Object-centric representations are a promising path toward more systematic generalization by providing flexible abstractions upon which compositional world models can be built. Recent work on simple 2D and 3D datasets has shown that models with object-centric inductive biases can learn to segment and represent meaningful objects from the statistical structure of the data alone without the need for any supervision. However, such fully-unsupervised methods still fail to scale to diverse realistic data, despite the use of increasingly complex inductive biases such as priors for the size of objects or the 3D geometry of the scene. In this paper, we instead take a weakly-supervised approach and focus on how 1) using the temporal dynamics of video data in the form of optical flow and 2) conditioning the model on simple object location cues can be used to enable segmenting and tracking objects in significantly more realistic synthetic data. We introduce a sequential extension to Slot Attention which we train to predict optical flow for realistic looking synthetic scenes and show that conditioning the initial state of this model on a small set of hints, such as center of mass of objects in the first frame, is sufficient to significantly improve instance segmentation. These benefits generalize beyond the training distribution to novel objects, novel backgrounds, and to longer video sequences. We also find that such initial-state-conditioning can be used during inference as a flexible interface to query the model for specific objects or parts of objects, which could pave the way for a range of weakly-supervised approaches and allow more effective interaction with trained models.
We present a novel approach to unsupervised learning for video object segmentation (VOS). Unlike previous work, our formulation allows to learn dense feature representations directly in a fully convolutional regime. We rely on uniform grid sampling to extract a set of anchors and train our model to disambiguate between them on both inter- and intra-video levels. However, a naive scheme to train such a model results in a degenerate solution. We propose to prevent this with a simple regularisation scheme, accommodating the equivariance property of the segmentation task to similarity transformations. Our training objective admits efficient implementation and exhibits fast training convergence. On established VOS benchmarks, our approach exceeds the segmentation accuracy of previous work despite using significantly less training data and compute power.
Transformers have been successful for many natural language processing tasks. However, applying transformers to the video domain for tasks such as long-term video generation and scene understanding has remained elusive due to the high computational complexity and the lack of natural tokenization. In this paper, we propose the Object-Centric Video Transformer (OCVT) which utilizes an object-centric approach for decomposing scenes into tokens suitable for use in a generative video transformer. By factoring the video into objects, our fully unsupervised model is able to learn complex spatio-temporal dynamics of multiple interacting objects in a scene and generate future frames of the video. Our model is also significantly more memory-efficient than pixel-based models and thus able to train on videos of length up to 70 frames with a single 48GB GPU. We compare our model with previous RNN-based approaches as well as other possible video transformer baselines. We demonstrate OCVT performs well when compared to baselines in generating future frames. OCVT also develops useful representations for video reasoning, achieving start-of-the-art performance on the CATER task.
Combining clustering and representation learning is one of the most promising approaches for unsupervised learning of deep neural networks. However, doing so naively leads to ill posed learning problems with degenerate solutions. In this paper, we propose a novel and principled learning formulation that addresses these issues. The method is obtained by maximizing the information between labels and input data indices. We show that this criterion extends standard cross-entropy minimization to an optimal transport problem, which we solve efficiently for millions of input images and thousands of labels using a fast variant of the Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm. The resulting method is able to self-label visual data so as to train highly competitive image representations without manual labels. Compared to the best previous method in this class, namely DeepCluster, our formulation minimizes a single objective function for both representation learning and clustering; it also significantly outperforms DeepCluster in standard benchmarks and reaches state of the art for learning a ResNet-50 self-supervisedly.
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.
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.
Applying image processing algorithms independently to each frame of a video often leads to undesired inconsistent results over time. Developing temporally consistent video-based extensions, however, requires domain knowledge for individual tasks and is unable to generalize to other applications. In this paper, we present an efficient end-to-end approach based on deep recurrent network for enforcing temporal consistency in a video. Our method takes the original unprocessed and per-frame processed videos as inputs to produce a temporally consistent video. Consequently, our approach is agnostic to specific image processing algorithms applied on the original video. We train the proposed network by minimizing both short-term and long-term temporal losses as well as the perceptual loss to strike a balance between temporal stability and perceptual similarity with the processed frames. At test time, our model does not require computing optical flow and thus achieves real-time speed even for high-resolution videos. We show that our single model can handle multiple and unseen tasks, including but not limited to artistic style transfer, enhancement, colorization, image-to-image translation and intrinsic image decomposition. Extensive objective evaluation and subject study demonstrate that the proposed approach performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods on various types of videos.
Tracking by detection is a common approach to solving the Multiple Object Tracking problem. In this paper we show how deep metric learning can be used to improve three aspects of tracking by detection. We train a convolutional neural network to learn an embedding function in a Siamese configuration on a large person re-identification dataset offline. It is then used to improve the online performance of tracking while retaining a high frame rate. We use this learned appearance metric to robustly build estimates of pedestrian's trajectories in the MOT16 dataset. In breaking with the tracking by detection model, we use our appearance metric to propose detections using the predicted state of a tracklet as a prior in the case where the detector fails. This method achieves competitive results in evaluation, especially among online, real-time approaches. We present an ablative study showing the impact of each of the three uses of our deep appearance metric.
Deep learning is the mainstream technique for many machine learning tasks, including image recognition, machine translation, speech recognition, and so on. It has outperformed conventional methods in various fields and achieved great successes. Unfortunately, the understanding on how it works remains unclear. It has the central importance to lay down the theoretic foundation for deep learning. In this work, we give a geometric view to understand deep learning: we show that the fundamental principle attributing to the success is the manifold structure in data, namely natural high dimensional data concentrates close to a low-dimensional manifold, deep learning learns the manifold and the probability distribution on it. We further introduce the concepts of rectified linear complexity for deep neural network measuring its learning capability, rectified linear complexity of an embedding manifold describing the difficulty to be learned. Then we show for any deep neural network with fixed architecture, there exists a manifold that cannot be learned by the network. Finally, we propose to apply optimal mass transportation theory to control the probability distribution in the latent space.
We propose Human Pose Models that represent RGB and depth images of human poses independent of clothing textures, backgrounds, lighting conditions, body shapes and camera viewpoints. Learning such universal models requires training images where all factors are varied for every human pose. Capturing such data is prohibitively expensive. Therefore, we develop a framework for synthesizing the training data. First, we learn representative human poses from a large corpus of real motion captured human skeleton data. Next, we fit synthetic 3D humans with different body shapes to each pose and render each from 180 camera viewpoints while randomly varying the clothing textures, background and lighting. Generative Adversarial Networks are employed to minimize the gap between synthetic and real image distributions. CNN models are then learned that transfer human poses to a shared high-level invariant space. The learned CNN models are then used as invariant feature extractors from real RGB and depth frames of human action videos and the temporal variations are modelled by Fourier Temporal Pyramid. Finally, linear SVM is used for classification. Experiments on three benchmark cross-view human action datasets show that our algorithm outperforms existing methods by significant margins for RGB only and RGB-D action recognition.
In this paper, we propose a novel feature learning framework for video person re-identification (re-ID). The proposed framework largely aims to exploit the adequate temporal information of video sequences and tackle the poor spatial alignment of moving pedestrians. More specifically, for exploiting the temporal information, we design a temporal residual learning (TRL) module to simultaneously extract the generic and specific features of consecutive frames. The TRL module is equipped with two bi-directional LSTM (BiLSTM), which are respectively responsible to describe a moving person in different aspects, providing complementary information for better feature representations. To deal with the poor spatial alignment in video re-ID datasets, we propose a spatial-temporal transformer network (ST^2N) module. Transformation parameters in the ST^2N module are learned by leveraging the high-level semantic information of the current frame as well as the temporal context knowledge from other frames. The proposed ST^2N module with less learnable parameters allows effective person alignments under significant appearance changes. Extensive experimental results on the large-scale MARS, PRID2011, ILIDS-VID and SDU-VID datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves consistently superior performance and outperforms most of the very recent state-of-the-art methods.