Posts

Active Adversarial Domain Adaptation

We propose an active learning approach for transferring representations across domains. Our approach, active adversarial domain adaptation (AADA), explores a duality between two related problems: adversarial domain alignment and importance sampling for adapting models across domains. The former uses a domain discriminative model to align domains, while the latter utilizes the model to weigh samples to account for distribution shifts. Specifically, our importance weight promotes unlabeled samples with large uncertainty in classification and diversity compared to la-beled examples, thus serving as a sample selection scheme for active learning. We show that these two views can be unified in one framework for domain adaptation and transfer learning when the source domain has many labeled examples while the target domain does not. AADA provides significant improvements over fine-tuning based approaches and other sampling methods when the two domains are closely related. Results on challenging domain adaptation tasks such as object detection demonstrate that the advantage over baseline approaches is retained even after hundreds of examples being actively annotated.

Adversarial Learning of Privacy-Preserving and Task-Oriented Representations

Data privacy has emerged as an important issue as data-driven deep learning has been an essential component of modern machine learning systems. For instance, there could be a potential privacy risk of machine learning systems via the model inversion attack, whose goal is to reconstruct the input data from the latent representation of deep networks. Our work aims at learning a privacy-preserving and task-oriented representation to defend against such model inversion attacks. Specifically, we propose an adversarial reconstruction learning framework that prevents the latent representations decoded into original input data. By simulating the expected behavior of adversary, our framework is realized by minimizing the negative pixel reconstruction loss or the negative feature reconstruction (i.e., perceptual distance) loss. We validate the proposed method on face attribute prediction, showing that our method allows protecting visual privacy with a small decrease in utility performance. In addition, we show the utility-privacy trade-off with different choices of hyperparameter for negative perceptual distance loss at training, allowing service providers to determine the right level of privacy-protection with a certain utility performance. Moreover, we provide an extensive study with different selections of features, tasks, and the data to further analyze their influence on privacy protection.

Degeneracy in Self-Calibration Revisited and a Deep Learning Solution for Uncalibrated SLAM

Self-calibration of camera intrinsics and radial distortion has a long history of research in the computer vision community. However, it remains rare to see real applications of such techniques to modern Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) systems, especially in driving scenarios. In this paper, we revisit the geometric approach to this problem, and provide a theoretical proof that explicitly shows the ambiguity between radial distortion and scene depth when two-view geometry is used to self-calibrate the radial distortion. In view of such geometric degeneracy, we propose a learning approach that trains a convolutional neural network (CNN) on a large amount of synthetic data. We demonstrate the utility of our proposed method by applying it as a checkerboard-free calibration tool for SLAM, achieving comparable or superior performance to previous learning and hand-crafted method

Domain Adaptation for Structured Output via Discriminative Patch Representations

Predicting structured outputs such as semantic segmentation relies on expensive per-pixel annotations to learn supervised models like convolutional neural networks. However, models trained on one data domain may not generalize well to other domains without annotations for model finetuning. To avoid the labor-intensive process of annotation, we develop a domain adaptation method to adapt the source data to the unlabeled target domain. We propose to learn discriminative feature representations of patches in the source domain by discovering multiple modes of patch-wise output distribution through the construction of a clustered space. With such representations as guidance, we use an adversarial learning scheme to push the feature representations of target patches in the clustered space closer to the distributions of source patches. In addition, we show that our framework is complementary to existing domain adaptation techniques and achieves consistent improvements on semantic segmentation. Extensive ablations and results are demonstrated on numerous benchmark datasets with various settings, such as synthetic-to-real and cross-city scenarios.

Deep Supervision with Intermediate Concepts (IEEE)

Read Deep Supervision with Intermediate Concepts (IEEE). Recent data-driven approaches to scene interpretation predominantly pose inference as an end-to-end black-box mapping, commonly performed by a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). However, decades of work on perceptual organization in both human and machine vision suggest that there are often intermediate representations that are intrinsic to an inference task, and which provide essential structure to improve generalization. In this work, we explore an approach for injecting prior domain structure into neural network training by supervising hidden layers of a CNN with intermediate concepts that normally are not observed in practice. We formulate a probabilistic framework which formalizes these notions and predicts improved generalization via this deep supervision method. One advantage of this approach is that we are able to train only from synthetic CAD renderings of cluttered scenes, where concept values can be extracted, but apply the results to real images. Our implementation achieves the state-of-the-art performance of 2D/3D keypoint localization and image classification on real image benchmarks including KITTI, PASCALVOC, PASCAL3D+, IKEA, and CIFAR100. We provide additional evidence that our approach outperforms alternative forms of supervision, such as multi-task networks.

Pose-variant 3D Facial Attribute Generation

We address the challenging problem of generating facial attributes using a single image in an unconstrained pose. In contrast to prior works that largely consider generation on 2D near-frontal images, we propose a GAN-based framework to generate attributes directly on a dense 3D representation given by UV texture and position maps, resulting in photorealistic, geometrically-consistent and identity-preserving outputs. Starting from a self-occluded UV texture map obtained by applying an off-the-shelf 3D reconstruction method, we propose two novel components. First, a texture completion generative adversarial network (TC-GAN) completes the partial UV texture map. Second, a 3D attribute generation GAN (3DA-GAN) synthesizes the target attribute while obtaining an appearance consistent with 3D face geometry and preserving identity. Extensive experiments on CelebA, LFW and IJB-A show that our method achieves consistently better attribute generation accuracy than prior methods, a higher degree of qualitative photorealism and preserves face identity information.

A Dataset for High-Level 3D Scene Understanding of Complex Road Scenes in the Top-View

We introduce a novel dataset for high-level 3D scene understanding of complex road scenes. Our annotations extend the existing datasets KITTI [5] and nuScenes [1] with semantically and geometrically meaningful attributes like the number of lanes or the existence of, and distance to, intersections, sidewalks and crosswalks. Our attributes are rich enough to build a meaningful representation of the scene in the top-view and provide a tangible interface to the real world for several practical applications.

Feature Transfer Learning for Face Recognition with Under-Represented Data

Despite the large volume of face recognition datasets, there is a significant portion of subjects, of which the samples are insufficient and thus under-represented. Ignoring such significant portion results in insufficient training data. Training with under-represented data leads to biased classifiers in conventionally-trained deep networks. In this paper, we propose a center-based feature transfer framework to augment the feature space of under-represented subjects from the regular subjects that have sufficiently diverse samples. A Gaussian prior of the variance is assumed across all subjects and the variance from regular ones are transferred to the under-represented ones. This encourages the under-represented distribution to be closer to the regular distribution. Further, an alternating training regimen is proposed to simultaneously achieve less biased classifiers and a more discriminative feature representation. We conduct ablative study to mimic the under-represented datasets by varying the portion of under-represented classes on the MS-Celeb-1M dataset. Advantageous results on LFW, IJB-A and MS-Celeb-1M demonstrate the effectiveness of our feature transfer and training strategy, compared to both general baselines and state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, our feature transfer successfully presents smooth visual interpolation, which conducts disentanglement to preserve identity of a class while augmenting its feature space with non-identity variations such as pose and lighting.

Gotta Adapt ’Em All: Joint Pixel and Feature-Level Domain Adaptation for Recognition in the Wild

Recent developments in deep domain adaptation have allowed knowledge transfer from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain at the level of intermediate features or input pixels. We propose that advantages may be derived by combining them, in the form of different insights that lead to a novel design and complementary properties that result in better performance. At the feature level, inspired by insights from semi-supervised learning, we propose a classification-aware domain adversarial neural network that brings target examples into more classifiable regions of source domain. Next, we posit that computer vision insights are more amenable to injection at the pixel level. In particular, we use 3D geometry and image synthesis based on a generalized appearance flow to preserve identity across pose transformations, while using an attribute-conditioned CycleGAN to translate a single source into multiple target images that differ in lower-level properties such as lighting. Besides standard UDA benchmark, we validate on a novel and apt problem of car recognition in unlabeled surveillance images using labeled images from the web, handling explicitly specified, nameable factors of variation through pixel-level and implicit, unspecified factors through feature-level adaptation.

Learning Structure-And-Motion-Aware Rolling Shutter Correction

An exact method of correcting the rolling shutter (RS) effect requires recovering the underlying geometry, i.e. the scene structures and the camera motions between scanlines or between views. However, the multiple-view geometry for RS cameras is much more complicated than its global shutter (GS) counterpart, with various degeneracies. In this paper, we first make a theoretical contribution by showing that RS two-view geometry is degenerate in the case of pure translational camera motion. In view of the complex RS geometry, we then propose a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based method which learns the underlying geometry (camera motion and scene structure) from just a single RS image and perform RS image correction. We call our method structure-and-motion-aware RS correction because it reasons about the concealed motions between the scanlines as well as the scene structure. Our method learns from a large-scale dataset synthesized in a geometrically meaningful way where the RS effect is generated in a manner consistent with the camera motion and scene structure. In extensive experiments, our method achieves superior performance compared to other state-of-the-art methods for single image RS correction and subsequent Structure from Motion (SfM) applications.