UC San Diego (UCSD) is a major research university with strengths in oceanography, bioengineering, and cognitive science. Its collaborative approach drives impactful discoveries in science and health. NECLA and UCSD have developed research on exploiting unlabeled data for vision-and-language pretraining. Inferred collaborations probably explored multimodal transformers or contrastive learning techniques to boost performance in low-supervision visual AI tasks. Researchers from UCSD and NECLA co-authored a study that examined the benefits of leveraging vision and language models for tasks involving unlabeled data. By combining large-scale visual and textual pretraining, the work highlighted strategies for improving performance in low-supervision scenarios, key for scalable AI development.

Posts

Learning Semantic Segmentation from Multiple Datasets with Label Shifts

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While it is desirable to train segmentation models on an aggregation of multiple datasets, a major challenge is that the label space of each dataset may be in conflict with one another. To tackle this challenge, we propose UniSeg, an effective and model-agnostic approach to automatically train segmentation models across multiple datasets with heterogeneous label spaces, without requiring any manual relabeling efforts. Specifically, we introduce two new ideas that account for conflicting and co-occurring labels to achieve better generalization performance in unseen domains. First, we identify a gradient conflict in training incurred by mismatched label spaces and propose a class-independent binary cross-entropy loss to alleviate such label conflicts. Second, we propose a loss function that considers class-relationships across datasets for a better multi-dataset training scheme. Extensive quantitative and qualitative analyses on road-scene datasets show that UniSeg improves over multi-dataset baselines, especially on unseen datasets, e.g., achieving more than 8%p gain in IoU on KITTI. Furthermore, UniSeg achieves 39.4% IoU on the WildDash2 public benchmark, making it one of the strongest submissions in the zero-shot setting. Our project page is available at https://www.nec-labs.com/~mas/UniSeg.

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Cross-Domain Similarity Learning for Face Recognition in Unseen Domains

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Face recognition models trained under the assumption of identical training and test distributions often suffer from poor generalization when faced with unknown variations, such as a novel ethnicity or unpredictable individual make-ups during test time. In this paper, we introduce a novel cross-domain metric learning loss, which we dub Cross-Domain Triplet (CDT) loss, to improve face recognition in unseen domains. The CDT loss encourages learning semantically meaningful features by enforcing compact feature clusters of identities from one domain, where the compactness is measured by underlying similarity metrics that belong to another training domain with different statistics. Intuitively, it discriminatively correlates explicit metrics derived from one domain, with triplet samples from another domain in a unified loss function to be minimized within a network, which leads to better alignment of the training domains. The network parameters are further enforced to learn generalized features under domain shift, in a model-agnostic learning pipeline. Unlike the recent work of Meta Face Recognition [18], our method does not require careful hard-pair sample mining and filtering strategy during training. Extensive experiments on various face recognition benchmarks show the superiority of our method in handling variations, compared to baseline and the state-of-the-art methods.

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Peek-a-boo: Occlusion Reasoning in Indoor Scenes with Plane Representations

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We address the challenging task of occlusion-aware indoor 3D scene understanding. We represent scenes by a set of planes, where each one is defined by its normal, offset and two masks outlining (i) the extent of the visible part and (ii) the full region that consists of both visible and occluded parts of the plane. We infer these planes from a single input image with a novel neural network architecture. It consists of a two-branch category-specific module that aims to predict layout and objects of the scene separately so that different types of planes can be handled better. We also introduce a novel loss function based on plane warping that can leverage multiple views at training time for improved occlusion-aware reasoning. In order to train and evaluate our occlusion-reasoning model, we use the ScanNet dataset and propose (i) a strategy to automatically extract ground truth for both visible and hidden regions and (ii) a new evaluation metric that specifically focuses on the prediction in hidden regions. We empirically demonstrate that our proposed approach can achieve higher accuracy for occlusion reasoning compared to competitive baselines on the ScanNet dataset, e.g. 42.65% relative improvement on hidden regions.

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Private-kNN Practical Differential Privacy for Computer Vision

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With increasing ethical and legal concerns on privacy for deep models in visual recognition, differential privacy has emerged as a mechanism to disguise membership of sensitive data in training datasets. Recent methods like Private Aggregation of Teacher Ensembles (PATE) leverage a large ensemble of teacher models trained on disjoint subsets of private data, to transfer knowledge to a student model with privacy guarantees. However, labeled vision data is often expensive and datasets, when split into many disjoint training sets, lead to significantly sub-optimal accuracy and thus hardly sustain good privacy bounds. We propose a practically data-efficient scheme based on private release of k-nearest neighbor (kNN) queries, which altogether avoids splitting the training dataset. Our approach allows the use of privacy-amplification by subsampling and iterative refinement of the kNN feature embedding. We rigorously analyze the theoretical properties of our method and demonstrate strong experimental performance on practical computer vision datasets for face attribute recognition and person reidentification. In particular, we achieve comparable or better accuracy than PATE while reducing more than 90% of the privacy loss, thereby providing the “most practical method to-date” for private deep learning in computer vision.

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Active Adversarial Domain Adaptation

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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.

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Adversarial Learning of Privacy-Preserving and Task-Oriented Representations

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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.

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Domain Adaptation for Structured Output via Discriminative Patch Representations

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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.

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Pose-variant 3D Facial Attribute Generation

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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.

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Learning to Look around Objects for Top-View Representations of Outdoor Scenes

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Given a single RGB image of a complex outdoor road scene in the perspective view, we address the novel problem of estimating an occlusion-reasoned semantic scene layout in the top-view. This challenging problem not only requires an accurate understanding of both the 3D geometry and the semantics of the visible scene, but also of occluded areas. We propose a convolutional neural network that learns to predict occluded portions of the scene layout by looking around foreground objects like cars or pedestrians. But instead of hallucinating RGB values, we show that directly predicting the semantics and depths in the occluded areas enables a better transformation into the top-view. We further show that this initial top-view representation can be significantly enhanced by learning priors and rules about typical road layouts from simulated or, if available, map data. Crucially, training our model does not require costly or subjective human annotations for occluded areas or the top-view, but rather uses readily available annotations for standard semantic segmentation in the perspective view. We extensively evaluate and analyze our approach on the KITTI and Cityscapes data sets.

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Hierarchical Metric Learning and Matching for 2D and 3D Geometric Correspondences

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Interest point descriptors have fueled progress on almost every problem in computer vision. Recent advances in deep neural networks have enabled task-specific learned descriptors that outperform hand-crafted descriptors on many problems. We demonstrate that commonly used metric learning approaches do not optimally leverage the feature hierarchies learned in a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), especially when applied to the task of geometric feature matching. While a metric loss applied to the deepest layer of a CNN, is often expected to yield ideal features irrespective of the task, in fact the growing receptive field as well as striding effects cause shallower features to be better at high precision matching tasks. We leverage this insight together with explicit supervision at multiple levels of the feature hierarchy for better regularization, to learn more effective descriptors in the context of geometric matching tasks. Further, we propose to use activation maps at different layers of a CNN, as an effective and principled replacement for the multi-resolution image pyramids often used for matching tasks. We propose concrete CNN architectures employing these ideas and evaluate them on multiple datasets for 2D and 3D geometric matching as well as optical flow, demonstrating state-of-the-art results and generalization across datasets.

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