arXiv subjects

Adam W. Harley

Publications and source records attributed to Adam W. Harley.

32 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Embodied Language Grounding with 3D Visual Feature Representations

We propose associating language utterances to 3D visual abstractions of the scene they describe. The 3D visual abstractions are encoded as 3-dimensional visual feature maps. We infer these 3D visual scene feature maps from RGB images of the scene via view prediction: when the generated 3D scene feature map is neurally projected from a camera viewpoint, it should match the corresponding RGB image. We present generative models that condition on the dependency tree of an utterance and generate a corresponding visual 3D feature map as well as reason about its plausibility, and detector models that condition on both the dependency tree of an utterance and a related image and localize the object referents in the 3D feature map inferred from the image. Our model outperforms models of language and vision that associate language with 2D CNN activations or 2D images by a large margin in a variety of tasks, such as, classifying plausibility of utterances, detecting referential expressions, and supplying rewards for trajectory optimization of object placement policies from language instructions. We perform numerous ablations and show the improved performance of our detectors is due to its better generalization across camera viewpoints and lack of object interferences in the inferred 3D feature space, and the improved performance of our generators is due to their ability to spatially reason about objects and their configurations in 3D when mapping from language to scenes.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

CoCoNets: Continuous Contrastive 3D Scene Representations

This paper explores self-supervised learning of amodal 3D feature representations from RGB and RGB-D posed images and videos, agnostic to object and scene semantic content, and evaluates the resulting scene representations in the downstream tasks of visual correspondence, object tracking, and object detection. The model infers a latent3D representation of the scene in the form of 3D feature points, where each continuous world 3D point is mapped to its corresponding feature vector. The model is trained for contrastive view prediction by rendering 3D feature clouds in queried viewpoints and matching against the 3D feature point cloud predicted from the query view. Notably, the representation can be queried for any 3D location, even if it is not visible from the input view. Our model brings together three powerful ideas of recent exciting research work: 3D feature grids as a neural bottleneck for view prediction, implicit functions for handling resolution limitations of 3D grids, and contrastive learning for unsupervised training of feature representations. We show the resulting 3D visual feature representations effectively scale across objects and scenes, imagine information occluded or missing from the input viewpoints, track objects over time, align semantically related objects in 3D, and improve 3D object detection. We outperform many existing state-of-the-art methods for 3D feature learning and view prediction, which are either limited by 3D grid spatial resolution, do not attempt to build amodal 3D representations, or do not handle combinatorial scene variability due to their non-convolutional bottlenecks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Track, Check, Repeat: An EM Approach to Unsupervised Tracking

We propose an unsupervised method for detecting and tracking moving objects in 3D, in unlabelled RGB-D videos. The method begins with classic handcrafted techniques for segmenting objects using motion cues: we estimate optical flow and camera motion, and conservatively segment regions that appear to be moving independently of the background. Treating these initial segments as pseudo-labels, we learn an ensemble of appearance-based 2D and 3D detectors, under heavy data augmentation. We use this ensemble to detect new instances of the "moving" type, even if they are not moving, and add these as new pseudo-labels. Our method is an expectation-maximization algorithm, where in the expectation step we fire all modules and look for agreement among them, and in the maximization step we re-train the modules to improve this agreement. The constraint of ensemble agreement helps combat contamination of the generated pseudo-labels (during the E step), and data augmentation helps the modules generalize to yet-unlabelled data (during the M step). We compare against existing unsupervised object discovery and tracking methods, using challenging videos from CATER and KITTI, and show strong improvements over the state-of-the-art.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Move to See Better: Self-Improving Embodied Object Detection

Passive methods for object detection and segmentation treat images of the same scene as individual samples and do not exploit object permanence across multiple views. Generalization to novel or difficult viewpoints thus requires additional training with lots of annotations. In contrast, humans often recognize objects by simply moving around, to get more informative viewpoints. In this paper, we propose a method for improving object detection in testing environments, assuming nothing but an embodied agent with a pre-trained 2D object detector. Our agent collects multi-view data, generates 2D and 3D pseudo-labels, and fine-tunes its detector in a self-supervised manner. Experiments on both indoor and outdoor datasets show that (1) our method obtains high-quality 2D and 3D pseudo-labels from multi-view RGB-D data; (2) fine-tuning with these pseudo-labels improves the 2D detector significantly in the test environment; (3) training a 3D detector with our pseudo-labels outperforms a prior self-supervised method by a large margin; (4) given weak supervision, our method can generate better pseudo-labels for novel objects.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

3D Object Recognition By Corresponding and Quantizing Neural 3D Scene Representations

We propose a system that learns to detect objects and infer their 3D poses in RGB-D images. Many existing systems can identify objects and infer 3D poses, but they heavily rely on human labels and 3D annotations. The challenge here is to achieve this without relying on strong supervision signals. To address this challenge, we propose a model that maps RGB-D images to a set of 3D visual feature maps in a differentiable fully-convolutional manner, supervised by predicting views. The 3D feature maps correspond to a featurization of the 3D world scene depicted in the images. The object 3D feature representations are invariant to camera viewpoint changes or zooms, which means feature matching can identify similar objects under different camera viewpoints. We can compare the 3D feature maps of two objects by searching alignment across scales and 3D rotations, and, as a result of the operation, we can estimate pose and scale changes without the need for 3D pose annotations. We cluster object feature maps into a set of 3D prototypes that represent familiar objects in canonical scales and orientations. We then parse images by inferring the prototype identity and 3D pose for each detected object. We compare our method to numerous baselines that do not learn 3D feature visual representations or do not attempt to correspond features across scenes, and outperform them by a large margin in the tasks of object retrieval and object pose estimation. Thanks to the 3D nature of the object-centric feature maps, the visual similarity cues are invariant to 3D pose changes or small scale changes, which gives our method an advantage over 2D and 1D methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Tracking Emerges by Looking Around Static Scenes, with Neural 3D Mapping

We hypothesize that an agent that can look around in static scenes can learn rich visual representations applicable to 3D object tracking in complex dynamic scenes. We are motivated in this pursuit by the fact that the physical world itself is mostly static, and multiview correspondence labels are relatively cheap to collect in static scenes, e.g., by triangulation. We propose to leverage multiview data of \textit{static points} in arbitrary scenes (static or dynamic), to learn a neural 3D mapping module which produces features that are correspondable across time. The neural 3D mapper consumes RGB-D data as input, and produces a 3D voxel grid of deep features as output. We train the voxel features to be correspondable across viewpoints, using a contrastive loss, and correspondability across time emerges automatically. At test time, given an RGB-D video with approximate camera poses, and given the 3D box of an object to track, we track the target object by generating a map of each timestep and locating the object's features within each map. In contrast to models that represent video streams in 2D or 2.5D, our model's 3D scene representation is disentangled from projection artifacts, is stable under camera motion, and is robust to partial occlusions. We test the proposed architectures in challenging simulated and real data, and show that our unsupervised 3D object trackers outperform prior unsupervised 2D and 2.5D trackers, and approach the accuracy of supervised trackers. This work demonstrates that 3D object trackers can emerge without tracking labels, through multiview self-supervision on static data.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Learning from Unlabelled Videos Using Contrastive Predictive Neural 3D Mapping

Predictive coding theories suggest that the brain learns by predicting observations at various levels of abstraction. One of the most basic prediction tasks is view prediction: how would a given scene look from an alternative viewpoint? Humans excel at this task. Our ability to imagine and fill in missing information is tightly coupled with perception: we feel as if we see the world in 3 dimensions, while in fact, information from only the front surface of the world hits our retinas. This paper explores the role of view prediction in the development of 3D visual recognition. We propose neural 3D mapping networks, which take as input 2.5D (color and depth) video streams captured by a moving camera, and lift them to stable 3D feature maps of the scene, by disentangling the scene content from the motion of the camera. The model also projects its 3D feature maps to novel viewpoints, to predict and match against target views. We propose contrastive prediction losses to replace the standard color regression loss, and show that this leads to better performance on complex photorealistic data. We show that the proposed model learns visual representations useful for (1) semi-supervised learning of 3D object detectors, and (2) unsupervised learning of 3D moving object detectors, by estimating the motion of the inferred 3D feature maps in videos of dynamic scenes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that empirically shows view prediction to be a scalable self-supervised task beneficial to 3D object detection.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Image Disentanglement and Uncooperative Re-Entanglement for High-Fidelity Image-to-Image Translation

Cross-domain image-to-image translation should satisfy two requirements: (1) preserve the information that is common to both domains, and (2) generate convincing images covering variations that appear in the target domain. This is challenging, especially when there are no example translations available as supervision. Adversarial cycle consistency was recently proposed as a solution, with beautiful and creative results, yielding much follow-up work. However, augmented reality applications cannot readily use such techniques to provide users with compelling translations of real scenes, because the translations do not have high-fidelity constraints. In other words, current models are liable to change details that should be preserved: while re-texturing a face, they may alter the face's expression in an unpredictable way. In this paper, we introduce the problem of high-fidelity image-to-image translation, and present a method for solving it. Our main insight is that low-fidelity translations typically escape a cycle-consistency penalty, because the back-translator learns to compensate for the forward-translator's errors. We therefore introduce an optimization technique that prevents the networks from cooperating: simply train each network only when its input data is real. Prior works, in comparison, train each network with a mix of real and generated data. Experimental results show that our method accurately disentangles the factors that separate the domains, and converges to semantics-preserving translations that prior methods miss.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Reward Learning from Narrated Demonstrations

Humans effortlessly "program" one another by communicating goals and desires in natural language. In contrast, humans program robotic behaviours by indicating desired object locations and poses to be achieved, by providing RGB images of goal configurations, or supplying a demonstration to be imitated. None of these methods generalize across environment variations, and they convey the goal in awkward technical terms. This work proposes joint learning of natural language grounding and instructable behavioural policies reinforced by perceptual detectors of natural language expressions, grounded to the sensory inputs of the robotic agent. Our supervision is narrated visual demonstrations(NVD), which are visual demonstrations paired with verbal narration (as opposed to being silent). We introduce a dataset of NVD where teachers perform activities while describing them in detail. We map the teachers' descriptions to perceptual reward detectors, and use them to train corresponding behavioural policies in simulation.We empirically show that our instructable agents (i) learn visual reward detectors using a small number of examples by exploiting hard negative mined configurations from demonstration dynamics, (ii) develop pick-and place policies using learned visual reward detectors, (iii) benefit from object-factorized state representations that mimic the syntactic structure of natural language goal expressions, and (iv) can execute behaviours that involve novel objects in novel locations at test time, instructed by natural language.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

Adversarial Inverse Graphics Networks: Learning 2D-to-3D Lifting and Image-to-Image Translation from Unpaired Supervision

Researchers have developed excellent feed-forward models that learn to map images to desired outputs, such as to the images' latent factors, or to other images, using supervised learning. Learning such mappings from unlabelled data, or improving upon supervised models by exploiting unlabelled data, remains elusive. We argue that there are two important parts to learning without annotations: (i) matching the predictions to the input observations, and (ii) matching the predictions to known priors. We propose Adversarial Inverse Graphics networks (AIGNs): weakly supervised neural network models that combine feedback from rendering their predictions, with distribution matching between their predictions and a collection of ground-truth factors. We apply AIGNs to 3D human pose estimation and 3D structure and egomotion estimation, and outperform models supervised by only paired annotations. We further apply AIGNs to facial image transformation using super-resolution and inpainting renderers, while deliberately adding biases in the ground-truth datasets. Our model seamlessly incorporates such biases, rendering input faces towards young, old, feminine, masculine or Tom Cruise-like equivalents (depending on the chosen bias), or adding lip and nose augmentations while inpainting concealed lips and noses.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

Segmentation-Aware Convolutional Networks Using Local Attention Masks

We introduce an approach to integrate segmentation information within a convolutional neural network (CNN). This counter-acts the tendency of CNNs to smooth information across regions and increases their spatial precision. To obtain segmentation information, we set up a CNN to provide an embedding space where region co-membership can be estimated based on Euclidean distance. We use these embeddings to compute a local attention mask relative to every neuron position. We incorporate such masks in CNNs and replace the convolution operation with a "segmentation-aware" variant that allows a neuron to selectively attend to inputs coming from its own region. We call the resulting network a segmentation-aware CNN because it adapts its filters at each image point according to local segmentation cues. We demonstrate the merit of our method on two widely different dense prediction tasks, that involve classification (semantic segmentation) and regression (optical flow). Our results show that in semantic segmentation we can match the performance of DenseCRFs while being faster and simpler, and in optical flow we obtain clearly sharper responses than networks that do not use local attention masks. In both cases, segmentation-aware convolution yields systematic improvements over strong baselines. Source code for this work is available online at http://cs.cmu.edu/~aharley/segaware.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2016

Back to Basics: Unsupervised Learning of Optical Flow via Brightness Constancy and Motion Smoothness

Recently, convolutional networks (convnets) have proven useful for predicting optical flow. Much of this success is predicated on the availability of large datasets that require expensive and involved data acquisition and laborious la- beling. To bypass these challenges, we propose an unsuper- vised approach (i.e., without leveraging groundtruth flow) to train a convnet end-to-end for predicting optical flow be- tween two images. We use a loss function that combines a data term that measures photometric constancy over time with a spatial term that models the expected variation of flow across the image. Together these losses form a proxy measure for losses based on the groundtruth flow. Empiri- cally, we show that a strong convnet baseline trained with the proposed unsupervised approach outperforms the same network trained with supervision on the KITTI dataset.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2016

Learning Dense Convolutional Embeddings for Semantic Segmentation

This paper proposes a new deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) architecture that learns pixel embeddings, such that pairwise distances between the embeddings can be used to infer whether or not the pixels lie on the same region. That is, for any two pixels on the same object, the embeddings are trained to be similar; for any pair that straddles an object boundary, the embeddings are trained to be dissimilar. Experimental results show that when this embedding network is used in conjunction with a DCNN trained on semantic segmentation, there is a systematic improvement in per-pixel classification accuracy. Our contributions are integrated in the popular Caffe deep learning framework, and consist in straightforward modifications to convolution routines. As such, they can be exploited for any task involving convolution layers.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2015

Evaluation of Deep Convolutional Nets for Document Image Classification and Retrieval

This paper presents a new state-of-the-art for document image classification and retrieval, using features learned by deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In object and scene analysis, deep neural nets are capable of learning a hierarchical chain of abstraction from pixel inputs to concise and descriptive representations. The current work explores this capacity in the realm of document analysis, and confirms that this representation strategy is superior to a variety of popular hand-crafted alternatives. Experiments also show that (i) features extracted from CNNs are robust to compression, (ii) CNNs trained on non-document images transfer well to document analysis tasks, and (iii) enforcing region-specific feature-learning is unnecessary given sufficient training data. This work also makes available a new labelled subset of the IIT-CDIP collection, containing 400,000 document images across 16 categories, useful for training new CNNs for document analysis.

cs.CV↗