IDRNet: Intervention-Driven Relation Network for Semantic Segmentation

Co-occurrent visual patterns suggest that pixel relation modeling facilitates dense prediction tasks, which inspires the development of numerous context modeling paradigms, \emph{e.g.}, multi-scale-driven and similarity-driven context schemes. Despite the impressive results, these existing paradigms often suffer from inadequate or ineffective contextual information aggregation due to reliance on large amounts of predetermined priors. To alleviate the issues, we propose a novel \textbf{I}ntervention-\textbf{D}riven \textbf{R}elation \textbf{Net}work (\textbf{IDRNet}), which leverages a deletion diagnostics procedure to guide the modeling of contextual relations among different pixels. Specifically, we first group pixel-level representations into semantic-level representations with the guidance of pseudo labels and further improve the distinguishability of the grouped representations with a feature enhancement module. Next, a deletion diagnostics procedure is conducted to model relations of these semantic-level representations via perceiving the network outputs and the extracted relations are utilized to guide the semantic-level representations to interact with each other. Finally, the interacted representations are utilized to augment original pixel-level representations for final predictions. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of IDRNet quantitatively and qualitatively. Notably, our intervention-driven context scheme brings consistent performance improvements to state-of-the-art segmentation frameworks and achieves competitive results on popular benchmark datasets, including ADE20K, COCO-Stuff, PASCAL-Context, LIP, and Cityscapes. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/SegmentationBLWX/sssegmentation}.

Paper

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Peer review

Reviewer 3dVM6/10 · confidence 3/52023-07-03

Summary

This study focuses on the utilization of deletion diagnostics for modeling pixel relationships. The main contribution of this work can be divided into two parts. Firstly, the simplification of pixel relation modeling as object relation modeling. Secondly, the introduction of deletion diagnostics to enable networks to build object relationships by detecting changes in the outputs of objective functions. Experimental results qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed paradigm.

Strengths

* The use of Deletion Diagnostics to update the relation matrix is a novel approach that considers the problem of category context in semantic segmentation from a different perspective than previous multi-scale driven and similarity-driven methods. * Thorough ablation experiments were conducted to verify the impact of different designs of IDRNet on segmentation performance. * The writing is clear and easily understandable for readers.

Weaknesses

* The experiments of Mask2Former+IDRNet only report results on one dataset, ADE20K. As Mask2Former is a general segmentation framework, it is recommended that the authors also report the performance of the proposed model on the other three datasets for a comprehensive comparison. * Additional experiments based on Mask2Former could be added to Table 2 to verify the effectiveness of IDRNet on a regular backbone.

Questions

See Weaknesses.

Rating

6: Weak Accept: Technically solid, moderate-to-high impact paper, with no major concerns with respect to evaluation, resources, reproducibility, ethical considerations.

Confidence

3: You are fairly confident in your assessment. It is possible that you did not understand some parts of the submission or that you are unfamiliar with some pieces of related work. Math/other details were not carefully checked.

Soundness

3 good

Presentation

3 good

Contribution

3 good

Limitations

There seems no discussion about limitations in the paper.

Reviewer dJpB5/10 · confidence 4/52023-07-05

Summary

This work presents IDRNet, a context aggregation scheme for semantic segmentation networks which is driven by intervention in the object query stage. The work is a follow up on OCR (object-contextual representations), but adds to the previous work by an intervention-based strategy to update, augment, or delete tokens. The updates to these tokens are based on semantic relations.

Strengths

Presentation: The paper is clear in its presentation of the concept, and the result. Tables and figures are self-explanatory and it is easy to follow the though process of the authors. The reviewer appreciates the effort spent in explaining the concept of this work. Results: As a scheme which is built to add to pixel representations, the results are quite impressive on five different datasets. The authors have also provided ablation studies detailing the effect of each separate block in the proposed algorithm. Visulalizations: The reviewer also appreciates the detail the authors have provided on viewing semantic relationships, which was the major motivation of their approach. Hence, it is safe to say that the motivation of the work and results go hand in hand.

Weaknesses

Originality: The concept of updating (deleting, augmenting, enhancing, "diagnosing") embeddings based on object relations might seem novel when you think of them in a convolution-based setting. However, I am afraid this concept is not original in transformer networks. Works such as Mask2Former do present queries which describe objects and the network learns (based on bipartite matching) to associate queries with the concept of object. There are also several other works [1], [2], [3] which prune, refine or update these tokens based on semantic relationships. Complexity: As the method adds additional compute to the network, the authors mention how much compute is added and also, more importantly, is Baseline+IDRNet better than simply scaling up the baseline to match this compute. [1] Revisiting Token Pruning for Object Detection and Instance Segmentation [2] Sparse Tokens for Dense Prediction - The Medical Image Segmentation Case [3] DynaMITe: Dynamic Query Bootstrapping for Multi-object Interactive Segmentation Transformer

Questions

1. Please could describe how this method is different from other works performing token pruning 2. Please could you provide some analysis on complexity/runtime related to other context aggregation schemes such as OCR 3. Please could you provide some limitations of the approach

Rating

5: Borderline accept: Technically solid paper where reasons to accept outweigh reasons to reject, e.g., limited evaluation. Please use sparingly.

Confidence

4: You are confident in your assessment, but not absolutely certain. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that you did not understand some parts of the submission or that you are unfamiliar with some pieces of related work.

Soundness

3 good

Presentation

3 good

Contribution

1 poor

Limitations

The authors have not addressed limitations of their method.

Reviewer q3X96/10 · confidence 5/52023-07-06

Summary

This paper presents a context relation modeling method, which can be incorporated with existing semantic segmentation model. Instead of modeling pixel-level relation, it models class-level semantic relation by weighted averaging features at each location and deletion diagnostics. The proposed module is flexible and tested with different network backbone and segmentation architectures, which observes consistent improvements on several widely used datasets. Furthermore, the proposed context relation module can be applied in object detection, that stronger results on MS COCO are shown based on Faster-RCNN.

Strengths

+ This paper presents a context relation module, which can be combined with previous semantic segmentation models. It is used to enhance the learned features and perform features interaction with global co-cocurrence. Besides, in order to overcome the heavy computation issue, this work proposes to use semantic relation to replace pixel relation. + This paper conduct extensive experimental results, including 4 popular datasets. Besides, this work is combined with many previous segmentation models. For example, even though PSPNet can aggregate context information, the semantic relation module can further improve its performance. + Comparison with previous state-of-the-art demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed module. + This work is also compatible with object detection framework. It should be also feasible to apply the proposed module in semantic instance segmentation.

Weaknesses

- Too many symbols in section 3. For some details, I cannot follow. In Eq 3, what is the output dimension for R_{sl} ? In Eq 6, why is R_{esl} a Ne xZ matrix, as M_r is KxK ? In Eq 8, what are the values in R_a if Y_c != k ? In Eq 9, what does the \bigoplus operation represent ? - Figure 5 is hard to see the graph connection, for example, the rider class. For sky, it is connected to truck, building, road, which does not seem to make sense. - In Table 5, why not show the performance for Mask2Former+IDRNet on LIP/COCO-Stuff/PASCAL-Context datasets? - Suggest to list all the comparing methods.

Questions

1. Actually, you do not have to use deletion diagnostics to update M. What is the motivation of deletion diagnostics? What kind of issues does the proposed deletion aim to address?

Rating

6: Weak Accept: Technically solid, moderate-to-high impact paper, with no major concerns with respect to evaluation, resources, reproducibility, ethical considerations.

Confidence

5: You are absolutely certain about your assessment. You are very familiar with the related work and checked the math/other details carefully.

Soundness

4 excellent

Presentation

2 fair

Contribution

4 excellent

Limitations

See weakness section.

Reviewer PhSv4/10 · confidence 3/52023-07-09

Summary

To further enhance the segmentation performance, the authors utilize deletion diagnostics to model pixel relationships. Specifically, to address the computational cost of pixel relation modelling, they simplify it as object relation modelling. Then, they introduce deletion diagnostics to facilitate the network in building object relationships. The experimental results qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate the effectiveness of their proposed paradigm.

Strengths

To improve the contextual information aggregation,the authors propose a novel Intervention-Driven Relation Network (IDRNet), which leverages a deletion diagnostics procedure to guide the modelling of contextual relations among different pixels. This method brings consistent performance improvements to state-of-the-art segmentation frameworks and achieves competitive results on popular benchmark datasets.

Weaknesses

1. The paper lacks the presentation of additional time-consuming and memory-consuming aspects associated with the Intervention-Driven context module. 2. The paper lacks interpretability regarding how the Intervention-Driven context module improves contextual information aggregation. 3. Some minor issues: confusion in the writing, some symbols used in equations or throughout the paper are not adequately explained.

Questions

1. There is confusion in the writing. For example, in the paper, IDRNet refers to an additional module that enhances contextual information aggregation. However, in Table 1, IDRNet is described as a simple FCN segmentation framework equipped with IDRNet. This inconsistency can cause confusion for readers. 2. Without using the Intervention-Driven context module, would combining the Multi-Scale-Driven and Similarity-Driven modules yield better results? 3. What is the extent of the additional time-consuming and memory-consuming aspects associated with the intervention-Driven context module? 4. In equation (8), the meaning of $R_a$ is not explained." 5. In equation (9), the meaning of $\oplus$ is not explained. Is it element-wise addition or channel-wise merging?

Rating

4: Borderline reject: Technically solid paper where reasons to reject, e.g., limited evaluation, outweigh reasons to accept, e.g., good evaluation. Please use sparingly.

Confidence

3: You are fairly confident in your assessment. It is possible that you did not understand some parts of the submission or that you are unfamiliar with some pieces of related work. Math/other details were not carefully checked.

Soundness

3 good

Presentation

2 fair

Contribution

3 good

Limitations

There is no limitation claimed in the paper. For example, the cost of the Intervention-Driven context module, particularly in terms of training time and storage, remains unknown.

Reviewer q3X92023-08-13

Thanks for providing the rebuttal. Additional experiments are presented, and the authors discuss more details for this submission, I can upgrade to weak accept. Authors need to improve the draft a lot for the camera-ready version if this submission is accepted, by explaining the method section more clearly.

Reviewer dJpB2023-08-17

Thanks for providing the clarifications. Please could you let me know how you apply IDRNet to Mask2Former? In this case, did you apply the diagnostics to the pixel representations? Did you use mask embeddings directly as your object embeddings? Furthermore, could you please clarify in the OCR analysis table what the backbone is for each experiment? Is it the same backbone for OCR and IDR?

Authorsrebuttal2023-08-19

> **Please could you let me know how you apply IDRNet to Mask2Former? In this case, did you apply the diagnostics to the pixel representations? Did you use mask embeddings directly as your object embeddings?** We are glad to explain how we apply IDRNet to Mask2Former. Actually, **we did not make extra designs for applying IDRNet to Mask2Former**. Specifically, we simply add IDR module after Swin-Large backbone to enhance the backbone output features and then, input the enhanced features to Mask2FormerHead to obtain mask predictions and the corresponding classification scores. Thus, when applying IDRNet to Mask2Former, we still **apply the deletion diagnostics to the semantic-level representations** to update the relation matrix $\mathcal{M}$ as described in Section 3 in the submitted manuscript. And we did not use the mask embeddings directly as our object embeddings since **we leverage the pixel-level pseudo labels to calculate the semantic-level representations**. To provide full details of our method, our code will be made publicly available. > **Could you please clarify in the OCR analysis table what the backbone is for each experiment? Is it the same backbone for OCR and IDR?** We are glad to clarify this point. In the OCR analysis table, all listed context modules, including OCR (we refer to mmsegmentation to implement OCR with ResNet backbone) and IDR, **use the same backbone, _i.e._, ResNet-50**.

Program Chairsdecision2023-09-21

Decision

Accept (poster)

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