Precise 6D pose estimation of rigid objects from RGB images is a critical but challenging task in robotics and augmented reality. To address this problem, we propose DeepRM, a novel recurrent network architecture for 6D pose refinement. DeepRM leverages initial coarse pose estimates to render synthetic images of target objects. The rendered images are then matched with the observed images to predict a rigid transform for updating the previous pose estimate. This process is repeated to incrementally refine the estimate at each iteration. LSTM units are used to propagate information through each refinement step, significantly improving overall performance. In contrast to many 2-stage Perspective-n-Point based solutions, DeepRM is trained end-to-end, and uses a scalable backbone that can be tuned via a single parameter for accuracy and efficiency. During training, a multi-scale optical flow head is added to predict the optical flow between the observed and synthetic images. Optical flow prediction stabilizes the training process, and enforces the learning of features that are relevant to the task of pose estimation. Our results demonstrate that DeepRM achieves state-of-the-art performance on two widely accepted challenging datasets.
Image captioning is the process of automatically generating a description of an image in natural language. Image captioning is one of the significant challenges in image understanding since it requires not only recognizing salient objects in the image but also their attributes and the way they interact. The system must then generate a syntactically and semantically correct caption that describes the image content in natural language. With the significant progress in deep learning models and their ability to effectively encode large sets of images and generate correct sentences, several neural-based captioning approaches have been proposed recently, each trying to achieve better accuracy and caption quality. This paper introduces an encoder-decoder-based image captioning system in which the encoder extracts spatial features from the image using ResNet-101. This stage is followed by a refining model, which uses an attention-on-attention mechanism to extract the visual features of the target image objects, then determine their interactions. The decoder consists of an attention-based recurrent module and a reflective attention module, which collaboratively apply attention to the visual and textual features to enhance the decoder's ability to model long-term sequential dependencies. Extensive experiments performed on Flickr30K, show the effectiveness of the proposed approach and the high quality of the generated captions.
Existing self-supervised monocular depth estimation methods can get rid of expensive annotations and achieve promising results. However, these methods suffer from severe performance degradation when directly adopting a model trained on a fixed resolution to evaluate at other different resolutions. In this paper, we propose a resolution adaptive self-supervised monocular depth estimation method (RA-Depth) by learning the scale invariance of the scene depth. Specifically, we propose a simple yet efficient data augmentation method to generate images with arbitrary scales for the same scene. Then, we develop a dual high-resolution network that uses the multi-path encoder and decoder with dense interactions to aggregate multi-scale features for accurate depth inference. Finally, to explicitly learn the scale invariance of the scene depth, we formulate a cross-scale depth consistency loss on depth predictions with different scales. Extensive experiments on the KITTI, Make3D and NYU-V2 datasets demonstrate that RA-Depth not only achieves state-of-the-art performance, but also exhibits a good ability of resolution adaptation.
Using Bayes's theorem, we derive a unit-wise recurrence as well as a backward recursion similar to the forward-backward algorithm. The resulting Bayesian recurrent units can be integrated as recurrent neural networks within deep learning frameworks, while retaining a probabilistic interpretation from the direct correspondence with hidden Markov models. Whilst the contribution is mainly theoretical, experiments on speech recognition indicate that adding the derived units at the end of state-of-the-art recurrent architectures can improve the performance at a very low cost in terms of trainable parameters.
The perceptive models of autonomous driving require fast inference within a low latency for safety. While existing works ignore the inevitable environmental changes after processing, streaming perception jointly evaluates the latency and accuracy into a single metric for video online perception, guiding the previous works to search trade-offs between accuracy and speed. In this paper, we explore the performance of real time models on this metric and endow the models with the capacity of predicting the future, significantly improving the results for streaming perception. Specifically, we build a simple framework with two effective modules. One is a Dual Flow Perception module (DFP). It consists of dynamic flow and static flow in parallel to capture moving tendency and basic detection feature, respectively. Trend Aware Loss (TAL) is the other module which adaptively generates loss weight for each object with its moving speed. Realistically, we consider multiple velocities driving scene and further propose Velocity-awared streaming AP (VsAP) to jointly evaluate the accuracy. In this realistic setting, we design a efficient mix-velocity training strategy to guide detector perceive any velocities. Our simple method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on Argoverse-HD dataset and improves the sAP and VsAP by 4.7% and 8.2% respectively compared to the strong baseline, validating its effectiveness.
The adaptive processing of structured data is a long-standing research topic in machine learning that investigates how to automatically learn a mapping from a structured input to outputs of various nature. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in the adaptive processing of graphs, which led to the development of different neural network-based methodologies. In this thesis, we take a different route and develop a Bayesian Deep Learning framework for graph learning. The dissertation begins with a review of the principles over which most of the methods in the field are built, followed by a study on graph classification reproducibility issues. We then proceed to bridge the basic ideas of deep learning for graphs with the Bayesian world, by building our deep architectures in an incremental fashion. This framework allows us to consider graphs with discrete and continuous edge features, producing unsupervised embeddings rich enough to reach the state of the art on several classification tasks. Our approach is also amenable to a Bayesian nonparametric extension that automatizes the choice of almost all model's hyper-parameters. Two real-world applications demonstrate the efficacy of deep learning for graphs. The first concerns the prediction of information-theoretic quantities for molecular simulations with supervised neural models. After that, we exploit our Bayesian models to solve a malware-classification task while being robust to intra-procedural code obfuscation techniques. We conclude the dissertation with an attempt to blend the best of the neural and Bayesian worlds together. The resulting hybrid model is able to predict multimodal distributions conditioned on input graphs, with the consequent ability to model stochasticity and uncertainty better than most works. Overall, we aim to provide a Bayesian perspective into the articulated research field of deep learning for graphs.
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.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which generalize deep neural networks to graph-structured data, have drawn considerable attention and achieved state-of-the-art performance in numerous graph related tasks. However, existing GNN models mainly focus on designing graph convolution operations. The graph pooling (or downsampling) operations, that play an important role in learning hierarchical representations, are usually overlooked. In this paper, we propose a novel graph pooling operator, called Hierarchical Graph Pooling with Structure Learning (HGP-SL), which can be integrated into various graph neural network architectures. HGP-SL incorporates graph pooling and structure learning into a unified module to generate hierarchical representations of graphs. More specifically, the graph pooling operation adaptively selects a subset of nodes to form an induced subgraph for the subsequent layers. To preserve the integrity of graph's topological information, we further introduce a structure learning mechanism to learn a refined graph structure for the pooled graph at each layer. By combining HGP-SL operator with graph neural networks, we perform graph level representation learning with focus on graph classification task. Experimental results on six widely used benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model.
Object tracking is challenging as target objects often undergo drastic appearance changes over time. Recently, adaptive correlation filters have been successfully applied to object tracking. However, tracking algorithms relying on highly adaptive correlation filters are prone to drift due to noisy updates. Moreover, as these algorithms do not maintain long-term memory of target appearance, they cannot recover from tracking failures caused by heavy occlusion or target disappearance in the camera view. In this paper, we propose to learn multiple adaptive correlation filters with both long-term and short-term memory of target appearance for robust object tracking. First, we learn a kernelized correlation filter with an aggressive learning rate for locating target objects precisely. We take into account the appropriate size of surrounding context and the feature representations. Second, we learn a correlation filter over a feature pyramid centered at the estimated target position for predicting scale changes. Third, we learn a complementary correlation filter with a conservative learning rate to maintain long-term memory of target appearance. We use the output responses of this long-term filter to determine if tracking failure occurs. In the case of tracking failures, we apply an incrementally learned detector to recover the target position in a sliding window fashion. Extensive experimental results on large-scale benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods in terms of efficiency, accuracy, and robustness.
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.
Recently, deep learning has achieved very promising results in visual object tracking. Deep neural networks in existing tracking methods require a lot of training data to learn a large number of parameters. However, training data is not sufficient for visual object tracking as annotations of a target object are only available in the first frame of a test sequence. In this paper, we propose to learn hierarchical features for visual object tracking by using tree structure based Recursive Neural Networks (RNN), which have fewer parameters than other deep neural networks, e.g. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). First, we learn RNN parameters to discriminate between the target object and background in the first frame of a test sequence. Tree structure over local patches of an exemplar region is randomly generated by using a bottom-up greedy search strategy. Given the learned RNN parameters, we create two dictionaries regarding target regions and corresponding local patches based on the learned hierarchical features from both top and leaf nodes of multiple random trees. In each of the subsequent frames, we conduct sparse dictionary coding on all candidates to select the best candidate as the new target location. In addition, we online update two dictionaries to handle appearance changes of target objects. Experimental results demonstrate that our feature learning algorithm can significantly improve tracking performance on benchmark datasets.