit generative adversarial networks to synthesize visual features from semantic attributes. We posit that the main limitation of these approaches is to adopt a single model to face two problems: 1) generating realistic visual features, and 2) translating semantic attributes into visual cues. Differently, we propose to decouple such tasks, solving them separately. In particular, we train an unconditional generator to solely capture the complexity of the distribution of visual data and we subsequently pair it with a conditional generator devoted to enrich the prior knowledge of the data distribution with the semantic content of the class embeddings. We present a detailed ablation study to dissect the effect of our proposed decoupling approach, while demonstrating its superiority over the related state-of-the-art., Comment: Published at the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Computer Vision (WACV) 2021