Speckle filtering is generally a prerequisite to the analysis of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. Tremendous progress has been achieved in the domain of single-image despeckling. Latest techniques rely on deep neural networks to restore the various structures and textures peculiar to SAR images. The availability of time series of SAR images offers the possibility of improving speckle filtering by combining different speckle realizations over the same area. The supervised training of deep neural networks requires ground-truth speckle-free images. Such images can only be obtained indirectly through some form of averaging, by spatial or temporal integration, and are imperfect. Given the potential of very high quality restoration reachable by multi-temporal speckle filtering, the limitations of ground-truth images need to be circumvented. We extend a recent self-supervised training strategy for single-look complex SAR images, called MERLIN, to the case of multi-temporal filtering. This requires modeling the sources of statistical dependencies in the spatial and temporal dimensions as well as between the real and imaginary components of the complex amplitudes. Quantitative analysis on datasets with simulated speckle indicates a clear improvement of speckle reduction when additional SAR images are included. Our method is then applied to stacks of TerraSAR-X images and shown to outperform competing multi-temporal speckle filtering approaches. The code of the trained models is made freely available on the Gitlab of the IMAGES team of the LTCI Lab, T\'el\'ecom Paris Institut Polytechnique de Paris (//gitlab.telecom-paris.fr/ring/multi-temporal-merlin/).
Self-supervised models are increasingly prevalent in machine learning (ML) since they reduce the need for expensively labeled data. Because of their versatility in downstream applications, they are increasingly used as a service exposed via public APIs. At the same time, these encoder models are particularly vulnerable to model stealing attacks due to the high dimensionality of vector representations they output. Yet, encoders remain undefended: existing mitigation strategies for stealing attacks focus on supervised learning. We introduce a new dataset inference defense, which uses the private training set of the victim encoder model to attribute its ownership in the event of stealing. The intuition is that the log-likelihood of an encoder's output representations is higher on the victim's training data than on test data if it is stolen from the victim, but not if it is independently trained. We compute this log-likelihood using density estimation models. As part of our evaluation, we also propose measuring the fidelity of stolen encoders and quantifying the effectiveness of the theft detection without involving downstream tasks; instead, we leverage mutual information and distance measurements. Our extensive empirical results in the vision domain demonstrate that dataset inference is a promising direction for defending self-supervised models against model stealing.
Designing learning systems which are invariant to certain data transformations is critical in machine learning. Practitioners can typically enforce a desired invariance on the trained model through the choice of a network architecture, e.g. using convolutions for translations, or using data augmentation. Yet, enforcing true invariance in the network can be difficult, and data invariances are not always known a piori. State-of-the-art methods for learning data augmentation policies require held-out data and are based on bilevel optimization problems, which are complex to solve and often computationally demanding. In this work we investigate new ways of learning invariances only from the training data. Using learnable augmentation layers built directly in the network, we demonstrate that our method is very versatile. It can incorporate any type of differentiable augmentation and be applied to a broad class of learning problems beyond computer vision. We provide empirical evidence showing that our approach is easier and faster to train than modern automatic data augmentation techniques based on bilevel optimization, while achieving comparable results. Experiments show that while the invariances transferred to a model through automatic data augmentation are limited by the model expressivity, the invariance yielded by our approach is insensitive to it by design.
Visual place recognition techniques based on deep learning, which have imposed themselves as the state-of-the-art in recent years, do not generalize well to environments visually different from the training set. Thus, to achieve top performance, it is sometimes necessary to fine-tune the networks to the target environment. To this end, we propose a self-supervised domain calibration procedure based on robust pose graph optimization from Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) as the supervision signal without requiring GPS or manual labeling. Moreover, we leverage the procedure to improve uncertainty estimation for place recognition matches which is important in safety critical applications. We show that our approach can improve the performance of a state-of-the-art technique on a target environment dissimilar from its training set and that we can obtain uncertainty estimates. We believe that this approach will help practitioners to deploy robust place recognition solutions in real-world applications. Our code is available publicly: //github.com/MISTLab/vpr-calibration-and-uncertainty
Deep learning on graphs has attracted significant interests recently. However, most of the works have focused on (semi-) supervised learning, resulting in shortcomings including heavy label reliance, poor generalization, and weak robustness. To address these issues, self-supervised learning (SSL), which extracts informative knowledge through well-designed pretext tasks without relying on manual labels, has become a promising and trending learning paradigm for graph data. Different from SSL on other domains like computer vision and natural language processing, SSL on graphs has an exclusive background, design ideas, and taxonomies. Under the umbrella of graph self-supervised learning, we present a timely and comprehensive review of the existing approaches which employ SSL techniques for graph data. We construct a unified framework that mathematically formalizes the paradigm of graph SSL. According to the objectives of pretext tasks, we divide these approaches into four categories: generation-based, auxiliary property-based, contrast-based, and hybrid approaches. We further conclude the applications of graph SSL across various research fields and summarize the commonly used datasets, evaluation benchmark, performance comparison and open-source codes of graph SSL. Finally, we discuss the remaining challenges and potential future directions in this research field.
Recent advances in representation learning have demonstrated an ability to represent information from different modalities such as video, text, and audio in a single high-level embedding vector. In this work we present a self-supervised learning framework that is able to learn a representation that captures finer levels of granularity across different modalities such as concepts or events represented by visual objects or spoken words. Our framework relies on a discretized embedding space created via vector quantization that is shared across different modalities. Beyond the shared embedding space, we propose a Cross-Modal Code Matching objective that forces the representations from different views (modalities) to have a similar distribution over the discrete embedding space such that cross-modal objects/actions localization can be performed without direct supervision. In our experiments we show that the proposed discretized multi-modal fine-grained representation (e.g., pixel/word/frame) can complement high-level summary representations (e.g., video/sentence/waveform) for improved performance on cross-modal retrieval tasks. We also observe that the discretized representation uses individual clusters to represent the same semantic concept across modalities.
Weakly-Supervised Object Detection (WSOD) and Localization (WSOL), i.e., detecting multiple and single instances with bounding boxes in an image using image-level labels, are long-standing and challenging tasks in the CV community. With the success of deep neural networks in object detection, both WSOD and WSOL have received unprecedented attention. Hundreds of WSOD and WSOL methods and numerous techniques have been proposed in the deep learning era. To this end, in this paper, we consider WSOL is a sub-task of WSOD and provide a comprehensive survey of the recent achievements of WSOD. Specifically, we firstly describe the formulation and setting of the WSOD, including the background, challenges, basic framework. Meanwhile, we summarize and analyze all advanced techniques and training tricks for improving detection performance. Then, we introduce the widely-used datasets and evaluation metrics of WSOD. Lastly, we discuss the future directions of WSOD. We believe that these summaries can help pave a way for future research on WSOD and WSOL.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently become increasingly popular due to their ability to learn complex systems of relations or interactions arising in a broad spectrum of problems ranging from biology and particle physics to social networks and recommendation systems. Despite the plethora of different models for deep learning on graphs, few approaches have been proposed thus far for dealing with graphs that present some sort of dynamic nature (e.g. evolving features or connectivity over time). In this paper, we present Temporal Graph Networks (TGNs), a generic, efficient framework for deep learning on dynamic graphs represented as sequences of timed events. Thanks to a novel combination of memory modules and graph-based operators, TGNs are able to significantly outperform previous approaches being at the same time more computationally efficient. We furthermore show that several previous models for learning on dynamic graphs can be cast as specific instances of our framework. We perform a detailed ablation study of different components of our framework and devise the best configuration that achieves state-of-the-art performance on several transductive and inductive prediction tasks for dynamic graphs.
Recent advances in maximizing mutual information (MI) between the source and target have demonstrated its effectiveness in text generation. However, previous works paid little attention to modeling the backward network of MI (i.e., dependency from the target to the source), which is crucial to the tightness of the variational information maximization lower bound. In this paper, we propose Adversarial Mutual Information (AMI): a text generation framework which is formed as a novel saddle point (min-max) optimization aiming to identify joint interactions between the source and target. Within this framework, the forward and backward networks are able to iteratively promote or demote each other's generated instances by comparing the real and synthetic data distributions. We also develop a latent noise sampling strategy that leverages random variations at the high-level semantic space to enhance the long term dependency in the generation process. Extensive experiments based on different text generation tasks demonstrate that the proposed AMI framework can significantly outperform several strong baselines, and we also show that AMI has potential to lead to a tighter lower bound of maximum mutual information for the variational information maximization problem.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a popular class of machine learning models whose major advantage is their ability to incorporate a sparse and discrete dependency structure between data points. Unfortunately, GNNs can only be used when such a graph-structure is available. In practice, however, real-world graphs are often noisy and incomplete or might not be available at all. With this work, we propose to jointly learn the graph structure and the parameters of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) by approximately solving a bilevel program that learns a discrete probability distribution on the edges of the graph. This allows one to apply GCNs not only in scenarios where the given graph is incomplete or corrupted but also in those where a graph is not available. We conduct a series of experiments that analyze the behavior of the proposed method and demonstrate that it outperforms related methods by a significant margin.
State-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) benefits a lot from multi-task learning (MTL), which learns multiple related tasks simultaneously to obtain shared or mutually related representations for different tasks. The most widely-used MTL CNN structure is based on an empirical or heuristic split on a specific layer (e.g., the last convolutional layer) to minimize different task-specific losses. However, this heuristic sharing/splitting strategy may be harmful to the final performance of one or multiple tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel CNN structure for MTL, which enables automatic feature fusing at every layer. Specifically, we first concatenate features from different tasks according to their channel dimension, and then formulate the feature fusing problem as discriminative dimensionality reduction. We show that this discriminative dimensionality reduction can be done by 1x1 Convolution, Batch Normalization, and Weight Decay in one CNN, which we refer to as Neural Discriminative Dimensionality Reduction (NDDR). We perform ablation analysis in details for different configurations in training the network. The experiments carried out on different network structures and different task sets demonstrate the promising performance and desirable generalizability of our proposed method.