Image-to-image (I2I) translation is an established way of translating data from one domain to another but the usability of the translated images in the target domain when working with such dissimilar domains as the SAR/optical satellite imagery ones and how much of the origin domain is translated to the target domain is still not clear enough. This article address this by performing translations of labelled datasets from the optical domain to the SAR domain with different I2I algorithms from the state-of-the-art, learning from transferred features in the destination domain and evaluating later how much from the original dataset was transferred. Added to this, stacking is proposed as a way of combining the knowledge learned from the different I2I translations and evaluated against single models.
Over the past few years, image-to-image (I2I) translation methods have been proposed to translate a given image into diverse outputs. Despite the impressive results, they mainly focus on the I2I translation between two domains, so the multi-domain I2I translation still remains a challenge. To address this problem, we propose a novel multi-domain unsupervised image-to-image translation (MDUIT) framework that leverages the decomposed content feature and appearance adaptive convolution to translate an image into a target appearance while preserving the given geometric content. We also exploit a contrast learning objective, which improves the disentanglement ability and effectively utilizes multi-domain image data in the training process by pairing the semantically similar images. This allows our method to learn the diverse mappings between multiple visual domains with only a single framework. We show that the proposed method produces visually diverse and plausible results in multiple domains compared to the state-of-the-art methods.
Despite significant advances in image-to-image (I2I) translation with generative adversarial networks (GANs), it remains challenging to effectively translate an image to a set of diverse images in multiple target domains using a pair of generators and discriminators. Existing multimodal I2I translation methods adopt multiple domain-specific content encoders for different domains, where each domain-specific content encoder is trained with images from the same domain only. Nevertheless, we argue that the content (domain-invariance) features should be learned from images among all of the domains. Consequently, each domain-specific content encoder of existing schemes fails to extract the domain-invariant features efficiently. To address this issue, we present a flexible and general SoloGAN model for efficient multimodal I2I translation among multiple domains with unpaired data. In contrast to existing methods, the SoloGAN algorithm uses a single projection discriminator with an additional auxiliary classifier and shares the encoder and generator for all domains. As such, the SoloGAN model can be trained effectively with images from all domains so that the domain-invariance content representation can be efficiently extracted. Qualitative and quantitative results over a wide range of datasets against several counterparts and variants of the SoloGAN model demonstrate the merits of the method, especially for challenging I2I translation tasks, i.e. tasks that involve extreme shape variations or need to keep the complex backgrounds unchanged after translations. Furthermore, we demonstrate the contribution of each component using ablation studies.
Image-to-image translation (I2I) aims to transfer images from a source domain to a target domain while preserving the content representations. I2I has drawn increasing attention and made tremendous progress in recent years because of its wide range of applications in many computer vision and image processing problems, such as image synthesis, segmentation, style transfer, restoration, and pose estimation. In this paper, we provide an overview of the I2I works developed in recent years. We will analyze the key techniques of the existing I2I works and clarify the main progress the community has made. Additionally, we will elaborate on the effect of I2I on the research and industry community and point out remaining challenges in related fields.
Knowledge distillation is typically conducted by training a small model (the student) to mimic a large and cumbersome model (the teacher). The idea is to compress the knowledge from the teacher by using its output probabilities as soft-labels to optimize the student. However, when the teacher is considerably large, there is no guarantee that the internal knowledge of the teacher will be transferred into the student; even if the student closely matches the soft-labels, its internal representations may be considerably different. This internal mismatch can undermine the generalization capabilities originally intended to be transferred from the teacher to the student. In this paper, we propose to distill the internal representations of a large model such as BERT into a simplified version of it. We formulate two ways to distill such representations and various algorithms to conduct the distillation. We experiment with datasets from the GLUE benchmark and consistently show that adding knowledge distillation from internal representations is a more powerful method than only using soft-label distillation.
Recent progress in pretraining language models on large textual corpora led to a surge of improvements for downstream NLP tasks. Whilst learning linguistic knowledge, these models may also be storing relational knowledge present in the training data, and may be able to answer queries structured as "fill-in-the-blank" cloze statements. Language models have many advantages over structured knowledge bases: they require no schema engineering, allow practitioners to query about an open class of relations, are easy to extend to more data, and require no human supervision to train. We present an in-depth analysis of the relational knowledge already present (without fine-tuning) in a wide range of state-of-the-art pretrained language models. We find that (i) without fine-tuning, BERT contains relational knowledge competitive with traditional NLP methods that have some access to oracle knowledge, (ii) BERT also does remarkably well on open-domain question answering against a supervised baseline, and (iii) certain types of factual knowledge are learned much more readily than others by standard language model pretraining approaches. The surprisingly strong ability of these models to recall factual knowledge without any fine-tuning demonstrates their potential as unsupervised open-domain QA systems. The code to reproduce our analysis is available at //github.com/facebookresearch/LAMA.
Visual localization is a key step in many robotics pipelines, allowing the robot to (approximately) determine its position and orientation in the world. An efficient and scalable approach to visual localization is to use image retrieval techniques. These approaches identify the image most similar to a query photo in a database of geo-tagged images and approximate the query's pose via the pose of the retrieved database image. However, image retrieval across drastically different illumination conditions, e.g. day and night, is still a problem with unsatisfactory results, even in this age of powerful neural models. This is due to a lack of a suitably diverse dataset with true correspondences to perform end-to-end learning. A recent class of neural models allows for realistic translation of images among visual domains with relatively little training data and, most importantly, without ground-truth pairings. In this paper, we explore the task of accurately localizing images captured from two traversals of the same area in both day and night. We propose ToDayGAN - a modified image-translation model to alter nighttime driving images to a more useful daytime representation. We then compare the daytime and translated night images to obtain a pose estimate for the night image using the known 6-DOF position of the closest day image. Our approach improves localization performance by over 250% compared the current state-of-the-art, in the context of standard metrics in multiple categories.
We study object recognition under the constraint that each object class is only represented by very few observations. In such cases, naive supervised learning would lead to severe over-fitting in deep neural networks due to limited training data. We tackle this problem by creating much more training data through label propagation from the few labeled examples to a vast collection of unannotated images. Our main insight is that such a label propagation scheme can be highly effective when the similarity metric used for propagation is learned and transferred from other related domains with lots of data. We test our approach on semi-supervised learning, transfer learning and few-shot recognition, where we learn our similarity metric using various supervised/unsupervised pretraining methods, and transfer it to unlabeled data across different data distributions. By taking advantage of unlabeled data in this way, we achieve significant improvements on all three tasks. Notably, our approach outperforms current state-of-the-art techniques by an absolute $20\%$ for semi-supervised learning on CIFAR10, $10\%$ for transfer learning from ImageNet to CIFAR10, and $6\%$ for few-shot recognition on mini-ImageNet, when labeled examples are limited.
Unpaired image-to-image translation is the problem of mapping an image in the source domain to one in the target domain, without requiring corresponding image pairs. To ensure the translated images are realistically plausible, recent works, such as Cycle-GAN, demands this mapping to be invertible. While, this requirement demonstrates promising results when the domains are unimodal, its performance is unpredictable in a multi-modal scenario such as in an image segmentation task. This is because, invertibility does not necessarily enforce semantic correctness. To this end, we present a semantically-consistent GAN framework, dubbed Sem-GAN, in which the semantics are defined by the class identities of image segments in the source domain as produced by a semantic segmentation algorithm. Our proposed framework includes consistency constraints on the translation task that, together with the GAN loss and the cycle-constraints, enforces that the images when translated will inherit the appearances of the target domain, while (approximately) maintaining their identities from the source domain. We present experiments on several image-to-image translation tasks and demonstrate that Sem-GAN improves the quality of the translated images significantly, sometimes by more than 20% on the FCN score. Further, we show that semantic segmentation models, trained with synthetic images translated via Sem-GAN, leads to significantly better segmentation results than other variants.
Image-to-image translation tasks have been widely investigated with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and dual learning. However, existing models lack the ability to control the translated results in the target domain and their results usually lack of diversity in the sense that a fixed image usually leads to (almost) deterministic translation result. In this paper, we study a new problem, conditional image-to-image translation, which is to translate an image from the source domain to the target domain conditioned on a given image in the target domain. It requires that the generated image should inherit some domain-specific features of the conditional image from the target domain. Therefore, changing the conditional image in the target domain will lead to diverse translation results for a fixed input image from the source domain, and therefore the conditional input image helps to control the translation results. We tackle this problem with unpaired data based on GANs and dual learning. We twist two conditional translation models (one translation from A domain to B domain, and the other one from B domain to A domain) together for inputs combination and reconstruction while preserving domain independent features. We carry out experiments on men's faces from-to women's faces translation and edges to shoes&bags translations. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Person re-identification (re-ID) models trained on one domain often fail to generalize well to another. In our attempt, we present a "learning via translation" framework. In the baseline, we translate the labeled images from source to target domain in an unsupervised manner. We then train re-ID models with the translated images by supervised methods. Yet, being an essential part of this framework, unsupervised image-image translation suffers from the information loss of source-domain labels during translation. Our motivation is two-fold. First, for each image, the discriminative cues contained in its ID label should be maintained after translation. Second, given the fact that two domains have entirely different persons, a translated image should be dissimilar to any of the target IDs. To this end, we propose to preserve two types of unsupervised similarities, 1) self-similarity of an image before and after translation, and 2) domain-dissimilarity of a translated source image and a target image. Both constraints are implemented in the similarity preserving generative adversarial network (SPGAN) which consists of a Siamese network and a CycleGAN. Through domain adaptation experiment, we show that images generated by SPGAN are more suitable for domain adaptation and yield consistent and competitive re-ID accuracy on two large-scale datasets.