We show how to train a fully convolutional neural network to perform inverse rendering from a single, uncontrolled image. The network takes an RGB image as input, regresses albedo and normal maps from which we compute lighting coefficients. Our network is trained using large uncontrolled image collections without ground truth. By incorporating a differentiable renderer, our network can learn from self-supervision. Since the problem is ill-posed we introduce additional supervision: 1. We learn a statistical natural illumination prior, 2. Our key insight is to perform offline multiview stereo (MVS) on images containing rich illumination variation. From the MVS pose and depth maps, we can cross project between overlapping views such that Siamese training can be used to ensure consistent estimation of photometric invariants. MVS depth also provides direct coarse supervision for normal map estimation. We believe this is the first attempt to use MVS supervision for learning inverse rendering.
Human pose estimation - the process of recognizing human keypoints in a given image - is one of the most important tasks in computer vision and has a wide range of applications including movement diagnostics, surveillance, or self-driving vehicle. The accuracy of human keypoint prediction is increasingly improved thanks to the burgeoning development of deep learning. Most existing methods solved human pose estimation by generating heatmaps in which the ith heatmap indicates the location confidence of the ith keypoint. In this paper, we introduce novel network structures referred to as multiresolution representation learning for human keypoint prediction. At different resolutions in the learning process, our networks branch off and use extra layers to learn heatmap generation. We firstly consider the architectures for generating the multiresolution heatmaps after obtaining the lowest-resolution feature maps. Our second approach allows learning during the process of feature extraction in which the heatmaps are generated at each resolution of the feature extractor. The first and second approaches are referred to as multi-resolution heatmap learning and multi-resolution feature map learning respectively. Our architectures are simple yet effective, achieving good performance. We conducted experiments on two common benchmarks for human pose estimation: MS-COCO and MPII dataset.
When and why can a neural network be successfully trained? This article provides an overview of optimization algorithms and theory for training neural networks. First, we discuss the issue of gradient explosion/vanishing and the more general issue of undesirable spectrum, and then discuss practical solutions including careful initialization and normalization methods. Second, we review generic optimization methods used in training neural networks, such as SGD, adaptive gradient methods and distributed methods, and theoretical results for these algorithms. Third, we review existing research on the global issues of neural network training, including results on bad local minima, mode connectivity, lottery ticket hypothesis and infinite-width analysis.
This work addresses a novel and challenging problem of estimating the full 3D hand shape and pose from a single RGB image. Most current methods in 3D hand analysis from monocular RGB images only focus on estimating the 3D locations of hand keypoints, which cannot fully express the 3D shape of hand. In contrast, we propose a Graph Convolutional Neural Network (Graph CNN) based method to reconstruct a full 3D mesh of hand surface that contains richer information of both 3D hand shape and pose. To train networks with full supervision, we create a large-scale synthetic dataset containing both ground truth 3D meshes and 3D poses. When fine-tuning the networks on real-world datasets without 3D ground truth, we propose a weakly-supervised approach by leveraging the depth map as a weak supervision in training. Through extensive evaluations on our proposed new datasets and two public datasets, we show that our proposed method can produce accurate and reasonable 3D hand mesh, and can achieve superior 3D hand pose estimation accuracy when compared with state-of-the-art methods.
Few-shot Learning aims to learn classifiers for new classes with only a few training examples per class. Existing meta-learning or metric-learning based few-shot learning approaches are limited in handling diverse domains with various number of labels. The meta-learning approaches train a meta learner to predict weights of homogeneous-structured task-specific networks, requiring a uniform number of classes across tasks. The metric-learning approaches learn one task-invariant metric for all the tasks, and they fail if the tasks diverge. We propose to deal with these limitations with meta metric learning. Our meta metric learning approach consists of task-specific learners, that exploit metric learning to handle flexible labels, and a meta learner, that discovers good parameters and gradient decent to specify the metrics in task-specific learners. Thus the proposed model is able to handle unbalanced classes as well as to generate task-specific metrics. We test our approach in the `$k$-shot $N$-way' few-shot learning setting used in previous work and new realistic few-shot setting with diverse multi-domain tasks and flexible label numbers. Experiments show that our approach attains superior performances in both settings.
Active learning from demonstration allows a robot to query a human for specific types of input to achieve efficient learning. Existing work has explored a variety of active query strategies; however, to our knowledge, none of these strategies directly minimize the performance risk of the policy the robot is learning. Utilizing recent advances in performance bounds for inverse reinforcement learning, we propose a risk-aware active inverse reinforcement learning algorithm that focuses active queries on areas of the state space with the potential for large generalization error. We show that risk-aware active learning outperforms standard active IRL approaches on gridworld, simulated driving, and table setting tasks, while also providing a performance-based stopping criterion that allows a robot to know when it has received enough demonstrations to safely perform a task.
Monocular image-based 3D reconstruction of faces is a long-standing problem in computer vision. Since image data is a 2D projection of a 3D face, the resulting depth ambiguity makes the problem ill-posed. Most existing methods rely on data-driven priors that are built from limited 3D face scans. In contrast, we propose multi-frame video-based self-supervised training of a deep network that (i) learns a face identity model both in shape and appearance while (ii) jointly learning to reconstruct 3D faces. Our face model is learned using only corpora of in-the-wild video clips collected from the Internet. This virtually endless source of training data enables learning of a highly general 3D face model. In order to achieve this, we propose a novel multi-frame consistency loss that ensures consistent shape and appearance across multiple frames of a subject's face, thus minimizing depth ambiguity. At test time we can use an arbitrary number of frames, so that we can perform both monocular as well as multi-frame reconstruction.
Recently, much advance has been made in image captioning, and an encoder-decoder framework has achieved outstanding performance for this task. In this paper, we propose an extension of the encoder-decoder framework by adding a component called guiding network. The guiding network models the attribute properties of input images, and its output is leveraged to compose the input of the decoder at each time step. The guiding network can be plugged into the current encoder-decoder framework and trained in an end-to-end manner. Hence, the guiding vector can be adaptively learned according to the signal from the decoder, making itself to embed information from both image and language. Additionally, discriminative supervision can be employed to further improve the quality of guidance. The advantages of our proposed approach are verified by experiments carried out on the MS COCO dataset.
Recent success of deep learning models for the task of extractive Question Answering (QA) is hinged on the availability of large annotated corpora. However, large domain specific annotated corpora are limited and expensive to construct. In this work, we envision a system where the end user specifies a set of base documents and only a few labelled examples. Our system exploits the document structure to create cloze-style questions from these base documents; pre-trains a powerful neural network on the cloze style questions; and further fine-tunes the model on the labeled examples. We evaluate our proposed system across three diverse datasets from different domains, and find it to be highly effective with very little labeled data. We attain more than 50% F1 score on SQuAD and TriviaQA with less than a thousand labelled examples. We are also releasing a set of 3.2M cloze-style questions for practitioners to use while building QA systems.
In this paper, we propose a novel multi-task learning architecture, which incorporates recent advances in attention mechanisms. Our approach, the Multi-Task Attention Network (MTAN), consists of a single shared network containing a global feature pool, together with task-specific soft-attention modules, which are trainable in an end-to-end manner. These attention modules allow for learning of task-specific features from the global pool, whilst simultaneously allowing for features to be shared across different tasks. The architecture can be built upon any feed-forward neural network, is simple to implement, and is parameter efficient. Experiments on the CityScapes dataset show that our method outperforms several baselines in both single-task and multi-task learning, and is also more robust to the various weighting schemes in the multi-task loss function. We further explore the effectiveness of our method through experiments over a range of task complexities, and show how our method scales well with task complexity compared to baselines.
Image segmentation is considered to be one of the critical tasks in hyperspectral remote sensing image processing. Recently, convolutional neural network (CNN) has established itself as a powerful model in segmentation and classification by demonstrating excellent performances. The use of a graphical model such as a conditional random field (CRF) contributes further in capturing contextual information and thus improving the segmentation performance. In this paper, we propose a method to segment hyperspectral images by considering both spectral and spatial information via a combined framework consisting of CNN and CRF. We use multiple spectral cubes to learn deep features using CNN, and then formulate deep CRF with CNN-based unary and pairwise potential functions to effectively extract the semantic correlations between patches consisting of three-dimensional data cubes. Effective piecewise training is applied in order to avoid the computationally expensive iterative CRF inference. Furthermore, we introduce a deep deconvolution network that improves the segmentation masks. We also introduce a new dataset and experimented our proposed method on it along with several widely adopted benchmark datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our method. By comparing our results with those from several state-of-the-art models, we show the promising potential of our method.