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Depth completion recovers a dense depth map from sensor measurements. Current methods are mostly tailored for very sparse depth measurements from LiDARs in outdoor settings, while for indoor scenes Time-of-Flight (ToF) or structured light sensors are mostly used. These sensors provide semi-dense maps, with dense measurements in some regions and almost empty in others. We propose a new model that takes into account the statistical difference between such regions. Our main contribution is a new decoder modulation branch added to the encoder-decoder architecture. The encoder extracts features from the concatenated RGB image and raw depth. Given the mask of missing values as input, the proposed modulation branch controls the decoding of a dense depth map from these features differently for different regions. This is implemented by modifying the spatial distribution of output signals inside the decoder via Spatially-Adaptive Denormalization (SPADE) blocks. Our second contribution is a novel training strategy that allows us to train on a semi-dense sensor data when the ground truth depth map is not available. Our model achieves the state of the art results on indoor Matterport3D dataset. Being designed for semi-dense input depth, our model is still competitive with LiDAR-oriented approaches on the KITTI dataset. Our training strategy significantly improves prediction quality with no dense ground truth available, as validated on the NYUv2 dataset.

Decoder Modulation for Indoor Depth Completion

Few-shot segmentation is challenging because objects within the support and query images could significantly differ in appearance and pose. Using a single prototype acquired directly from the support image to segment the query image causes semantic ambiguity. In this paper, we propose prototype mixture models (PMMs), which correlate diverse image regions with multiple prototypes to enforce the prototype-based semantic representation. Estimated by an Expectation-Maximization algorithm, PMMs incorporate rich channel-wised and spatial semantics from limited support images. Utilized as representations as well as classifiers, PMMs fully leverage the semantics to activate objects in the query image while depressing background regions in a duplex manner. Extensive experiments on Pascal VOC and MS-COCO datasets show that PMMs significantly improve upon state-of-the-arts. Particularly, PMMs improve 5-shot segmentation performance on MS-COCO by up to 5.82\% with only a moderate cost for model size and inference speed.

Prototype Mixture Models for Few-shot Semantic Segmentation

Accurate 3D object detection (3DOD) is crucial for safe navigation of complex environments by autonomous robots. Regressing accurate 3D bounding boxes in cluttered environments based on sparse LiDAR data is however a highly challenging problem. We address this task by exploring recent advances in conditional energy-based models (EBMs) for probabilistic regression. While methods employing EBMs for regression have demonstrated impressive performance on 2D object detection in images, these techniques are not directly applicable to 3D bounding boxes. In this work, we therefore design a differentiable pooling operator for 3D bounding boxes, serving as the core module of our EBM network. We further integrate this general approach into the state-of-the-art 3D object detector SA-SSD. On the KITTI dataset, our proposed approach consistently outperforms the SA-SSD baseline across all 3DOD metrics, demonstrating the potential of EBM-based regression for highly accurate 3DOD. Code is available at https://github.com/fregu856/ebms_3dod.

Accurate 3D Object Detection using Energy-Based Models

Deep learning with noisy labels is practically challenging, as the capacity of deep models is so high that they can totally memorize these noisy labels sooner or later during training. Nonetheless, recent studies on the memorization effects of deep neural networks show that they would first memorize training data of clean labels and then those of noisy labels. Therefore in this paper, we propose a new deep learning paradigm called Co-teaching for combating with noisy labels. Namely, we train two deep neural networks simultaneously, and let them teach each other given every mini-batch: firstly, each network feeds forward all data and selects some data of possibly clean labels; secondly, two networks communicate with each other what data in this mini-batch should be used for training; finally, each network back propagates the data selected by its peer network and updates itself. Empirical results on noisy versions of MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 demonstrate that Co-teaching is much superior to the state-of-the-art methods in the robustness of trained deep models.

Co-teaching: Robust Training of Deep Neural Networks with Extremely Noisy Labels

This paper proposes an end-to-end trainable network, SegFlow, for simultaneously predicting pixel-wise object segmentation and optical flow in videos. The proposed SegFlow has two branches where useful information of object segmentation and optical flow is propagated bidirectionally in a unified framework. The segmentation branch is based on a fully convolutional network, which has been proved effective in image segmentation task, and the optical flow branch takes advantage of the FlowNet model. The unified framework is trained iteratively offline to learn a generic notion, and fine-tuned online for specific objects. Extensive experiments on both the video object segmentation and optical flow datasets demonstrate that introducing optical flow improves the performance of segmentation and vice versa, against the state-of-the-art algorithms.

SegFlow: Joint Learning for Video Object Segmentation and Optical Flow

The effectiveness of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) has been substantially attributed to their built-in property of translation equivariance. However, CNNs do not have embedded mechanisms to handle other types of transformations. In this work, we pay attention to scale changes, which regularly appear in various tasks due to the changing distances between the objects and the camera. First, we introduce the general theory for building scale-equivariant convolutional networks with steerable filters. We develop scale-convolution and generalize other common blocks to be scale-equivariant. We demonstrate the computational efficiency and numerical stability of the proposed method. We compare the proposed models to the previously developed methods for scale equivariance and local scale invariance. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results on MNIST-scale dataset and on STL-10 dataset in the supervised learning setting.

Scale-Equivariant Steerable Networks

We investigate architectures of discriminatively trained deep Convolutional Networks (ConvNets) for action recognition in video. The challenge is to capture the complementary information on appearance from still frames and motion between frames. We also aim to generalise the best performing hand-crafted features within a data-driven learning framework. Our contribution is three-fold. First, we propose a two-stream ConvNet architecture which incorporates spatial and temporal networks. Second, we demonstrate that a ConvNet trained on multi-frame dense optical flow is able to achieve very good performance in spite of limited training data. Finally, we show that multi-task learning, applied to two different action classification datasets, can be used to increase the amount of training data and improve the performance on both. Our architecture is trained and evaluated on the standard video actions benchmarks of UCF-101 and HMDB-51, where it is competitive with the state of the art. It also exceeds by a large margin previous attempts to use deep nets for video classification.

Two-Stream Convolutional Networks for Action Recognition in Videos

Traffic light and sign detectors on autonomous cars are integral for road scene perception. The literature is abundant with deep learning networks that detect either lights or signs, not both, which makes them unsuitable for real-life deployment due to the limited graphics processing unit (GPU) memory and power available on embedded systems. The root cause of this issue is that no public dataset contains both traffic light and sign labels, which leads to difficulties in developing a joint detection framework. We present a deep hierarchical architecture in conjunction with a mini-batch proposal selection mechanism that allows a network to detect both traffic lights and signs from training on separate traffic light and sign datasets. Our method solves the overlapping issue where instances from one dataset are not labelled in the other dataset. We are the first to present a network that performs joint detection on traffic lights and signs. We measure our network on the Tsinghua-Tencent 100K benchmark for traffic sign detection and the Bosch Small Traffic Lights benchmark for traffic light detection and show it outperforms the existing Bosch Small Traffic light state-of-the-art method. We focus on autonomous car deployment and show our network is more suitable than others because of its low memory footprint and real-time image processing time. Qualitative results can be viewed at https://youtu.be/_YmogPzBXOw

A Hierarchical Deep Architecture and Mini-Batch Selection Method For Joint Traffic Sign and Light Detection

Region proposal mechanisms are essential for existing deep learning approaches to object detection in images. Although they can generally achieve a good detection performance under normal circumstances, their recall in a scene with extreme cases is unacceptably low. This is mainly because bounding box annotations contain much environment noise information, and non-maximum suppression (NMS) is required to select target boxes. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the first anchor-free and NMS-free object detection model called weakly supervised multimodal annotation segmentation (WSMA-Seg), which utilizes segmentation models to achieve an accurate and robust object detection without NMS. In WSMA-Seg, multimodal annotations are proposed to achieve an instance-aware segmentation using weakly supervised bounding boxes; we also develop a run-data-based following algorithm to trace contours of objects. In addition, we propose a multi-scale pooling segmentation (MSP-Seg) as the underlying segmentation model of WSMA-Seg to achieve a more accurate segmentation and to enhance the detection accuracy of WSMA-Seg. Experimental results on multiple datasets show that the proposed WSMA-Seg approach outperforms the state-of-the-art detectors.

Segmentation is All You Need

Face detection has drawn much attention in recent decades since the seminal work by Viola and Jones. While many subsequences have improved the work with more powerful learning algorithms, the feature representation used for face detection still can't meet the demand for effectively and efficiently handling faces with large appearance variance in the wild. To solve this bottleneck, we borrow the concept of channel features to the face detection domain, which extends the image channel to diverse types like gradient magnitude and oriented gradient histograms and therefore encodes rich information in a simple form. We adopt a novel variant called aggregate channel features, make a full exploration of feature design, and discover a multi-scale version of features with better performance. To deal with poses of faces in the wild, we propose a multi-view detection approach featuring score re-ranking and detection adjustment. Following the learning pipelines in Viola-Jones framework, the multi-view face detector using aggregate channel features shows competitive performance against state-of-the-art algorithms on AFW and FDDB testsets, while runs at 42 FPS on VGA images.

Aggregate channel features for multi-view face detection

This paper introduces PyDCI, a new implementation of Distributional Correspondence Indexing (DCI) written in Python. DCI is a transfer learning method for cross-domain and cross-lingual text classification for which we had provided an implementation (here called JaDCI) built on top of JaTeCS, a Java framework for text classification. PyDCI is a stand-alone version of DCI that exploits scikit-learn and the SciPy stack. We here report on new experiments that we have carried out in order to test PyDCI, and in which we use as baselines new high-performing methods that have appeared after DCI was originally proposed. These experiments show that, thanks to a few subtle ways in which we have improved DCI, PyDCI outperforms both JaDCI and the above-mentioned high-performing methods, and delivers the best known results on the two popular benchmarks on which we had tested DCI, i.e., MultiDomainSentiment (a.k.a. MDS -- for cross-domain adaptation) and Webis-CLS-10 (for cross-lingual adaptation). PyDCI, together with the code allowing to replicate our experiments, is available at https://github.com/AlexMoreo/pydci .

Revisiting Distributional Correspondence Indexing: A Python Reimplementation and New Experiments

Recent anchor-based deep face detectors have achieved promising performance, but they are still struggling to detect hard faces, such as small, blurred and partially occluded faces. A reason is that they treat all images and faces equally, without putting more effort on hard ones; however, many training images only contain easy faces, which are less helpful to achieve better performance on hard images. In this paper, we propose that the robustness of a face detector against hard faces can be improved by learning small faces on hard images. Our intuitions are (1) hard images are the images which contain at least one hard face, thus they facilitate training robust face detectors; (2) most hard faces are small faces and other types of hard faces can be easily converted to small faces by shrinking. We build an anchor-based deep face detector, which only output a single feature map with small anchors, to specifically learn small faces and train it by a novel hard image mining strategy. Extensive experiments have been conducted on WIDER FACE, FDDB, Pascal Faces, and AFW datasets to show the effectiveness of our method. Our method achieves APs of 95.7, 94.9 and 89.7 on easy, medium and hard WIDER FACE val dataset respectively, which surpass the previous state-of-the-arts, especially on the hard subset. Code and model are available at https://github.com/bairdzhang/smallhardface.

Robust Face Detection via Learning Small Faces on Hard Images

The goal of this paper is to detect the spatio-temporal extent of an action. The two-stream detection network based on RGB and flow provides state-of-the-art accuracy at the expense of a large model-size and heavy computation. We propose to embed RGB and optical-flow into a single two-in-one stream network with new layers. A motion condition layer extracts motion information from flow images, which is leveraged by the motion modulation layer to generate transformation parameters for modulating the low-level RGB features. The method is easily embedded in existing appearance- or two-stream action detection networks, and trained end-to-end. Experiments demonstrate that leveraging the motion condition to modulate RGB features improves detection accuracy. With only half the computation and parameters of the state-of-the-art two-stream methods, our two-in-one stream still achieves impressive results on UCF101-24, UCFSports and J-HMDB.

Dance with Flow: Two-in-One Stream Action Detection

Video frame interpolation aims to synthesize nonexistent frames in-between the original frames. While significant advances have been made from the recent deep convolutional neural networks, the quality of interpolation is often reduced due to large object motion or occlusion. In this work, we propose a video frame interpolation method which explicitly detects the occlusion by exploring the depth information. Specifically, we develop a depth-aware flow projection layer to synthesize intermediate flows that preferably sample closer objects than farther ones. In addition, we learn hierarchical features to gather contextual information from neighboring pixels. The proposed model then warps the input frames, depth maps, and contextual features based on the optical flow and local interpolation kernels for synthesizing the output frame. Our model is compact, efficient, and fully differentiable. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that the proposed model performs favorably against state-of-the-art frame interpolation methods on a wide variety of datasets.

Depth-Aware Video Frame Interpolation

Transfer learning aims at transferring knowledge from a well-labeled domain to a similar but different domain with limited or no labels. Unfortunately, existing learning-based methods often involve intensive model selection and hyperparameter tuning to obtain good results. Moreover, cross-validation is not possible for tuning hyperparameters since there are often no labels in the target domain. This would restrict wide applicability of transfer learning especially in computationally-constraint devices such as wearables. In this paper, we propose a practically Easy Transfer Learning (EasyTL) approach which requires no model selection and hyperparameter tuning, while achieving competitive performance. By exploiting intra-domain structures, EasyTL is able to learn both non-parametric transfer features and classifiers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, compared to state-of-the-art traditional and deep methods, EasyTL satisfies the Occam's Razor principle: it is extremely easy to implement and use while achieving comparable or better performance in classification accuracy and much better computational efficiency. Additionally, it is shown that EasyTL can increase the performance of existing transfer feature learning methods.

Easy Transfer Learning By Exploiting Intra-domain Structures

In this paper, we propose an accurate edge detector using richer convolutional features (RCF). Since objects in nature images have various scales and aspect ratios, the automatically learned rich hierarchical representations by CNNs are very critical and effective to detect edges and object boundaries. And the convolutional features gradually become coarser with receptive fields increasing. Based on these observations, our proposed network architecture makes full use of multiscale and multi-level information to perform the image-to-image edge prediction by combining all of the useful convolutional features into a holistic framework. It is the first attempt to adopt such rich convolutional features in computer vision tasks. Using VGG16 network, we achieve \sArt results on several available datasets. When evaluating on the well-known BSDS500 benchmark, we achieve ODS F-measure of \textbf{.811} while retaining a fast speed (\textbf{8} FPS). Besides, our fast version of RCF achieves ODS F-measure of \textbf{.806} with \textbf{30} FPS.

Richer Convolutional Features for Edge Detection

The skeleton data have been widely used for the action recognition tasks since they can robustly accommodate dynamic circumstances and complex backgrounds. In existing methods, both the joint and bone information in skeleton data have been proved to be of great help for action recognition tasks. However, how to incorporate these two types of data to best take advantage of the relationship between joints and bones remains a problem to be solved. In this work, we represent the skeleton data as a directed acyclic graph based on the kinematic dependency between the joints and bones in the natural human body. A novel directed graph neural network is designed specially to extract the information of joints, bones and their relations and make prediction based on the extracted features. In addition, to better fit the action recognition task, the topological structure of the graph is made adaptive based on the training process, which brings notable improvement. Moreover, the motion information of the skeleton sequence is exploited and combined with the spatial information to further enhance the performance in a two-stream framework. Our final model is tested on two large-scale datasets, NTU-RGBD and Skeleton-Kinetics, and exceeds state-of-the-art performance on both of them.

Skeleton-Based Action Recognition With Directed Graph Neural Networks

We introduce a new family of deep neural network models. Instead of specifying a discrete sequence of hidden layers, we parameterize the derivative of the hidden state using a neural network. The output of the network is computed using a black-box differential equation solver. These continuous-depth models have constant memory cost, adapt their evaluation strategy to each input, and can explicitly trade numerical precision for speed. We demonstrate these properties in continuous-depth residual networks and continuous-time latent variable models. We also construct continuous normalizing flows, a generative model that can train by maximum likelihood, without partitioning or ordering the data dimensions. For training, we show how to scalably backpropagate through any ODE solver, without access to its internal operations. This allows end-to-end training of ODEs within larger models.

Neural Ordinary Differential Equations

Open-domain targeted sentiment analysis aims to detect opinion targets along with their sentiment polarities from a sentence. Prior work typically formulates this task as a sequence tagging problem. However, such formulation suffers from problems such as huge search space and sentiment inconsistency. To address these problems, we propose a span-based extract-then-classify framework, where multiple opinion targets are directly extracted from the sentence under the supervision of target span boundaries, and corresponding polarities are then classified using their span representations. We further investigate three approaches under this framework, namely the pipeline, joint, and collapsed models. Experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our approach consistently outperforms the sequence tagging baseline. Moreover, we find that the pipeline model achieves the best performance compared with the other two models.

Open-Domain Targeted Sentiment Analysis via Span-Based Extraction and Classification

Planar homography estimation refers to the problem of computing a bijective linear mapping of pixels between two images. While this problem has been studied with convolutional neural networks (CNNs), existing methods simply regress the location of the four corners using a dense layer preceded by a fully-connected layer. This vector representation damages the spatial structure of the corners since they have a clear spatial order. Moreover, four points are the minimum required to compute the homography, and so such an approach is susceptible to perturbation. In this paper, we propose a conceptually simple, reliable, and general framework for homography estimation. In contrast to previous works, we formulate this problem as a perspective field (PF), which models the essence of the homography - pixel-to-pixel bijection. The PF is naturally learned by the proposed fully convolutional residual network, PFNet, to keep the spatial order of each pixel. Moreover, since every pixels’ displacement can be obtained from the PF, it enables robust homography estimation by utilizing dense correspondences. Our experiments demonstrate the proposed method outperforms traditional correspondence-based approaches and state-of-the-art CNN approaches in terms of accuracy while also having a smaller network size. In addition, the new parameterization of this task is general and can be implemented by any fully convolutional network (FCN) architecture.

Rethinking Planar Homography Estimation Using Perspective Fields

Currently, researchers have paid great attention to retrieval-based dialogues in open-domain. In particular, people study the problem by investigating context-response matching for multi-turn response selection based on publicly recognized benchmark data sets. State-of-the-art methods require a response to interact with each utterance in a context from the beginning, but the interaction is performed in a shallow way. In this work, we let utterance-response interaction go deep by proposing an interaction-over-interaction network (IoI). The model performs matching by stacking multiple interaction blocks in which residual information from one time of interaction initiates the interaction process again. Thus, matching information within an utterance-response pair is extracted from the interaction of the pair in an iterative fashion, and the information flows along the chain of the blocks via representations. Evaluation results on three benchmark data sets indicate that IoI can significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods in terms of various matching metrics. Through further analysis, we also unveil how the depth of interaction affects the performance of IoI.

One Time of Interaction May Not Be Enough: Go Deep with an Interaction-over-Interaction Network for Response Selection in Dialogues

Multi-hop knowledge graph (KG) reasoning is an effective and explainable method for predicting the target entity via reasoning paths in query answering (QA) task. Most previous methods assume that every relation in KGs has enough training triples, regardless of those few-shot relations which cannot provide sufficient triples for training robust reasoning models. In fact, the performance of existing multi-hop reasoning methods drops significantly on few-shot relations. In this paper, we propose a meta-based multi-hop reasoning method (Meta-KGR), which adopts meta-learning to learn effective meta parameters from high-frequency relations that could quickly adapt to few-shot relations. We evaluate Meta-KGR on two public datasets sampled from Freebase and NELL, and the experimental results show that Meta-KGR outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods in few-shot scenarios. Our code and datasets can be obtained from https://github.com/ THU-KEG/MetaKGR.

Adapting Meta Knowledge Graph Information for Multi-Hop Reasoning over Few-Shot Relations

People using white canes for navigation find it challenging to concurrently access devices such as smartphones. Building on prior research on abandonment of specialized devices, we explore a new touch free mode of interaction wherein a person with visual impairment can perform gestures on their existing white cane to trigger tasks on their smartphone. We present GesturePod, an easy-to-integrate device that clips on to any white cane, and detects gestures performed with the cane. With GesturePod, a user can perform common tasks on their smartphone without touch or even removing the phone from their pocket or bag. We discuss the challenges in building the device and our design choices. We propose a novel, efficient machine learning pipeline to train and deploy the gesture recognition model. Our in-lab study shows that GesturePod achieves 92% gesture recognition accuracy and can help perform common smartphone tasks faster. Our in-wild study suggests that GesturePod is a promising tool to improve smartphone access for people with VI, especially in constrained outdoor scenarios.

GesturePod: Enabling On-device Gesture-based Interaction for White Cane Users

Recently, large-scale pre-trained language models have demonstrated impressive performance on several commonsense-reasoning benchmark datasets. However, building machines with commonsense to compose realistically plausible sentences remains challenging. In this paper, we present a constrained text generation task, CommonGen associated with a benchmark dataset, to explicitly test machines for the ability of generative commonsense reasoning. Given a set of common concepts (e.g., {dog, frisbee, catch, throw}); the task is to generate a coherent sentence describing an everyday scenario using these concepts (e.g., "a man throws a frisbee and his dog catches it"). The CommonGen task is challenging because it inherently requires 1) relational reasoning with background commonsense knowledge, and 2) compositional generalization ability to work on unseen concept combinations. Our dataset, constructed through a combination of crowdsourced and existing caption corpora, consists of 79k commonsense descriptions over 35k unique concept-sets. Experiments show that there is a large gap between state-of-the-art text generation models (e.g., T5) and human performance. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the learned generative commonsense reasoning capability can be transferred to improve downstream tasks such as CommonsenseQA by generating additional context.

CommonGen: A Constrained Text Generation Challenge for Generative Commonsense Reasoning

Graphs offer a natural way to formulate Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) within the tracking-by-detection paradigm. However, they also introduce a major challenge for learning methods, as defining a model that can operate on such structured domain is not trivial. As a consequence, most learning-based work has been devoted to learning better features for MOT and then using these with well-established optimization frameworks. In this work, we exploit the classical network flow formulation of MOT to define a fully differentiable framework based on Message Passing Networks (MPNs). By operating directly on the graph domain, our method can reason globally over an entire set of detections and predict final solutions. Hence, we show that learning in MOT does not need to be restricted to feature extraction, but it can also be applied to the data association step. We show a significant improvement in both MOTA and IDF1 on three publicly available benchmarks. Our code is available at https://bit.ly/motsolv.

Learning a Neural Solver for Multiple Object Tracking

Semantic segmentation is a challenging task that addresses most of the perception needs of Intelligent Vehicles (IV) in an unified way. Deep Neural Networks excel at this task, as they can be trained end-to-end to accurately classify multiple object categories in an image at pixel level. However, a good trade-off between high quality and computational resources is yet not present in state-of-the-art semantic segmentation approaches, limiting their application in real vehicles. In this paper, we propose a deep architecture that is able to run in real-time while providing accurate semantic segmentation. The core of our architecture is a novel layer that uses residual connections and factorized convolutions in order to remain efficient while retaining remarkable accuracy. Our approach is able to run at over 83 FPS in a single Titan X, and 7 FPS in a Jetson TX1 (embedded GPU). A comprehensive set of experiments on the publicly available Cityscapes dataset demonstrates that our system achieves an accuracy that is similar to the state of the art, while being orders of magnitude faster to compute than other architectures that achieve top precision. The resulting trade-off makes our model an ideal approach for scene understanding in IV applications. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Eromera/erfnet

ERFNet: Efficient Residual Factorized ConvNet for Real-time Semantic Segmentation

A common problem in human-object interaction (HOI) detection task is that numerous HOI classes have only a small number of labeled examples, resulting in training sets with a long-tailed distribution. The lack of positive labels can lead to low classification accuracy for these classes. Towards addressing this issue, we observe that there exist natural correlations and anti-correlations among human-object interactions. In this paper, we model the correlations as action co-occurrence matrices and present techniques to learn these priors and leverage them for more effective training, especially in rare classes. The utility of our approach is demonstrated experimentally, where the performance of our approach exceeds the state-of-the-art methods on both of the two leading HOI detection benchmark datasets, HICO-Det and V-COCO.

Detecting Human-Object Interactions with Action Co-occurrence Priors

We consider the problem of scaling deep generative shape models to high-resolution. Drawing motivation from the canonical view representation of objects, we introduce a novel method for the fast up-sampling of 3D objects in voxel space through networks that perform super-resolution on the six orthographic depth projections. This allows us to generate high-resolution objects with more efficient scaling than methods which work directly in 3D. We decompose the problem of 2D depth super-resolution into silhouette and depth prediction to capture both structure and fine detail. This allows our method to generate sharp edges more easily than an individual network. We evaluate our work on multiple experiments concerning high-resolution 3D objects, and show our system is capable of accurately predicting novel objects at resolutions as large as 512$\mathbf{\times}$512$\mathbf{\times}$512 -- the highest resolution reported for this task. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on 3D object reconstruction from RGB images on the ShapeNet dataset, and further demonstrate the first effective 3D super-resolution method.

Multi-View Silhouette and Depth Decomposition for High Resolution 3D Object Representation

Inspired by how humans summarize long documents, we propose an accurate and fast summarization model that first selects salient sentences and then rewrites them abstractively (i.e., compresses and paraphrases) to generate a concise overall summary. We use a novel sentence-level policy gradient method to bridge the non-differentiable computation between these two neural networks in a hierarchical way, while maintaining language fluency. Empirically, we achieve the new state-of-the-art on all metrics (including human evaluation) on the CNN/Daily Mail dataset, as well as significantly higher abstractiveness scores. Moreover, by first operating at the sentence-level and then the word-level, we enable parallel decoding of our neural generative model that results in substantially faster (10-20x) inference speed as well as 4x faster training convergence than previous long-paragraph encoder-decoder models. We also demonstrate the generalization of our model on the test-only DUC-2002 dataset, where we achieve higher scores than a state-of-the-art model.

Fast Abstractive Summarization with Reinforce-Selected Sentence Rewriting

There has been much recent work on training neural attention models at the sequence-level using either reinforcement learning-style methods or by optimizing the beam. In this paper, we survey a range of classical objective functions that have been widely used to train linear models for structured prediction and apply them to neural sequence to sequence models. Our experiments show that these losses can perform surprisingly well by slightly outperforming beam search optimization in a like for like setup. We also report new state of the art results on both IWSLT'14 German-English translation as well as Gigaword abstractive summarization. On the larger WMT'14 English-French translation task, sequence-level training achieves 41.5 BLEU which is on par with the state of the art.

Classical Structured Prediction Losses for Sequence to Sequence Learning

In this paper, we introduce a new large-scale face dataset named VGGFace2. The dataset contains 3.31 million images of 9131 subjects, with an average of 362.6 images for each subject. Images are downloaded from Google Image Search and have large variations in pose, age, illumination, ethnicity and profession (e.g. actors, athletes, politicians). The dataset was collected with three goals in mind: (i) to have both a large number of identities and also a large number of images for each identity; (ii) to cover a large range of pose, age and ethnicity; and (iii) to minimize the label noise. We describe how the dataset was collected, in particular the automated and manual filtering stages to ensure a high accuracy for the images of each identity. To assess face recognition performance using the new dataset, we train ResNet-50 (with and without Squeeze-and-Excitation blocks) Convolutional Neural Networks on VGGFace2, on MS- Celeb-1M, and on their union, and show that training on VGGFace2 leads to improved recognition performance over pose and age. Finally, using the models trained on these datasets, we demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on all the IARPA Janus face recognition benchmarks, e.g. IJB-A, IJB-B and IJB-C, exceeding the previous state-of-the-art by a large margin. Datasets and models are publicly available.

VGGFace2: A dataset for recognising faces across pose and age

We consider the task of text attribute transfer: transforming a sentence to alter a specific attribute (e.g., sentiment) while preserving its attribute-independent content (e.g., changing "screen is just the right size" to "screen is too small"). Our training data includes only sentences labeled with their attribute (e.g., positive or negative), but not pairs of sentences that differ only in their attributes, so we must learn to disentangle attributes from attribute-independent content in an unsupervised way. Previous work using adversarial methods has struggled to produce high-quality outputs. In this paper, we propose simpler methods motivated by the observation that text attributes are often marked by distinctive phrases (e.g., "too small"). Our strongest method extracts content words by deleting phrases associated with the sentence's original attribute value, retrieves new phrases associated with the target attribute, and uses a neural model to fluently combine these into a final output. On human evaluation, our best method generates grammatical and appropriate responses on 22% more inputs than the best previous system, averaged over three attribute transfer datasets: altering sentiment of reviews on Yelp, altering sentiment of reviews on Amazon, and altering image captions to be more romantic or humorous.

Delete, Retrieve, Generate: A Simple Approach to Sentiment and Style Transfer

Face detection has been well studied for many years and one of remaining challenges is to detect small, blurred and partially occluded faces in uncontrolled environment. This paper proposes a novel context-assisted single shot face detector, named \emph{PyramidBox} to handle the hard face detection problem. Observing the importance of the context, we improve the utilization of contextual information in the following three aspects. First, we design a novel context anchor to supervise high-level contextual feature learning by a semi-supervised method, which we call it PyramidAnchors. Second, we propose the Low-level Feature Pyramid Network to combine adequate high-level context semantic feature and Low-level facial feature together, which also allows the PyramidBox to predict faces of all scales in a single shot. Third, we introduce a context-sensitive structure to increase the capacity of prediction network to improve the final accuracy of output. In addition, we use the method of Data-anchor-sampling to augment the training samples across different scales, which increases the diversity of training data for smaller faces. By exploiting the value of context, PyramidBox achieves superior performance among the state-of-the-art over the two common face detection benchmarks, FDDB and WIDER FACE. Our code is available in PaddlePaddle: \href{https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/models/tree/develop/fluid/face_detection}{\url{https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/models/tree/develop/fluid/face_detection}}.

PyramidBox: A Context-assisted Single Shot Face Detector

Several machine learning models, including neural networks, consistently misclassify adversarial examples---inputs formed by applying small but intentionally worst-case perturbations to examples from the dataset, such that the perturbed input results in the model outputting an incorrect answer with high confidence. Early attempts at explaining this phenomenon focused on nonlinearity and overfitting. We argue instead that the primary cause of neural networks' vulnerability to adversarial perturbation is their linear nature. This explanation is supported by new quantitative results while giving the first explanation of the most intriguing fact about them: their generalization across architectures and training sets. Moreover, this view yields a simple and fast method of generating adversarial examples. Using this approach to provide examples for adversarial training, we reduce the test set error of a maxout network on the MNIST dataset.

Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples

We introduce a simple yet surprisingly powerful model to incorporate attention in action recognition and human object interaction tasks. Our proposed attention module can be trained with or without extra supervision, and gives a sizable boost in accuracy while keeping the network size and computational cost nearly the same. It leads to significant improvements over state of the art base architecture on three standard action recognition benchmarks across still images and videos, and establishes new state of the art on MPII dataset with 12.5% relative improvement. We also perform an extensive analysis of our attention module both empirically and analytically. In terms of the latter, we introduce a novel derivation of bottom-up and top-down attention as low-rank approximations of bilinear pooling methods (typically used for fine-grained classification). From this perspective, our attention formulation suggests a novel characterization of action recognition as a fine-grained recognition problem.

Attentional Pooling for Action Recognition

We present a simple sequential sentence encoder for multi-domain natural language inference. Our encoder is based on stacked bidirectional LSTM-RNNs with shortcut connections and fine-tuning of word embeddings. The overall supervised model uses the above encoder to encode two input sentences into two vectors, and then uses a classifier over the vector combination to label the relationship between these two sentences as that of entailment, contradiction, or neural. Our Shortcut-Stacked sentence encoders achieve strong improvements over existing encoders on matched and mismatched multi-domain natural language inference (top non-ensemble single-model result in the EMNLP RepEval 2017 Shared Task (Nangia et al., 2017)). Moreover, they achieve the new state-of-the-art encoding result on the original SNLI dataset (Bowman et al., 2015).

Shortcut-Stacked Sentence Encoders for Multi-Domain Inference

Image restoration is a long-standing problem in low-level computer vision with many interesting applications. We describe a flexible learning framework based on the concept of nonlinear reaction diffusion models for various image restoration problems. By embodying recent improvements in nonlinear diffusion models, we propose a dynamic nonlinear reaction diffusion model with time-dependent parameters (\ie, linear filters and influence functions). In contrast to previous nonlinear diffusion models, all the parameters, including the filters and the influence functions, are simultaneously learned from training data through a loss based approach. We call this approach TNRD -- \textit{Trainable Nonlinear Reaction Diffusion}. The TNRD approach is applicable for a variety of image restoration tasks by incorporating appropriate reaction force. We demonstrate its capabilities with three representative applications, Gaussian image denoising, single image super resolution and JPEG deblocking. Experiments show that our trained nonlinear diffusion models largely benefit from the training of the parameters and finally lead to the best reported performance on common test datasets for the tested applications. Our trained models preserve the structural simplicity of diffusion models and take only a small number of diffusion steps, thus are highly efficient. Moreover, they are also well-suited for parallel computation on GPUs, which makes the inference procedure extremely fast.

Trainable Nonlinear Reaction Diffusion: A Flexible Framework for Fast and Effective Image Restoration

Despite of the recent success of neural networks for human pose estimation, current approaches are limited to pose estimation of a single person and cannot handle humans in groups or crowds. In this work, we propose a method that estimates the poses of multiple persons in an image in which a person can be occluded by another person or might be truncated. To this end, we consider multi-person pose estimation as a joint-to-person association problem. We construct a fully connected graph from a set of detected joint candidates in an image and resolve the joint-to-person association and outlier detection using integer linear programming. Since solving joint-to-person association jointly for all persons in an image is an NP-hard problem and even approximations are expensive, we solve the problem locally for each person. On the challenging MPII Human Pose Dataset for multiple persons, our approach achieves the accuracy of a state-of-the-art method, but it is 6,000 to 19,000 times faster.

Multi-Person Pose Estimation with Local Joint-to-Person Associations

In this work, we connect two distinct concepts for unsupervised domain adaptation: feature distribution alignment between domains by utilizing the task-specific decision boundary and the Wasserstein metric. Our proposed sliced Wasserstein discrepancy (SWD) is designed to capture the natural notion of dissimilarity between the outputs of task-specific classifiers. It provides a geometrically meaningful guidance to detect target samples that are far from the support of the source and enables efficient distribution alignment in an end-to-end trainable fashion. In the experiments, we validate the effectiveness and genericness of our method on digit and sign recognition, image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection.

Sliced Wasserstein Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

In image classification, visual separability between different object categories is highly uneven, and some categories are more difficult to distinguish than others. Such difficult categories demand more dedicated classifiers. However, existing deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) are trained as flat N-way classifiers, and few efforts have been made to leverage the hierarchical structure of categories. In this paper, we introduce hierarchical deep CNNs (HD-CNNs) by embedding deep CNNs into a category hierarchy. An HD-CNN separates easy classes using a coarse category classifier while distinguishing difficult classes using fine category classifiers. During HD-CNN training, component-wise pretraining is followed by global finetuning with a multinomial logistic loss regularized by a coarse category consistency term. In addition, conditional executions of fine category classifiers and layer parameter compression make HD-CNNs scalable for large-scale visual recognition. We achieve state-of-the-art results on both CIFAR100 and large-scale ImageNet 1000-class benchmark datasets. In our experiments, we build up three different HD-CNNs and they lower the top-1 error of the standard CNNs by 2.65%, 3.1% and 1.1%, respectively.

HD-CNN: Hierarchical Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Large Scale Visual Recognition

The recent increase in the extensive use of digital imaging technologies has brought with it a simultaneous demand for higher-resolution images. We develop a novel edge-informed approach to single image super-resolution (SISR). The SISR problem is reformulated as an image inpainting task. We use a two-stage inpainting model as a baseline for super-resolution and show its effectiveness for different scale factors (x2, x4, x8) compared to basic interpolation schemes. This model is trained using a joint optimization of image contents (texture and color) and structures (edges). Quantitative and qualitative comparisons are included and the proposed model is compared with current state-of-the-art techniques. We show that our method of decoupling structure and texture reconstruction improves the quality of the final reconstructed high-resolution image. Code and models available at: https://github.com/knazeri/edge-informed-sisr

Edge-Informed Single Image Super-Resolution

Recent years have witnessed rapid progress in detecting and recognizing individual object instances. To understand the situation in a scene, however, computers need to recognize how humans interact with surrounding objects. In this paper, we tackle the challenging task of detecting human-object interactions (HOI). Our core idea is that the appearance of a person or an object instance contains informative cues on which relevant parts of an image to attend to for facilitating interaction prediction. To exploit these cues, we propose an instance-centric attention module that learns to dynamically highlight regions in an image conditioned on the appearance of each instance. Such an attention-based network allows us to selectively aggregate features relevant for recognizing HOIs. We validate the efficacy of the proposed network on the Verb in COCO and HICO-DET datasets and show that our approach compares favorably with the state-of-the-arts.

iCAN: Instance-Centric Attention Network for Human-Object Interaction Detection

In this paper, we introduce Iterative Text Summarization (ITS), an iteration-based model for supervised extractive text summarization, inspired by the observation that it is often necessary for a human to read an article multiple times in order to fully understand and summarize its contents. Current summarization approaches read through a document only once to generate a document representation, resulting in a sub-optimal representation. To address this issue we introduce a model which iteratively polishes the document representation on many passes through the document. As part of our model, we also introduce a selective reading mechanism that decides more accurately the extent to which each sentence in the model should be updated. Experimental results on the CNN/DailyMail and DUC2002 datasets demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art extractive systems when evaluated by machines and by humans.

Iterative Document Representation Learning Towards Summarization with Polishing

Neural methods have had several recent successes in semantic parsing, though they have yet to face the challenge of producing meaning representations based on formal semantics. We present a sequence-to-sequence neural semantic parser that is able to produce Discourse Representation Structures (DRSs) for English sentences with high accuracy, outperforming traditional DRS parsers. To facilitate the learning of the output, we represent DRSs as a sequence of flat clauses and introduce a method to verify that produced DRSs are well-formed and interpretable. We compare models using characters and words as input and see (somewhat surprisingly) that the former performs better than the latter. We show that eliminating variable names from the output using De Bruijn-indices increases parser performance. Adding silver training data boosts performance even further.

Exploring Neural Methods for Parsing Discourse Representation Structures

Spectral Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are a generalization of convolutional networks to learning on graph-structured data. Applications of spectral GCNs have been successful, but limited to a few problems where the graph is fixed, such as shape correspondence and node classification. In this work, we address this limitation by revisiting a particular family of spectral graph networks, Chebyshev GCNs, showing its efficacy in solving graph classification tasks with a variable graph structure and size. Chebyshev GCNs restrict graphs to have at most one edge between any pair of nodes. To this end, we propose a novel multigraph network that learns from multi-relational graphs. We model learned edges with abstract meaning and experiment with different ways to fuse the representations extracted from annotated and learned edges, achieving competitive results on a variety of chemical classification benchmarks.

Spectral Multigraph Networks for Discovering and Fusing Relationships in Molecules

Egocentric activity recognition is one of the most challenging tasks in video analysis. It requires a fine-grained discrimination of small objects and their manipulation. While some methods base on strong supervision and attention mechanisms, they are either annotation consuming or do not take spatio-temporal patterns into account. In this paper we propose LSTA as a mechanism to focus on features from spatial relevant parts while attention is being tracked smoothly across the video sequence. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LSTA on egocentric activity recognition with an end-to-end trainable two-stream architecture, achieving state of the art performance on four standard benchmarks.

LSTA: Long Short-Term Attention for Egocentric Action Recognition

Temporally locating and classifying action segments in long untrimmed videos is of particular interest to many applications like surveillance and robotics. While traditional approaches follow a two-step pipeline, by generating frame-wise probabilities and then feeding them to high-level temporal models, recent approaches use temporal convolutions to directly classify the video frames. In this paper, we introduce a multi-stage architecture for the temporal action segmentation task. Each stage features a set of dilated temporal convolutions to generate an initial prediction that is refined by the next one. This architecture is trained using a combination of a classification loss and a proposed smoothing loss that penalizes over-segmentation errors. Extensive evaluation shows the effectiveness of the proposed model in capturing long-range dependencies and recognizing action segments. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results on three challenging datasets: 50Salads, Georgia Tech Egocentric Activities (GTEA), and the Breakfast dataset.

MS-TCN: Multi-Stage Temporal Convolutional Network for Action Segmentation

We improve the informativeness of models for conditional text generation using techniques from computational pragmatics. These techniques formulate language production as a game between speakers and listeners, in which a speaker should generate output text that a listener can use to correctly identify the original input that the text describes. While such approaches are widely used in cognitive science and grounded language learning, they have received less attention for more standard language generation tasks. We consider two pragmatic modeling methods for text generation: one where pragmatics is imposed by information preservation, and another where pragmatics is imposed by explicit modeling of distractors. We find that these methods improve the performance of strong existing systems for abstractive summarization and generation from structured meaning representations.

Pragmatically Informative Text Generation

In this paper, we propose Spatio-TEmporal Progressive (STEP) action detector---a progressive learning framework for spatio-temporal action detection in videos. Starting from a handful of coarse-scale proposal cuboids, our approach progressively refines the proposals towards actions over a few steps. In this way, high-quality proposals (i.e., adhere to action movements) can be gradually obtained at later steps by leveraging the regression outputs from previous steps. At each step, we adaptively extend the proposals in time to incorporate more related temporal context. Compared to the prior work that performs action detection in one run, our progressive learning framework is able to naturally handle the spatial displacement within action tubes and therefore provides a more effective way for spatio-temporal modeling. We extensively evaluate our approach on UCF101 and AVA, and demonstrate superior detection results. Remarkably, we achieve mAP of 75.0% and 18.6% on the two datasets with 3 progressive steps and using respectively only 11 and 34 initial proposals.

STEP: Spatio-Temporal Progressive Learning for Video Action Detection

3D multi-object tracking (MOT) is an essential component for many applications such as autonomous driving and assistive robotics. Recent work on 3D MOT focuses on developing accurate systems giving less attention to practical considerations such as computational cost and system complexity. In contrast, this work proposes a simple real-time 3D MOT system. Our system first obtains 3D detections from a LiDAR point cloud. Then, a straightforward combination of a 3D Kalman filter and the Hungarian algorithm is used for state estimation and data association. Additionally, 3D MOT datasets such as KITTI evaluate MOT methods in the 2D space and standardized 3D MOT evaluation tools are missing for a fair comparison of 3D MOT methods. Therefore, we propose a new 3D MOT evaluation tool along with three new metrics to comprehensively evaluate 3D MOT methods. We show that, although our system employs a combination of classical MOT modules, we achieve state-of-the-art 3D MOT performance on two 3D MOT benchmarks (KITTI and nuScenes). Surprisingly, although our system does not use any 2D data as inputs, we achieve competitive performance on the KITTI 2D MOT leaderboard. Our proposed system runs at a rate of $207.4$ FPS on the KITTI dataset, achieving the fastest speed among all modern MOT systems. To encourage standardized 3D MOT evaluation, our system and evaluation code are made publicly available at https://github.com/xinshuoweng/AB3DMOT.

3D Multi-Object Tracking: A Baseline and New Evaluation Metrics

Deep learning-based video salient object detection has recently achieved great success with its performance significantly outperforming any other unsupervised methods. However, existing data-driven approaches heavily rely on a large quantity of pixel-wise annotated video frames to deliver such promising results. In this paper, we address the semi-supervised video salient object detection task using pseudo-labels. Specifically, we present an effective video saliency detector that consists of a spatial refinement network and a spatiotemporal module. Based on the same refinement network and motion information in terms of optical flow, we further propose a novel method for generating pixel-level pseudo-labels from sparsely annotated frames. By utilizing the generated pseudo-labels together with a part of manual annotations, our video saliency detector learns spatial and temporal cues for both contrast inference and coherence enhancement, thus producing accurate saliency maps. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed semi-supervised method even greatly outperforms all the state-of-the-art fully supervised methods across three public benchmarks of VOS, DAVIS, and FBMS.

Semi-Supervised Video Salient Object Detection Using Pseudo-Labels

The paucity of videos in current action classification datasets (UCF-101 and HMDB-51) has made it difficult to identify good video architectures, as most methods obtain similar performance on existing small-scale benchmarks. This paper re-evaluates state-of-the-art architectures in light of the new Kinetics Human Action Video dataset. Kinetics has two orders of magnitude more data, with 400 human action classes and over 400 clips per class, and is collected from realistic, challenging YouTube videos. We provide an analysis on how current architectures fare on the task of action classification on this dataset and how much performance improves on the smaller benchmark datasets after pre-training on Kinetics. We also introduce a new Two-Stream Inflated 3D ConvNet (I3D) that is based on 2D ConvNet inflation: filters and pooling kernels of very deep image classification ConvNets are expanded into 3D, making it possible to learn seamless spatio-temporal feature extractors from video while leveraging successful ImageNet architecture designs and even their parameters. We show that, after pre-training on Kinetics, I3D models considerably improve upon the state-of-the-art in action classification, reaching 80.9% on HMDB-51 and 98.0% on UCF-101.

Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset

Many real world tasks require multiple agents to work together. Multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been proposed in recent years to solve these tasks, but current methods often fail to efficiently learn policies. We thus investigate the presence of a common weakness in single-agent RL, namely value function overestimation bias, in the multi-agent setting. Based on our findings, we propose an approach that reduces this bias by using double centralized critics. We evaluate it on six mixed cooperative-competitive tasks, showing a significant advantage over current methods. Finally, we investigate the application of multi-agent methods to high-dimensional robotic tasks and show that our approach can be used to learn decentralized policies in this domain.

Reducing Overestimation Bias in Multi-Agent Domains Using Double Centralized Critics

We propose Localized Narratives, a new form of multimodal image annotations connecting vision and language. We ask annotators to describe an image with their voice while simultaneously hovering their mouse over the region they are describing. Since the voice and the mouse pointer are synchronized, we can localize every single word in the description. This dense visual grounding takes the form of a mouse trace segment per word and is unique to our data. We annotated 849k images with Localized Narratives: the whole COCO, Flickr30k, and ADE20K datasets, and 671k images of Open Images, all of which we make publicly available. We provide an extensive analysis of these annotations showing they are diverse, accurate, and efficient to produce. We also demonstrate their utility on the application of controlled image captioning.

Connecting Vision and Language with Localized Narratives

SUMMARY: Recently, novel machine-learning algorithms have shown potential for predicting undiscovered links in biomedical knowledge networks. However, dedicated benchmarks for measuring algorithmic progress have not yet emerged. With OpenBioLink, we introduce a large-scale, high-quality and highly challenging biomedical link prediction benchmark to transparently and reproducibly evaluate such algorithms. Furthermore, we present preliminary baseline evaluation results. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Source code, data and supplementary files are openly available at https://github.com/OpenBioLink/OpenBioLink CONTACT: matthias.samwald ((at)) meduniwien.ac.at

OpenBioLink: A benchmarking framework for large-scale biomedical link prediction

Spatial-temporal graphs have been widely used by skeleton-based action recognition algorithms to model human action dynamics. To capture robust movement patterns from these graphs, long-range and multi-scale context aggregation and spatial-temporal dependency modeling are critical aspects of a powerful feature extractor. However, existing methods have limitations in achieving (1) unbiased long-range joint relationship modeling under multi-scale operators and (2) unobstructed cross-spacetime information flow for capturing complex spatial-temporal dependencies. In this work, we present (1) a simple method to disentangle multi-scale graph convolutions and (2) a unified spatial-temporal graph convolutional operator named G3D. The proposed multi-scale aggregation scheme disentangles the importance of nodes in different neighborhoods for effective long-range modeling. The proposed G3D module leverages dense cross-spacetime edges as skip connections for direct information propagation across the spatial-temporal graph. By coupling these proposals, we develop a powerful feature extractor named MS-G3D based on which our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on three large-scale datasets: NTU RGB+D 60, NTU RGB+D 120, and Kinetics Skeleton 400.

Disentangling and Unifying Graph Convolutions for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

For object detection, how to address the contradictory requirement between feature map resolution and receptive field on high-resolution inputs still remains an open question. In this paper, to tackle this issue, we build a novel architecture, called Attention-guided Context Feature Pyramid Network (AC-FPN), that exploits discriminative information from various large receptive fields via integrating attention-guided multi-path features. The model contains two modules. The first one is Context Extraction Module (CEM) that explores large contextual information from multiple receptive fields. As redundant contextual relations may mislead localization and recognition, we also design the second module named Attention-guided Module (AM), which can adaptively capture the salient dependencies over objects by using the attention mechanism. AM consists of two sub-modules, i.e., Context Attention Module (CxAM) and Content Attention Module (CnAM), which focus on capturing discriminative semantics and locating precise positions, respectively. Most importantly, our AC-FPN can be readily plugged into existing FPN-based models. Extensive experiments on object detection and instance segmentation show that existing models with our proposed CEM and AM significantly surpass their counterparts without them, and our model successfully obtains state-of-the-art results. We have released the source code at https://github.com/Caojunxu/AC-FPN.

Attention-guided Context Feature Pyramid Network for Object Detection

The existing fusion based RGB-D salient object detection methods usually adopt the bi-stream structure to strike the fusion trade-off between RGB and depth (D). The D quality usually varies from scene to scene, while the SOTA bi-stream approaches are depth quality unaware, which easily result in substantial difficulties in achieving complementary fusion status between RGB and D, leading to poor fusion results in facing of low-quality D. Thus, this paper attempts to integrate a novel depth quality aware subnet into the classic bi-stream structure, aiming to assess the depth quality before conducting the selective RGB-D fusion. Compared with the SOTA bi-stream methods, the major highlight of our method is its ability to lessen the importance of those low-quality, no-contribution, or even negative-contribution D regions during the RGB-D fusion, achieving a much improved complementary status between RGB and D.

Depth Quality Aware Salient Object Detection

Knowledge Graphs (KG) are of vital importance for multiple applications on the web, including information retrieval, recommender systems, and metadata annotation. Regardless of whether they are built manually by domain experts or with automatic pipelines, KGs are often incomplete. Recent work has begun to explore the use of textual descriptions available in knowledge graphs to learn vector representations of entities in order to preform link prediction. However, the extent to which these representations learned for link prediction generalize to other tasks is unclear. This is important given the cost of learning such representations. Ideally, we would prefer representations that do not need to be trained again when transferring to a different task, while retaining reasonable performance. In this work, we propose a holistic evaluation protocol for entity representations learned via a link prediction objective. We consider the inductive link prediction and entity classification tasks, which involve entities not seen during training. We also consider an information retrieval task for entity-oriented search. We evaluate an architecture based on a pretrained language model, that exhibits strong generalization to entities not observed during training, and outperforms related state-of-the-art methods (22% MRR improvement in link prediction on average). We further provide evidence that the learned representations transfer well to other tasks without fine-tuning. In the entity classification task we obtain an average improvement of 16% in accuracy compared with baselines that also employ pre-trained models. In the information retrieval task, we obtain significant improvements of up to 8.8% in NDCG@10 for natural language queries. We thus show that the learned representations are not limited KG-specific tasks, and have greater generalization properties than evaluated in previous work.

Inductive Entity Representations from Text via Link Prediction

In this paper, we investigate the following two limitations for the existing distractor generation (DG) methods. First, the quality of the existing DG methods are still far from practical use. There is still room for DG quality improvement. Second, the existing DG designs are mainly for single distractor generation. However, for practical MCQ preparation, multiple distractors are desired. Aiming at these goals, in this paper, we present a new distractor generation scheme with multi-tasking and negative answer training strategies for effectively generating \textit{multiple} distractors. The experimental results show that (1) our model advances the state-of-the-art result from 28.65 to 39.81 (BLEU 1 score) and (2) the generated multiple distractors are diverse and show strong distracting power for multiple choice question.

A BERT-based Distractor Generation Scheme with Multi-tasking and Negative Answer Training Strategies

Motivation Neural methods to extract drug-drug interactions (DDIs) from literature require a large number of annotations. In this study, we propose a novel method to effectively utilize external drug database information as well as information from large-scale plain text for DDI extraction. Specifically, we focus on drug description and molecular structure information as the drug database information. Results We evaluated our approach on the DDIExtraction 2013 shared task data set. We obtained the following results. First, large-scale raw text information can greatly improve the performance of extracting DDIs when combined with the existing model and it shows the state-of-the-art performance. Second, each of drug description and molecular structure information is helpful to further improve the DDI performance for some specific DDI types. Finally, the simultaneous use of the drug description and molecular structure information can significantly improve the performance on all the DDI types. We showed that the plain text, the drug description information, and molecular structure information are complementary and their effective combination are essential for the improvement.

Using Drug Descriptions and Molecular Structures for Drug-Drug Interaction Extraction from Literature

Although pain is frequent in old age, older adults are often undertreated for pain. This is especially the case for long-term care residents with moderate to severe dementia who cannot report their pain because of cognitive impairments that accompany dementia. Nursing staff acknowledge the challenges of effectively recognizing and managing pain in long-term care facilities due to lack of human resources and, sometimes, expertise to use validated pain assessment approaches on a regular basis. Vision-based ambient monitoring will allow for frequent automated assessments so care staff could be automatically notified when signs of pain are displayed. However, existing computer vision techniques for pain detection are not validated on faces of older adults or people with dementia, and this population is not represented in existing facial expression datasets of pain. We present the first fully automated vision-based technique validated on a dementia cohort. Our contributions are threefold. First, we develop a deep learning-based computer vision system for detecting painful facial expressions on a video dataset that is collected unobtrusively from older adult participants with and without dementia. Second, we introduce a pairwise comparative inference method that calibrates to each person and is sensitive to changes in facial expression while using training data more efficiently than sequence models. Third, we introduce a fast contrastive training method that improves cross-dataset performance. Our pain estimation model outperforms baselines by a wide margin, especially when evaluated on faces of people with dementia. Pre-trained model and demo code available at https://github.com/TaatiTeam/pain_detection_demo

Unobtrusive Pain Monitoring in Older Adults with Dementia using Pairwise and Contrastive Training

The task of graph-to-text generation aims at producing sentences that preserve the meaning of input graphs. As a crucial defect, the current state-of-the-art models may mess up or even drop the core structural information of input graphs when generating outputs. We propose to tackle this problem by leveraging richer training signals that can guide our model for preserving input information. In particular, we introduce two types of autoencoding losses, each individually focusing on different aspects (a.k.a. views) of input graphs. The losses are then back-propagated to better calibrate our model via multi-task training. Experiments on two benchmarks for graph-to-text generation show the effectiveness of our approach over a state-of-the-art baseline. Our code is available at \url{http://github.com/Soistesimmer/AMR-multiview}.

Structural Information Preserving for Graph-to-Text Generation

In this work we introduce Deforming Autoencoders, a generative model for images that disentangles shape from appearance in an unsupervised manner. As in the deformable template paradigm, shape is represented as a deformation between a canonical coordinate system (`template') and an observed image, while appearance is modeled in `canonical', template, coordinates, thus discarding variability due to deformations. We introduce novel techniques that allow this approach to be deployed in the setting of autoencoders and show that this method can be used for unsupervised group-wise image alignment. We show experiments with expression morphing in humans, hands, and digits, face manipulation, such as shape and appearance interpolation, as well as unsupervised landmark localization. A more powerful form of unsupervised disentangling becomes possible in template coordinates, allowing us to successfully decompose face images into shading and albedo, and further manipulate face images.

Deforming Autoencoders: Unsupervised Disentangling of Shape and Appearance

This paper proposes Self-Imitation Learning (SIL), a simple off-policy actor-critic algorithm that learns to reproduce the agent's past good decisions. This algorithm is designed to verify our hypothesis that exploiting past good experiences can indirectly drive deep exploration. Our empirical results show that SIL significantly improves advantage actor-critic (A2C) on several hard exploration Atari games and is competitive to the state-of-the-art count-based exploration methods. We also show that SIL improves proximal policy optimization (PPO) on MuJoCo tasks.

Self-Imitation Learning

We introduce a fully differentiable approximation to higher-order inference for coreference resolution. Our approach uses the antecedent distribution from a span-ranking architecture as an attention mechanism to iteratively refine span representations. This enables the model to softly consider multiple hops in the predicted clusters. To alleviate the computational cost of this iterative process, we introduce a coarse-to-fine approach that incorporates a less accurate but more efficient bilinear factor, enabling more aggressive pruning without hurting accuracy. Compared to the existing state-of-the-art span-ranking approach, our model significantly improves accuracy on the English OntoNotes benchmark, while being far more computationally efficient.

Higher-order Coreference Resolution with Coarse-to-fine Inference

Can we detect common objects in a variety of image domains without instance-level annotations? In this paper, we present a framework for a novel task, cross-domain weakly supervised object detection, which addresses this question. For this paper, we have access to images with instance-level annotations in a source domain (e.g., natural image) and images with image-level annotations in a target domain (e.g., watercolor). In addition, the classes to be detected in the target domain are all or a subset of those in the source domain. Starting from a fully supervised object detector, which is pre-trained on the source domain, we propose a two-step progressive domain adaptation technique by fine-tuning the detector on two types of artificially and automatically generated samples. We test our methods on our newly collected datasets containing three image domains, and achieve an improvement of approximately 5 to 20 percentage points in terms of mean average precision (mAP) compared to the best-performing baselines.

Cross-Domain Weakly-Supervised Object Detection through Progressive Domain Adaptation

To understand the visual world, a machine must not only recognize individual object instances but also how they interact. Humans are often at the center of such interactions and detecting human-object interactions is an important practical and scientific problem. In this paper, we address the task of detecting <human, verb, object> triplets in challenging everyday photos. We propose a novel model that is driven by a human-centric approach. Our hypothesis is that the appearance of a person -- their pose, clothing, action -- is a powerful cue for localizing the objects they are interacting with. To exploit this cue, our model learns to predict an action-specific density over target object locations based on the appearance of a detected person. Our model also jointly learns to detect people and objects, and by fusing these predictions it efficiently infers interaction triplets in a clean, jointly trained end-to-end system we call InteractNet. We validate our approach on the recently introduced Verbs in COCO (V-COCO) and HICO-DET datasets, where we show quantitatively compelling results.

Detecting and Recognizing Human-Object Interactions

Knowledge graphs contain knowledge about the world and provide a structured representation of this knowledge. Current knowledge graphs contain only a small subset of what is true in the world. Link prediction approaches aim at predicting new links for a knowledge graph given the existing links among the entities. Tensor factorization approaches have proved promising for such link prediction problems. Proposed in 1927, Canonical Polyadic (CP) decomposition is among the first tensor factorization approaches. CP generally performs poorly for link prediction as it learns two independent embedding vectors for each entity, whereas they are really tied. We present a simple enhancement of CP (which we call SimplE) to allow the two embeddings of each entity to be learned dependently. The complexity of SimplE grows linearly with the size of embeddings. The embeddings learned through SimplE are interpretable, and certain types of background knowledge can be incorporated into these embeddings through weight tying. We prove SimplE is fully expressive and derive a bound on the size of its embeddings for full expressivity. We show empirically that, despite its simplicity, SimplE outperforms several state-of-the-art tensor factorization techniques. SimplE's code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/Mehran-k/SimplE.

SimplE Embedding for Link Prediction in Knowledge Graphs

We propose associative domain adaptation, a novel technique for end-to-end domain adaptation with neural networks, the task of inferring class labels for an unlabeled target domain based on the statistical properties of a labeled source domain. Our training scheme follows the paradigm that in order to effectively derive class labels for the target domain, a network should produce statistically domain invariant embeddings, while minimizing the classification error on the labeled source domain. We accomplish this by reinforcing associations between source and target data directly in embedding space. Our method can easily be added to any existing classification network with no structural and almost no computational overhead. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on various benchmarks and achieve state-of-the-art results across the board with a generic convolutional neural network architecture not specifically tuned to the respective tasks. Finally, we show that the proposed association loss produces embeddings that are more effective for domain adaptation compared to methods employing maximum mean discrepancy as a similarity measure in embedding space.

Associative Domain Adaptation

Deep learning techniques are being used in skeleton based action recognition tasks and outstanding performance has been reported. Compared with RNN based methods which tend to overemphasize temporal information, CNN-based approaches can jointly capture spatio-temporal information from texture color images encoded from skeleton sequences. There are several skeleton-based features that have proven effective in RNN-based and handcrafted-feature-based methods. However, it remains unknown whether they are suitable for CNN-based approaches. This paper proposes to encode five spatial skeleton features into images with different encoding methods. In addition, the performance implication of different joints used for feature extraction is studied. The proposed method achieved state-of-the-art performance on NTU RGB+D dataset for 3D human action analysis. An accuracy of 75.32\% was achieved in Large Scale 3D Human Activity Analysis Challenge in Depth Videos.

Investigation of Different Skeleton Features for CNN-based 3D Action Recognition

Meaning Representation (AMR) is a semantic representation for natural language that embeds annotations related to traditional tasks such as named entity recognition, semantic role labeling, word sense disambiguation and co-reference resolution. We describe a transition-based parser for AMR that parses sentences left-to-right, in linear time. We further propose a test-suite that assesses specific subtasks that are helpful in comparing AMR parsers, and show that our parser is competitive with the state of the art on the LDC2015E86 dataset and that it outperforms state-of-the-art parsers for recovering named entities and handling polarity.

An Incremental Parser for Abstract Meaning Representation

This paper proposes a state-of-the-art recurrent neural network (RNN) language model that combines probability distributions computed not only from a final RNN layer but also from middle layers. Our proposed method raises the expressive power of a language model based on the matrix factorization interpretation of language modeling introduced by Yang et al. (2018). The proposed method improves the current state-of-the-art language model and achieves the best score on the Penn Treebank and WikiText-2, which are the standard benchmark datasets. Moreover, we indicate our proposed method contributes to two application tasks: machine translation and headline generation. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/nttcslab-nlp/doc_lm.

Direct Output Connection for a High-Rank Language Model

Conventional object detection models require large amounts of training data. In comparison, humans can recognize previously unseen objects by merely knowing their semantic description. To mimic similar behaviour, zero-shot object detection aims to recognize and localize 'unseen' object instances by using only their semantic information. The model is first trained to learn the relationships between visual and semantic domains for seen objects, later transferring the acquired knowledge to totally unseen objects. This setting gives rise to the need for correct alignment between visual and semantic concepts, so that the unseen objects can be identified using only their semantic attributes. In this paper, we propose a novel loss function called 'Polarity loss', that promotes correct visual-semantic alignment for an improved zero-shot object detection. On one hand, it refines the noisy semantic embeddings via metric learning on a 'Semantic vocabulary' of related concepts to establish a better synergy between visual and semantic domains. On the other hand, it explicitly maximizes the gap between positive and negative predictions to achieve better discrimination between seen, unseen and background objects. Our approach is inspired by embodiment theories in cognitive science, that claim human semantic understanding to be grounded in past experiences (seen objects), related linguistic concepts (word vocabulary) and visual perception (seen/unseen object images). We conduct extensive evaluations on MS-COCO and Pascal VOC datasets, showing significant improvements over state of the art.

Polarity Loss for Zero-shot Object Detection

We consider the problem of inferring a layered representa-tion, its depth ordering and motion segmentation from a video in whichobjects may undergo 3D non-planar motion relative to the camera. Wegeneralize layered inference to the aforementioned case and correspond-ing self-occlusion phenomena. We accomplish this by introducing a flat-tened 3D object representation, which is a compact representation of anobject that contains all visible portions of the object seen in the video,including parts of an object that are self-occluded (as well as occluded)in one frame but seen in another. We formulate the inference of such flat-tened representations and motion segmentation, and derive an optimiza-tion scheme. We also introduce a new depth ordering scheme, which isindependent of layered inference and addresses the case of self-occlusion.It requires almost no computation given the flattened representations.Experiments on benchmark datasets show the advantage of our methodcompared to existing layered methods, which do not model 3D motionand self-occlusion.

Extending Layered Models to 3D Motion

We propose a novel deep learning approach to solve simultaneous alignment and recognition problems (referred to as "Sequence-to-sequence" learning). We decompose the problem into a series of specialised expert systems referred to as SubUNets. The spatio-temporal relationships between these SubUNets are then modelled to solve the task, while remaining trainable end-to-end. The approach mimics human learning and educational techniques, and has a number of significant advantages. SubUNets allow us to inject domain-specific expert knowledge into the system regarding suitable intermediate representations. They also allow us to implicitly perform transfer learning between different interrelated tasks, which also allows us to exploit a wider range of more varied data sources. In our experiments we demonstrate that each of these properties serves to significantly improve the performance of the overarching recognition system, by better constraining the learning problem. The proposed techniques are demonstrated in the challenging domain of sign language recognition. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on hand-shape recognition outperforming previous techniques by more than 30%). Furthermore, we are able to obtain comparable sign recognition rates to previous research, without the need for an alignment step to segment out the signs for recognition.

SubUNets: End-To-End Hand Shape and Continuous Sign Language Recognition

The field of self-supervised monocular depth estimation has seen huge advancements in recent years. Most methods assume stereo data is available during training but usually under-utilize it and only treat it as a reference signal. We propose a novel self-supervised approach which uses both left and right images equally during training, but can still be used with a single input image at test time, for monocular depth estimation. Our Siamese network architecture consists of two, twin networks, each learns to predict a disparity map from a single image. At test time, however, only one of these networks is used in order to infer depth. We show state-of-the-art results on the standard KITTI Eigen split benchmark as well as being the highest scoring self-supervised method on the new KITTI single view benchmark. To demonstrate the ability of our method to generalize to new data sets, we further provide results on the Make3D benchmark, which was not used during training.

Learn Stereo, Infer Mono: Siamese Networks for Self-Supervised, Monocular, Depth Estimation

Learning subtle yet discriminative features (e.g., beak and eyes for a bird) plays a significant role in fine-grained image recognition. Existing attention-based approaches localize and amplify significant parts to learn fine-grained details, which often suffer from a limited number of parts and heavy computational cost. In this paper, we propose to learn such fine-grained features from hundreds of part proposals by Trilinear Attention Sampling Network (TASN) in an efficient teacher-student manner. Specifically, TASN consists of 1) a trilinear attention module, which generates attention maps by modeling the inter-channel relationships, 2) an attention-based sampler which highlights attended parts with high resolution, and 3) a feature distiller, which distills part features into a global one by weight sharing and feature preserving strategies. Extensive experiments verify that TASN yields the best performance under the same settings with the most competitive approaches, in iNaturalist-2017, CUB-Bird, and Stanford-Cars datasets.

Looking for the Devil in the Details: Learning Trilinear Attention Sampling Network for Fine-grained Image Recognition

Recently, deep learning based 3D face reconstruction methods have shown promising results in both quality and efficiency.However, training deep neural networks typically requires a large volume of data, whereas face images with ground-truth 3D face shapes are scarce. In this paper, we propose a novel deep 3D face reconstruction approach that 1) leverages a robust, hybrid loss function for weakly-supervised learning which takes into account both low-level and perception-level information for supervision, and 2) performs multi-image face reconstruction by exploiting complementary information from different images for shape aggregation. Our method is fast, accurate, and robust to occlusion and large pose. We provide comprehensive experiments on three datasets, systematically comparing our method with fifteen recent methods and demonstrating its state-of-the-art performance.

Accurate 3D Face Reconstruction with Weakly-Supervised Learning: From Single Image to Image Set

Temporal action localization is crucial for understanding untrimmed videos. In this work, we first identify two underexplored problems posed by the weak supervision for temporal action localization, namely action completeness modeling and action-context separation. Then by presenting a novel network architecture and its training strategy, the two problems are explicitly looked into. Specifically, to model the completeness of actions, we propose a multi-branch neural network in which branches are enforced to discover distinctive action parts. Complete actions can be therefore localized by fusing activations from different branches. And to separate action instances from their surrounding context, we generate hard negative data for training using the prior that motionless video clips are unlikely to be actions. Experiments performed on datasets THUMOS'14 and ActivityNet show that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods. In particular, the average mAP on ActivityNet v1.2 is significantly improved from 18.0% to 22.4%. Our code will be released soon.

Completeness Modeling and Context Separation for Weakly Supervised Temporal Action Localization

Temporal action proposal generation is an challenging and promising task which aims to locate temporal regions in real-world videos where action or event may occur. Current bottom-up proposal generation methods can generate proposals with precise boundary, but cannot efficiently generate adequately reliable confidence scores for retrieving proposals. To address these difficulties, we introduce the Boundary-Matching (BM) mechanism to evaluate confidence scores of densely distributed proposals, which denote a proposal as a matching pair of starting and ending boundaries and combine all densely distributed BM pairs into the BM confidence map. Based on BM mechanism, we propose an effective, efficient and end-to-end proposal generation method, named Boundary-Matching Network (BMN), which generates proposals with precise temporal boundaries as well as reliable confidence scores simultaneously. The two-branches of BMN are jointly trained in an unified framework. We conduct experiments on two challenging datasets: THUMOS-14 and ActivityNet-1.3, where BMN shows significant performance improvement with remarkable efficiency and generalizability. Further, combining with existing action classifier, BMN can achieve state-of-the-art temporal action detection performance.

BMN: Boundary-Matching Network for Temporal Action Proposal Generation

Event handlers have wide range of applications such as medical assistant systems and fire suppression systems. These systems try to provide accurate responses based on the least information. Support vector data description (SVDD) is one of the appropriate tools for such detections, which should handle lack of information. Therefore, many efforts have been done to improve SVDD. Unfortunately, the existing descriptors suffer from weak data characteristic in sparse data sets and their tuning parameters are organized improperly. These issues cause reduction of accuracy in event handlers when they are faced with data shortage. Therefore, we propose automatic support vector data description (ASVDD) based on both validation degree, which is originated from fuzzy rough set to discover data characteristic, and assigning effective values for tuning parameters by chaotic bat algorithm. To evaluate the performance of ASVDD, several experiments have been conducted on various data sets of UCI repository. The experimental results demonstrate superiority of the proposed method over state-of-the-art ones in terms of classification accuracy and AUC. In order to prove meaningful distinction between the accuracy results of the proposed method and the leading-edge ones, the Wilcoxon statistical test has been conducted.

Automatic support vector data description

Most state-of-the-art action localization systems process each action proposal individually, without explicitly exploiting their relations during learning. However, the relations between proposals actually play an important role in action localization, since a meaningful action always consists of multiple proposals in a video. In this paper, we propose to exploit the proposal-proposal relations using Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs). First, we construct an action proposal graph, where each proposal is represented as a node and their relations between two proposals as an edge. Here, we use two types of relations, one for capturing the context information for each proposal and the other one for characterizing the correlations between distinct actions. Then we apply the GCNs over the graph to model the relations among different proposals and learn powerful representations for the action classification and localization. Experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art on THUMOS14 (49.1% versus 42.8%). Moreover, augmentation experiments on ActivityNet also verify the efficacy of modeling action proposal relationships. Codes are available at https://github.com/Alvin-Zeng/PGCN.

Graph Convolutional Networks for Temporal Action Localization

Image animation consists of generating a video sequence so that an object in a source image is animated according to the motion of a driving video. Our framework addresses this problem without using any annotation or prior information about the specific object to animate. Once trained on a set of videos depicting objects of the same category (e.g. faces, human bodies), our method can be applied to any object of this class. To achieve this, we decouple appearance and motion information using a self-supervised formulation. To support complex motions, we use a representation consisting of a set of learned keypoints along with their local affine transformations. A generator network models occlusions arising during target motions and combines the appearance extracted from the source image and the motion derived from the driving video. Our framework scores best on diverse benchmarks and on a variety of object categories. Our source code is publicly available.

First Order Motion Model for Image Animation

This paper aims to develop a method than can accurately estimate the crowd count from an individual image with arbitrary crowd density and arbitrary perspective. To this end, we have proposed a simple but effective Multi-column Convolutional Neural Network (MCNN) architecture to map the image to its crowd density map. The proposed MCNN allows the input image to be of arbitrary size or resolution. By utilizing filters with receptive fields of different sizes, the features learned by each column CNN are adaptive to variations in people/head size due to perspective effect or image resolution. Furthermore, the true density map is computed accurately based on geometry-adaptive kernels which do not need knowing the perspective map of the input image. Since exiting crowd counting datasets do not adequately cover all the challenging situations considered in our work, we have collected and labelled a large new dataset that includes 1198 images with about 330,000 heads annotated. On this challenging new dataset, as well as all existing datasets, we conduct extensive experiments to verify the effectiveness of the proposed model and method. In particular, with the proposed simple MCNN model, our method outperforms all existing methods. In addition, experiments show that our model, once trained on one dataset, can be readily transferred to a new dataset.

Single-Image Crowd Counting via Multi-Column Convolutional Neural Network

Zero-shot learning strives to classify unseen categories for which no data is available during training. In the generalized variant, the test samples can further belong to seen or unseen categories. The state-of-the-art relies on Generative Adversarial Networks that synthesize unseen class features by leveraging class-specific semantic embeddings. During training, they generate semantically consistent features, but discard this constraint during feature synthesis and classification. We propose to enforce semantic consistency at all stages of (generalized) zero-shot learning: training, feature synthesis and classification. We first introduce a feedback loop, from a semantic embedding decoder, that iteratively refines the generated features during both the training and feature synthesis stages. The synthesized features together with their corresponding latent embeddings from the decoder are then transformed into discriminative features and utilized during classification to reduce ambiguities among categories. Experiments on (generalized) zero-shot object and action classification reveal the benefit of semantic consistency and iterative feedback, outperforming existing methods on six zero-shot learning benchmarks. Source code at https://github.com/akshitac8/tfvaegan.

Latent Embedding Feedback and Discriminative Features for Zero-Shot Classification

In this paper, we propose the first framework (UCNet) to employ uncertainty for RGB-D saliency detection by learning from the data labeling process. Existing RGB-D saliency detection methods treat the saliency detection task as a point estimation problem, and produce a single saliency map following a deterministic learning pipeline. Inspired by the saliency data labeling process, we propose probabilistic RGB-D saliency detection network via conditional variational autoencoders to model human annotation uncertainty and generate multiple saliency maps for each input image by sampling in the latent space. With the proposed saliency consensus process, we are able to generate an accurate saliency map based on these multiple predictions. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations on six challenging benchmark datasets against 18 competing algorithms demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in learning the distribution of saliency maps, leading to a new state-of-the-art in RGB-D saliency detection.

UC-Net: Uncertainty Inspired RGB-D Saliency Detection via Conditional Variational Autoencoders

Grounding (i.e. localizing) arbitrary, free-form textual phrases in visual content is a challenging problem with many applications for human-computer interaction and image-text reference resolution. Few datasets provide the ground truth spatial localization of phrases, thus it is desirable to learn from data with no or little grounding supervision. We propose a novel approach which learns grounding by reconstructing a given phrase using an attention mechanism, which can be either latent or optimized directly. During training our approach encodes the phrase using a recurrent network language model and then learns to attend to the relevant image region in order to reconstruct the input phrase. At test time, the correct attention, i.e., the grounding, is evaluated. If grounding supervision is available it can be directly applied via a loss over the attention mechanism. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the Flickr 30k Entities and ReferItGame datasets with different levels of supervision, ranging from no supervision over partial supervision to full supervision. Our supervised variant improves by a large margin over the state-of-the-art on both datasets.

Grounding of Textual Phrases in Images by Reconstruction

We address the problem of acoustic source separation in a deep learning framework we call "deep clustering." Rather than directly estimating signals or masking functions, we train a deep network to produce spectrogram embeddings that are discriminative for partition labels given in training data. Previous deep network approaches provide great advantages in terms of learning power and speed, but previously it has been unclear how to use them to separate signals in a class-independent way. In contrast, spectral clustering approaches are flexible with respect to the classes and number of items to be segmented, but it has been unclear how to leverage the learning power and speed of deep networks. To obtain the best of both worlds, we use an objective function that to train embeddings that yield a low-rank approximation to an ideal pairwise affinity matrix, in a class-independent way. This avoids the high cost of spectral factorization and instead produces compact clusters that are amenable to simple clustering methods. The segmentations are therefore implicitly encoded in the embeddings, and can be "decoded" by clustering. Preliminary experiments show that the proposed method can separate speech: when trained on spectrogram features containing mixtures of two speakers, and tested on mixtures of a held-out set of speakers, it can infer masking functions that improve signal quality by around 6dB. We show that the model can generalize to three-speaker mixtures despite training only on two-speaker mixtures. The framework can be used without class labels, and therefore has the potential to be trained on a diverse set of sound types, and to generalize to novel sources. We hope that future work will lead to segmentation of arbitrary sounds, with extensions to microphone array methods as well as image segmentation and other domains.

Deep clustering: Discriminative embeddings for segmentation and separation

The framework of variational autoencoders (VAEs) provides a principled method for jointly learning latent-variable models and corresponding inference models. However, the main drawback of this approach is the blurriness of the generated images. Some studies link this effect to the objective function, namely, the (negative) log-likelihood. Here, we propose to enhance VAEs by adding a random variable that is a downscaled version of the original image and still use the log-likelihood function as the learning objective. Further, by providing the downscaled image as an input to the decoder, it can be used in a manner similar to the super-resolution. We present empirically that the proposed approach performs comparably to VAEs in terms of the negative log-likelihood, but it obtains a better FID score in data synthesis.

Super-resolution Variational Auto-Encoders

Attempts to render deep learning models interpretable, data-efficient, and robust have seen some success through hybridisation with rule-based systems, for example, in Neural Theorem Provers (NTPs). These neuro-symbolic models can induce interpretable rules and learn representations from data via back-propagation, while providing logical explanations for their predictions. However, they are restricted by their computational complexity, as they need to consider all possible proof paths for explaining a goal, thus rendering them unfit for large-scale applications. We present Conditional Theorem Provers (CTPs), an extension to NTPs that learns an optimal rule selection strategy via gradient-based optimisation. We show that CTPs are scalable and yield state-of-the-art results on the CLUTRR dataset, which tests systematic generalisation of neural models by learning to reason over smaller graphs and evaluating on larger ones. Finally, CTPs show better link prediction results on standard benchmarks in comparison with other neural-symbolic models, while being explainable. All source code and datasets are available online, at https://github.com/uclnlp/ctp.

Learning Reasoning Strategies in End-to-End Differentiable Proving

We present a simple but yet effective method for learning distinctive 3D local deep descriptors (DIPs) that can be used to register point clouds without requiring an initial alignment. Point cloud patches are extracted, canonicalised with respect to their estimated local reference frame and encoded into rotation-invariant compact descriptors by a PointNet-based deep neural network. DIPs can effectively generalise across different sensor modalities because they are learnt end-to-end from locally and randomly sampled points. Because DIPs encode only local geometric information, they are robust to clutter, occlusions and missing regions. We evaluate and compare DIPs against alternative hand-crafted and deep descriptors on several indoor and outdoor datasets consisting of point clouds reconstructed using different sensors. Results show that DIPs (i) achieve comparable results to the state-of-the-art on RGB-D indoor scenes (3DMatch dataset), (ii) outperform state-of-the-art by a large margin on laser-scanner outdoor scenes (ETH dataset), and (iii) generalise to indoor scenes reconstructed with the Visual-SLAM system of Android ARCore. Source code: https://github.com/fabiopoiesi/dip.

Distinctive 3D local deep descriptors

Denoising Score Matching with Annealed Langevin Sampling (DSM-ALS) has recently found success in generative modeling. The approach works by first training a neural network to estimate the score of a distribution, and then using Langevin dynamics to sample from the data distribution assumed by the score network. Despite the convincing visual quality of samples, this method appears to perform worse than Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) under the Fr\'echet Inception Distance, a standard metric for generative models. We show that this apparent gap vanishes when denoising the final Langevin samples using the score network. In addition, we propose two improvements to DSM-ALS: 1) Consistent Annealed Sampling as a more stable alternative to Annealed Langevin Sampling, and 2) a hybrid training formulation, composed of both Denoising Score Matching and adversarial objectives. By combining these two techniques and exploring different network architectures, we elevate score matching methods and obtain results competitive with state-of-the-art image generation on CIFAR-10.

Adversarial score matching and improved sampling for image generation

We present a novel and high-performance 3D object detection framework, named PointVoxel-RCNN (PV-RCNN), for accurate 3D object detection from point clouds. Our proposed method deeply integrates both 3D voxel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and PointNet-based set abstraction to learn more discriminative point cloud features. It takes advantages of efficient learning and high-quality proposals of the 3D voxel CNN and the flexible receptive fields of the PointNet-based networks. Specifically, the proposed framework summarizes the 3D scene with a 3D voxel CNN into a small set of keypoints via a novel voxel set abstraction module to save follow-up computations and also to encode representative scene features. Given the high-quality 3D proposals generated by the voxel CNN, the RoI-grid pooling is proposed to abstract proposal-specific features from the keypoints to the RoI-grid points via keypoint set abstraction with multiple receptive fields. Compared with conventional pooling operations, the RoI-grid feature points encode much richer context information for accurately estimating object confidences and locations. Extensive experiments on both the KITTI dataset and the Waymo Open dataset show that our proposed PV-RCNN surpasses state-of-the-art 3D detection methods with remarkable margins by using only point clouds.

PV-RCNN: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction for 3D Object Detection

Colonoscopy is the gold standard for examination and detection of colorectal polyps. Localization and delineation of polyps can play a vital role in treatment (e.g., surgical planning) and prognostic decision making. Polyp segmentation can provide detailed boundary information for clinical analysis. Convolutional neural networks have improved the performance in colonoscopy. However, polyps usually possess various challenges, such as intra-and inter-class variation and noise. While manual labeling for polyp assessment requires time from experts and is prone to human error (e.g., missed lesions), an automated, accurate, and fast segmentation can improve the quality of delineated lesion boundaries and reduce missed rate. The Endotect challenge provides an opportunity to benchmark computer vision methods by training on the publicly available Hyperkvasir and testing on a separate unseen dataset. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture called ``DDANet'' based on a dual decoder attention network. Our experiments demonstrate that the model trained on the Kvasir-SEG dataset and tested on an unseen dataset achieves a dice coefficient of 0.7874, mIoU of 0.7010, recall of 0.7987, and a precision of 0.8577, demonstrating the generalization ability of our model.

DDANet: Dual Decoder Attention Network for Automatic Polyp Segmentation

We present a paper abstract writing system based on an attentive neural sequence-to-sequence model that can take a title as input and automatically generate an abstract. We design a novel Writing-editing Network that can attend to both the title and the previously generated abstract drafts and then iteratively revise and polish the abstract. With two series of Turing tests, where the human judges are asked to distinguish the system-generated abstracts from human-written ones, our system passes Turing tests by junior domain experts at a rate up to 30% and by non-expert at a rate up to 80%.

Paper Abstract Writing through Editing Mechanism

Observing that Semantic features learned in an image classification task and Appearance features learned in a similarity matching task complement each other, we build a twofold Siamese network, named SA-Siam, for real-time object tracking. SA-Siam is composed of a semantic branch and an appearance branch. Each branch is a similarity-learning Siamese network. An important design choice in SA-Siam is to separately train the two branches to keep the heterogeneity of the two types of features. In addition, we propose a channel attention mechanism for the semantic branch. Channel-wise weights are computed according to the channel activations around the target position. While the inherited architecture from SiamFC \cite{SiamFC} allows our tracker to operate beyond real-time, the twofold design and the attention mechanism significantly improve the tracking performance. The proposed SA-Siam outperforms all other real-time trackers by a large margin on OTB-2013/50/100 benchmarks.

A Twofold Siamese Network for Real-Time Object Tracking

We propose a novel crowd counting model that maps a given crowd scene to its density. Crowd analysis is compounded by myriad of factors like inter-occlusion between people due to extreme crowding, high similarity of appearance between people and background elements, and large variability of camera view-points. Current state-of-the art approaches tackle these factors by using multi-scale CNN architectures, recurrent networks and late fusion of features from multi-column CNN with different receptive fields. We propose switching convolutional neural network that leverages variation of crowd density within an image to improve the accuracy and localization of the predicted crowd count. Patches from a grid within a crowd scene are relayed to independent CNN regressors based on crowd count prediction quality of the CNN established during training. The independent CNN regressors are designed to have different receptive fields and a switch classifier is trained to relay the crowd scene patch to the best CNN regressor. We perform extensive experiments on all major crowd counting datasets and evidence better performance compared to current state-of-the-art methods. We provide interpretable representations of the multichotomy of space of crowd scene patches inferred from the switch. It is observed that the switch relays an image patch to a particular CNN column based on density of crowd.

Switching Convolutional Neural Network for Crowd Counting

In this paper, we study the task of 3D human pose estimation in the wild. This task is challenging due to lack of training data, as existing datasets are either in the wild images with 2D pose or in the lab images with 3D pose. We propose a weakly-supervised transfer learning method that uses mixed 2D and 3D labels in a unified deep neutral network that presents two-stage cascaded structure. Our network augments a state-of-the-art 2D pose estimation sub-network with a 3D depth regression sub-network. Unlike previous two stage approaches that train the two sub-networks sequentially and separately, our training is end-to-end and fully exploits the correlation between the 2D pose and depth estimation sub-tasks. The deep features are better learnt through shared representations. In doing so, the 3D pose labels in controlled lab environments are transferred to in the wild images. In addition, we introduce a 3D geometric constraint to regularize the 3D pose prediction, which is effective in the absence of ground truth depth labels. Our method achieves competitive results on both 2D and 3D benchmarks.

Towards 3D Human Pose Estimation in the Wild: a Weakly-supervised Approach

We present a memory augmented neural network for natural language understanding: Neural Semantic Encoders. NSE is equipped with a novel memory update rule and has a variable sized encoding memory that evolves over time and maintains the understanding of input sequences through read}, compose and write operations. NSE can also access multiple and shared memories. In this paper, we demonstrated the effectiveness and the flexibility of NSE on five different natural language tasks: natural language inference, question answering, sentence classification, document sentiment analysis and machine translation where NSE achieved state-of-the-art performance when evaluated on publically available benchmarks. For example, our shared-memory model showed an encouraging result on neural machine translation, improving an attention-based baseline by approximately 1.0 BLEU.

Neural Semantic Encoders