arXiv subjects

Ming-Hsuan Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Ming-Hsuan Yang.

At least 397 records · Page 22Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Show, Match and Segment: Joint Weakly Supervised Learning of Semantic Matching and Object Co-segmentation

We present an approach for jointly matching and segmenting object instances of the same category within a collection of images. In contrast to existing algorithms that tackle the tasks of semantic matching and object co-segmentation in isolation, our method exploits the complementary nature of the two tasks. The key insights of our method are two-fold. First, the estimated dense correspondence fields from semantic matching provide supervision for object co-segmentation by enforcing consistency between the predicted masks from a pair of images. Second, the predicted object masks from object co-segmentation in turn allow us to reduce the adverse effects due to background clutters for improving semantic matching. Our model is end-to-end trainable and does not require supervision from manually annotated correspondences and object masks. We validate the efficacy of our approach on five benchmark datasets: TSS, Internet, PF-PASCAL, PF-WILLOW, and SPair-71k, and show that our algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods on both semantic matching and object co-segmentation tasks.

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arXiv2020

Collaborative Distillation for Ultra-Resolution Universal Style Transfer

Universal style transfer methods typically leverage rich representations from deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models (e.g., VGG-19) pre-trained on large collections of images. Despite the effectiveness, its application is heavily constrained by the large model size to handle ultra-resolution images given limited memory. In this work, we present a new knowledge distillation method (named Collaborative Distillation) for encoder-decoder based neural style transfer to reduce the convolutional filters. The main idea is underpinned by a finding that the encoder-decoder pairs construct an exclusive collaborative relationship, which is regarded as a new kind of knowledge for style transfer models. Moreover, to overcome the feature size mismatch when applying collaborative distillation, a linear embedding loss is introduced to drive the student network to learn a linear embedding of the teacher's features. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our method when applied to different universal style transfer approaches (WCT and AdaIN), even if the model size is reduced by 15.5 times. Especially, on WCT with the compressed models, we achieve ultra-resolution (over 40 megapixels) universal style transfer on a 12GB GPU for the first time. Further experiments on optimization-based stylization scheme show the generality of our algorithm on different stylization paradigms. Our code and trained models are available at https://github.com/mingsun-tse/collaborative-distillation.

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arXiv2020

Rethinking Class-Balanced Methods for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition from a Domain Adaptation Perspective

Object frequency in the real world often follows a power law, leading to a mismatch between datasets with long-tailed class distributions seen by a machine learning model and our expectation of the model to perform well on all classes. We analyze this mismatch from a domain adaptation point of view. First of all, we connect existing class-balanced methods for long-tailed classification to target shift, a well-studied scenario in domain adaptation. The connection reveals that these methods implicitly assume that the training data and test data share the same class-conditioned distribution, which does not hold in general and especially for the tail classes. While a head class could contain abundant and diverse training examples that well represent the expected data at inference time, the tail classes are often short of representative training data. To this end, we propose to augment the classic class-balanced learning by explicitly estimating the differences between the class-conditioned distributions with a meta-learning approach. We validate our approach with six benchmark datasets and three loss functions.

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arXiv2020

CycleISP: Real Image Restoration via Improved Data Synthesis

The availability of large-scale datasets has helped unleash the true potential of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, for the single-image denoising problem, capturing a real dataset is an unacceptably expensive and cumbersome procedure. Consequently, image denoising algorithms are mostly developed and evaluated on synthetic data that is usually generated with a widespread assumption of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). While the CNNs achieve impressive results on these synthetic datasets, they do not perform well when applied on real camera images, as reported in recent benchmark datasets. This is mainly because the AWGN is not adequate for modeling the real camera noise which is signal-dependent and heavily transformed by the camera imaging pipeline. In this paper, we present a framework that models camera imaging pipeline in forward and reverse directions. It allows us to produce any number of realistic image pairs for denoising both in RAW and sRGB spaces. By training a new image denoising network on realistic synthetic data, we achieve the state-of-the-art performance on real camera benchmark datasets. The parameters in our model are ~5 times lesser than the previous best method for RAW denoising. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the proposed framework generalizes beyond image denoising problem e.g., for color matching in stereoscopic cinema. The source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/swz30/CycleISP.

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arXiv2020

Self-supervised Single-view 3D Reconstruction via Semantic Consistency

We learn a self-supervised, single-view 3D reconstruction model that predicts the 3D mesh shape, texture and camera pose of a target object with a collection of 2D images and silhouettes. The proposed method does not necessitate 3D supervision, manually annotated keypoints, multi-view images of an object or a prior 3D template. The key insight of our work is that objects can be represented as a collection of deformable parts, and each part is semantically coherent across different instances of the same category (e.g., wings on birds and wheels on cars). Therefore, by leveraging self-supervisedly learned part segmentation of a large collection of category-specific images, we can effectively enforce semantic consistency between the reconstructed meshes and the original images. This significantly reduces ambiguities during joint prediction of shape and camera pose of an object, along with texture. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to try and solve the single-view reconstruction problem without a category-specific template mesh or semantic keypoints. Thus our model can easily generalize to various object categories without such labels, e.g., horses, penguins, etc. Through a variety of experiments on several categories of deformable and rigid objects, we demonstrate that our unsupervised method performs comparably if not better than existing category-specific reconstruction methods learned with supervision.

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arXiv2020

Cross-Domain Few-Shot Classification via Learned Feature-Wise Transformation

Few-shot classification aims to recognize novel categories with only few labeled images in each class. Existing metric-based few-shot classification algorithms predict categories by comparing the feature embeddings of query images with those from a few labeled images (support examples) using a learned metric function. While promising performance has been demonstrated, these methods often fail to generalize to unseen domains due to large discrepancy of the feature distribution across domains. In this work, we address the problem of few-shot classification under domain shifts for metric-based methods. Our core idea is to use feature-wise transformation layers for augmenting the image features using affine transforms to simulate various feature distributions under different domains in the training stage. To capture variations of the feature distributions under different domains, we further apply a learning-to-learn approach to search for the hyper-parameters of the feature-wise transformation layers. We conduct extensive experiments and ablation studies under the domain generalization setting using five few-shot classification datasets: mini-ImageNet, CUB, Cars, Places, and Plantae. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed feature-wise transformation layer is applicable to various metric-based models, and provides consistent improvements on the few-shot classification performance under domain shift.

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arXiv2020

Gated Fusion Network for Degraded Image Super Resolution

Single image super resolution aims to enhance image quality with respect to spatial content, which is a fundamental task in computer vision. In this work, we address the task of single frame super resolution with the presence of image degradation, e.g., blur, haze, or rain streaks. Due to the limitations of frame capturing and formation processes, image degradation is inevitable, and the artifacts would be exacerbated by super resolution methods. To address this problem, we propose a dual-branch convolutional neural network to extract base features and recovered features separately. The base features contain local and global information of the input image. On the other hand, the recovered features focus on the degraded regions and are used to remove the degradation. Those features are then fused through a recursive gate module to obtain sharp features for super resolution. By decomposing the feature extraction step into two task-independent streams, the dual-branch model can facilitate the training process by avoiding learning the mixed degradation all-in-one and thus enhance the final high-resolution prediction results. We evaluate the proposed method in three degradation scenarios. Experiments on these scenarios demonstrate that the proposed method performs more efficiently and favorably against the state-of-the-art approaches on benchmark datasets.

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arXiv2020

Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation by Iterative Affinity Learning

Weakly-supervised semantic segmentation is a challenging task as no pixel-wise label information is provided for training. Recent methods have exploited classification networks to localize objects by selecting regions with strong response. While such response map provides sparse information, however, there exist strong pairwise relations between pixels in natural images, which can be utilized to propagate the sparse map to a much denser one. In this paper, we propose an iterative algorithm to learn such pairwise relations, which consists of two branches, a unary segmentation network which learns the label probabilities for each pixel, and a pairwise affinity network which learns affinity matrix and refines the probability map generated from the unary network. The refined results by the pairwise network are then used as supervision to train the unary network, and the procedures are conducted iteratively to obtain better segmentation progressively. To learn reliable pixel affinity without accurate annotation, we also propose to mine confident regions. We show that iteratively training this framework is equivalent to optimizing an energy function with convergence to a local minimum. Experimental results on the PASCAL VOC 2012 and COCO datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods.

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arXiv2020

UA-DETRAC: A New Benchmark and Protocol for Multi-Object Detection and Tracking

In recent years, numerous effective multi-object tracking (MOT) methods are developed because of the wide range of applications. Existing performance evaluations of MOT methods usually separate the object tracking step from the object detection step by using the same fixed object detection results for comparisons. In this work, we perform a comprehensive quantitative study on the effects of object detection accuracy to the overall MOT performance, using the new large-scale University at Albany DETection and tRACking (UA-DETRAC) benchmark dataset. The UA-DETRAC benchmark dataset consists of 100 challenging video sequences captured from real-world traffic scenes (over 140,000 frames with rich annotations, including occlusion, weather, vehicle category, truncation, and vehicle bounding boxes) for object detection, object tracking and MOT system. We evaluate complete MOT systems constructed from combinations of state-of-the-art object detection and object tracking methods. Our analysis shows the complex effects of object detection accuracy on MOT system performance. Based on these observations, we propose new evaluation tools and metrics for MOT systems that consider both object detection and object tracking for comprehensive analysis.

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arXiv2020

An Adaptive Random Path Selection Approach for Incremental Learning

In a conventional supervised learning setting, a machine learning model has access to examples of all object classes that are desired to be recognized during the inference stage. This results in a fixed model that lacks the flexibility to adapt to new learning tasks. In practical settings, learning tasks often arrive in a sequence and the models must continually learn to increment their previously acquired knowledge. Existing incremental learning approaches fall well below the state-of-the-art cumulative models that use all training classes at once. In this paper, we propose a random path selection algorithm, called Adaptive RPS-Net, that progressively chooses optimal paths for the new tasks while encouraging parameter sharing between tasks. We introduce a new network capacity measure that enables us to automatically switch paths if the already used resources are saturated. Since the proposed path-reuse strategy ensures forward knowledge transfer, our approach is efficient and has considerably less computation overhead. As an added novelty, the proposed model integrates knowledge distillation and retrospection along with the path selection strategy to overcome catastrophic forgetting. In order to maintain an equilibrium between previous and newly acquired knowledge, we propose a simple controller to dynamically balance the model plasticity. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that the Adaptive RPS-Net method surpasses the state-of-the-art performance for incremental learning and by utilizing parallel computation this method can run in constant time with nearly the same efficiency as a conventional deep convolutional neural network.

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arXiv2020

Visual Question Answering on 360° Images

In this work, we introduce VQA 360, a novel task of visual question answering on 360 images. Unlike a normal field-of-view image, a 360 image captures the entire visual content around the optical center of a camera, demanding more sophisticated spatial understanding and reasoning. To address this problem, we collect the first VQA 360 dataset, containing around 17,000 real-world image-question-answer triplets for a variety of question types. We then study two different VQA models on VQA 360, including one conventional model that takes an equirectangular image (with intrinsic distortion) as input and one dedicated model that first projects a 360 image onto cubemaps and subsequently aggregates the information from multiple spatial resolutions. We demonstrate that the cubemap-based model with multi-level fusion and attention diffusion performs favorably against other variants and the equirectangular-based models. Nevertheless, the gap between the humans' and machines' performance reveals the need for more advanced VQA 360 algorithms. We, therefore, expect our dataset and studies to serve as the benchmark for future development in this challenging task. Dataset, code, and pre-trained models are available online.

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arXiv2020

CrDoCo: Pixel-level Domain Transfer with Cross-Domain Consistency

Unsupervised domain adaptation algorithms aim to transfer the knowledge learned from one domain to another (e.g., synthetic to real images). The adapted representations often do not capture pixel-level domain shifts that are crucial for dense prediction tasks (e.g., semantic segmentation). In this paper, we present a novel pixel-wise adversarial domain adaptation algorithm. By leveraging image-to-image translation methods for data augmentation, our key insight is that while the translated images between domains may differ in styles, their predictions for the task should be consistent. We exploit this property and introduce a cross-domain consistency loss that enforces our adapted model to produce consistent predictions. Through extensive experimental results, we show that our method compares favorably against the state-of-the-art on a wide variety of unsupervised domain adaptation tasks.

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arXiv2019

RC-DARTS: Resource Constrained Differentiable Architecture Search

Recent advances show that Neural Architectural Search (NAS) method is able to find state-of-the-art image classification deep architectures. In this paper, we consider the one-shot NAS problem for resource constrained applications. This problem is of great interest because it is critical to choose different architectures according to task complexity when the resource is constrained. Previous techniques are either too slow for one-shot learning or does not take the resource constraint into consideration. In this paper, we propose the resource constrained differentiable architecture search (RC-DARTS) method to learn architectures that are significantly smaller and faster while achieving comparable accuracy. Specifically, we propose to formulate the RC-DARTS task as a constrained optimization problem by adding the resource constraint. An iterative projection method is proposed to solve the given constrained optimization problem. We also propose a multi-level search strategy to enable layers at different depths to adaptively learn different types of neural architectures. Through extensive experiments on the Cifar10 and ImageNet datasets, we show that the RC-DARTS method learns lightweight neural architectures which have smaller model size and lower computational complexity while achieving comparable or better performances than the state-of-the-art methods.

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arXiv2019

Controllable and Progressive Image Extrapolation

Image extrapolation aims at expanding the narrow field of view of a given image patch. Existing models mainly deal with natural scene images of homogeneous regions and have no control of the content generation process. In this work, we study conditional image extrapolation to synthesize new images guided by the input structured text. The text is represented as a graph to specify the objects and their spatial relation to the unknown regions of the image. Inspired by drawing techniques, we propose a progressive generative model of three stages, i.e., generating a coarse bounding-boxes layout, refining it to a finer segmentation layout, and mapping the layout to a realistic output. Such a multi-stage design is shown to facilitate the training process and generate more controllable results. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed method on the face and human clothing dataset in terms of visual results, quantitative evaluations and flexible controls.

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arXiv2019

DRIT++: Diverse Image-to-Image Translation via Disentangled Representations

Image-to-image translation aims to learn the mapping between two visual domains. There are two main challenges for this task: 1) lack of aligned training pairs and 2) multiple possible outputs from a single input image. In this work, we present an approach based on disentangled representation for generating diverse outputs without paired training images. To synthesize diverse outputs, we propose to embed images onto two spaces: a domain-invariant content space capturing shared information across domains and a domain-specific attribute space. Our model takes the encoded content features extracted from a given input and attribute vectors sampled from the attribute space to synthesize diverse outputs at test time. To handle unpaired training data, we introduce a cross-cycle consistency loss based on disentangled representations. Qualitative results show that our model can generate diverse and realistic images on a wide range of tasks without paired training data. For quantitative evaluations, we measure realism with user study and Fréchet inception distance, and measure diversity with the perceptual distance metric, Jensen-Shannon divergence, and number of statistically-different bins.

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arXiv2019

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.

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arXiv2019

Learning to Localize Sound Sources in Visual Scenes: Analysis and Applications

Visual events are usually accompanied by sounds in our daily lives. However, can the machines learn to correlate the visual scene and sound, as well as localize the sound source only by observing them like humans? To investigate its empirical learnability, in this work we first present a novel unsupervised algorithm to address the problem of localizing sound sources in visual scenes. In order to achieve this goal, a two-stream network structure which handles each modality with attention mechanism is developed for sound source localization. The network naturally reveals the localized response in the scene without human annotation. In addition, a new sound source dataset is developed for performance evaluation. Nevertheless, our empirical evaluation shows that the unsupervised method generates false conclusions in some cases. Thereby, we show that this false conclusion cannot be fixed without human prior knowledge due to the well-known correlation and causality mismatch misconception. To fix this issue, we extend our network to the supervised and semi-supervised network settings via a simple modification due to the general architecture of our two-stream network. We show that the false conclusions can be effectively corrected even with a small amount of supervision, i.e., semi-supervised setup. Furthermore, we present the versatility of the learned audio and visual embeddings on the cross-modal content alignment and we extend this proposed algorithm to a new application, sound saliency based automatic camera view panning in 360-degree° videos.

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arXiv2019

Dancing to Music

Dancing to music is an instinctive move by humans. Learning to model the music-to-dance generation process is, however, a challenging problem. It requires significant efforts to measure the correlation between music and dance as one needs to simultaneously consider multiple aspects, such as style and beat of both music and dance. Additionally, dance is inherently multimodal and various following movements of a pose at any moment are equally likely. In this paper, we propose a synthesis-by-analysis learning framework to generate dance from music. In the analysis phase, we decompose a dance into a series of basic dance units, through which the model learns how to move. In the synthesis phase, the model learns how to compose a dance by organizing multiple basic dancing movements seamlessly according to the input music. Experimental qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that the proposed method can synthesize realistic, diverse,style-consistent, and beat-matching dances from music.

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