Given a text description, Temporal Language Grounding (TLG) aims to localize temporal boundaries of the segments that contain the specified semantics in an untrimmed video. TLG is inherently a challenging task, as it requires to have comprehensive understanding of both video contents and text sentences. Previous works either tackle this task in a fully-supervised setting that requires a large amount of manual annotations or in a weakly supervised setting that cannot achieve satisfactory performance. To achieve good performance with limited annotations, we tackle this task in a semi-supervised way and propose a unified Semi-supervised Temporal Language Grounding (STLG) framework. STLG consists of two parts: (1) A pseudo label generation module that produces adaptive instant pseudo labels for unlabeled data based on predictions from a teacher model; (2) A self-supervised feature learning module with two sequential perturbations, i.e., time lagging and time scaling, for improving the video representation by inter-modal and intra-modal contrastive learning. We conduct experiments on the ActivityNet-CD-OOD and Charades-CD-OOD datasets and the results demonstrate that our proposed STLG framework achieve competitive performance compared to fully-supervised state-of-the-art methods with only a small portion of temporal annotations.
Semantic segmentation is a challenging task in the absence of densely labelled data. Only relying on class activation maps (CAM) with image-level labels provides deficient segmentation supervision. Prior works thus consider pre-trained models to produce coarse saliency maps to guide the generation of pseudo segmentation labels. However, the commonly used off-line heuristic generation process cannot fully exploit the benefits of these coarse saliency maps. Motivated by the significant inter-task correlation, we propose a novel weakly supervised multi-task framework termed as AuxSegNet, to leverage saliency detection and multi-label image classification as auxiliary tasks to improve the primary task of semantic segmentation using only image-level ground-truth labels. Inspired by their similar structured semantics, we also propose to learn a cross-task global pixel-level affinity map from the saliency and segmentation representations. The learned cross-task affinity can be used to refine saliency predictions and propagate CAM maps to provide improved pseudo labels for both tasks. The mutual boost between pseudo label updating and cross-task affinity learning enables iterative improvements on segmentation performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed auxiliary learning network structure and the cross-task affinity learning method. The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art weakly supervised segmentation performance on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO benchmarks.
While recent studies on semi-supervised learning have shown remarkable progress in leveraging both labeled and unlabeled data, most of them presume a basic setting of the model is randomly initialized. In this work, we consider semi-supervised learning and transfer learning jointly, leading to a more practical and competitive paradigm that can utilize both powerful pre-trained models from source domain as well as labeled/unlabeled data in the target domain. To better exploit the value of both pre-trained weights and unlabeled target examples, we introduce adaptive consistency regularization that consists of two complementary components: Adaptive Knowledge Consistency (AKC) on the examples between the source and target model, and Adaptive Representation Consistency (ARC) on the target model between labeled and unlabeled examples. Examples involved in the consistency regularization are adaptively selected according to their potential contributions to the target task. We conduct extensive experiments on several popular benchmarks including CUB-200-2011, MIT Indoor-67, MURA, by fine-tuning the ImageNet pre-trained ResNet-50 model. Results show that our proposed adaptive consistency regularization outperforms state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning techniques such as Pseudo Label, Mean Teacher, and MixMatch. Moreover, our algorithm is orthogonal to existing methods and thus able to gain additional improvements on top of MixMatch and FixMatch. Our code is available at //github.com/SHI-Labs/Semi-Supervised-Transfer-Learning.
Visual and audio modalities are highly correlated, yet they contain different information. Their strong correlation makes it possible to predict the semantics of one from the other with good accuracy. Their intrinsic differences make cross-modal prediction a potentially more rewarding pretext task for self-supervised learning of video and audio representations compared to within-modality learning. Based on this intuition, we propose Cross-Modal Deep Clustering (XDC), a novel self-supervised method that leverages unsupervised clustering in one modality (e.g., audio) as a supervisory signal for the other modality (e.g., video). This cross-modal supervision helps XDC utilize the semantic correlation and the differences between the two modalities. Our experiments show that XDC outperforms single-modality clustering and other multi-modal variants. XDC achieves state-of-the-art accuracy among self-supervised methods on multiple video and audio benchmarks. Most importantly, our video model pretrained on large-scale unlabeled data significantly outperforms the same model pretrained with full-supervision on ImageNet and Kinetics for action recognition on HMDB51 and UCF101. To the best of our knowledge, XDC is the first self-supervised learning method that outperforms large-scale fully-supervised pretraining for action recognition on the same architecture.
There are thousands of actively spoken languages on Earth, but a single visual world. Grounding in this visual world has the potential to bridge the gap between all these languages. Our goal is to use visual grounding to improve unsupervised word mapping between languages. The key idea is to establish a common visual representation between two languages by learning embeddings from unpaired instructional videos narrated in the native language. Given this shared embedding we demonstrate that (i) we can map words between the languages, particularly the 'visual' words; (ii) that the shared embedding provides a good initialization for existing unsupervised text-based word translation techniques, forming the basis for our proposed hybrid visual-text mapping algorithm, MUVE; and (iii) our approach achieves superior performance by addressing the shortcomings of text-based methods -- it is more robust, handles datasets with less commonality, and is applicable to low-resource languages. We apply these methods to translate words from English to French, Korean, and Japanese -- all without any parallel corpora and simply by watching many videos of people speaking while doing things.
This paper presents SimCLR: a simple framework for contrastive learning of visual representations. We simplify recently proposed contrastive self-supervised learning algorithms without requiring specialized architectures or a memory bank. In order to understand what enables the contrastive prediction tasks to learn useful representations, we systematically study the major components of our framework. We show that (1) composition of data augmentations plays a critical role in defining effective predictive tasks, (2) introducing a learnable nonlinear transformation between the representation and the contrastive loss substantially improves the quality of the learned representations, and (3) contrastive learning benefits from larger batch sizes and more training steps compared to supervised learning. By combining these findings, we are able to considerably outperform previous methods for self-supervised and semi-supervised learning on ImageNet. A linear classifier trained on self-supervised representations learned by SimCLR achieves 76.5% top-1 accuracy, which is a 7% relative improvement over previous state-of-the-art, matching the performance of a supervised ResNet-50. When fine-tuned on only 1% of the labels, we achieve 85.8% top-5 accuracy, outperforming AlexNet with 100X fewer labels.
In this work, we study the problem of training deep networks for semantic image segmentation using only a fraction of annotated images, which may significantly reduce human annotation efforts. Particularly, we propose a strategy that exploits the unpaired image style transfer capabilities of CycleGAN in semi-supervised segmentation. Unlike recent works using adversarial learning for semi-supervised segmentation, we enforce cycle consistency to learn a bidirectional mapping between unpaired images and segmentation masks. This adds an unsupervised regularization effect that boosts the segmentation performance when annotated data is limited. Experiments on three different public segmentation benchmarks (PASCAL VOC 2012, Cityscapes and ACDC) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The proposed model achieves 2-4% of improvement with respect to the baseline and outperforms recent approaches for this task, particularly in low labeled data regime.
This work tackles the problem of semi-supervised learning of image classifiers. Our main insight is that the field of semi-supervised learning can benefit from the quickly advancing field of self-supervised visual representation learning. Unifying these two approaches, we propose the framework of self-supervised semi-supervised learning ($S^4L$) and use it to derive two novel semi-supervised image classification methods. We demonstrate the effectiveness of these methods in comparison to both carefully tuned baselines, and existing semi-supervised learning methods. We then show that $S^4L$ and existing semi-supervised methods can be jointly trained, yielding a new state-of-the-art result on semi-supervised ILSVRC-2012 with 10% of labels.
Large-scale labeled data are generally required to train deep neural networks in order to obtain better performance in visual feature learning from images or videos for computer vision applications. To avoid extensive cost of collecting and annotating large-scale datasets, as a subset of unsupervised learning methods, self-supervised learning methods are proposed to learn general image and video features from large-scale unlabeled data without using any human-annotated labels. This paper provides an extensive review of deep learning-based self-supervised general visual feature learning methods from images or videos. First, the motivation, general pipeline, and terminologies of this field are described. Then the common deep neural network architectures that used for self-supervised learning are summarized. Next, the main components and evaluation metrics of self-supervised learning methods are reviewed followed by the commonly used image and video datasets and the existing self-supervised visual feature learning methods. Finally, quantitative performance comparisons of the reviewed methods on benchmark datasets are summarized and discussed for both image and video feature learning. At last, this paper is concluded and lists a set of promising future directions for self-supervised visual feature learning.
Deep neural networks have achieved great successes on the image captioning task. However, most of the existing models depend heavily on paired image-sentence datasets, which are very expensive to acquire. In this paper, we make the first attempt to train an image captioning model in an unsupervised manner. Instead of relying on manually labeled image-sentence pairs, our proposed model merely requires an image set, a sentence corpus, and an existing visual concept detector. The sentence corpus is used to teach the captioning model how to generate plausible sentences. Meanwhile, the knowledge in the visual concept detector is distilled into the captioning model to guide the model to recognize the visual concepts in an image. In order to further encourage the generated captions to be semantically consistent with the image, the image and caption are projected into a common latent space so that they can be used to reconstruct each other. Given that the existing sentence corpora are mainly designed for linguistic research and thus with little reference to image contents, we crawl a large-scale image description corpus of 2 million natural sentences to facilitate the unsupervised image captioning scenario. Experimental results show that our proposed model is able to produce quite promising results without using any labeled training pairs.