Recent works on 6D object pose estimation focus on learning keypoint correspondences between images and object models, and then determine the object pose through RANSAC-based algorithms or by directly regressing the pose with end-to-end optimisations. We argue that learning point-level discriminative features is overlooked in the literature. To this end, we revisit Fully Convolutional Geometric Features (FCGF) and tailor it for object 6D pose estimation to achieve state-of-the-art performance. FCGF employs sparse convolutions and learns point-level features using a fully-convolutional network by optimising a hardest contrastive loss. We can outperform recent competitors on popular benchmarks by adopting key modifications to the loss and to the input data representations, by carefully tuning the training strategies, and by employing data augmentations suitable for the underlying problem. We carry out a thorough ablation to study the contribution of each modification. The code is available at //github.com/jcorsetti/FCGF6D.
Generative diffusion models, including Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, can generate visually appealing, diverse, and high-resolution images for various applications. These models are trained on billions of internet-sourced images, raising significant concerns about the potential unauthorized use of copyright-protected images. In this paper, we examine whether it is possible to determine if a specific image was used in the training set, a problem known in the cybersecurity community and referred to as a membership inference attack. Our focus is on Stable Diffusion, and we address the challenge of designing a fair evaluation framework to answer this membership question. We propose a methodology to establish a fair evaluation setup and apply it to Stable Diffusion, enabling potential extensions to other generative models. Utilizing this evaluation setup, we execute membership attacks (both known and newly introduced). Our research reveals that previously proposed evaluation setups do not provide a full understanding of the effectiveness of membership inference attacks. We conclude that the membership inference attack remains a significant challenge for large diffusion models (often deployed as black-box systems), indicating that related privacy and copyright issues will persist in the foreseeable future.
An ideal length-extrapolatable Transformer language model can handle sequences longer than the training length without any fine-tuning. Such long-context utilization capability relies heavily on a flexible positional embedding design. Upon investigating the flexibility of existing large pre-trained Transformer language models, we find that the T5 family deserves a closer look, as its positional embeddings capture rich and flexible attention patterns. However, T5 suffers from the dispersed attention issue: the longer the input sequence, the flatter the attention distribution. To alleviate the issue, we propose two attention alignment strategies via temperature scaling. Our findings show improvement on the long-context utilization capability of T5 on language modeling, retrieval, multi-document question answering, and code completion tasks without any fine-tuning. This suggests that a flexible positional embedding design and attention alignment can go a long way toward Transformer length extrapolation.
Image Segmentation is one of the core tasks in Computer Vision and solving it often depends on modeling the image appearance data via the color distributions of each it its constituent regions. Whereas many segmentation algorithms handle the appearance models dependence using alternation or implicit methods, we propose here a new approach to directly estimate them from the image without prior information on the underlying segmentation. Our method uses local high order color statistics from the image as an input to tensor factorization-based estimator for latent variable models. This approach is able to estimate models in multiregion images and automatically output the regions proportions without prior user interaction, overcoming the drawbacks from a prior attempt to this problem. We also demonstrate the performance of our proposed method in many challenging synthetic and real imaging scenarios and show that it leads to an efficient segmentation algorithm.
Offline reinforcement learning suffers from the out-of-distribution issue and extrapolation error. Most policy constraint methods regularize the density of the trained policy towards the behavior policy, which is too restrictive in most cases. We propose Supported Trust Region optimization (STR) which performs trust region policy optimization with the policy constrained within the support of the behavior policy, enjoying the less restrictive support constraint. We show that, when assuming no approximation and sampling error, STR guarantees strict policy improvement until convergence to the optimal support-constrained policy in the dataset. Further with both errors incorporated, STR still guarantees safe policy improvement for each step. Empirical results validate the theory of STR and demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance on MuJoCo locomotion domains and much more challenging AntMaze domains.
Recent contrastive representation learning methods rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between multiple views of an underlying context. E.g., we can derive multiple views of a given image by applying data augmentation, or we can split a sequence into views comprising the past and future of some step in the sequence. Contrastive lower bounds on MI are easy to optimize, but have a strong underestimation bias when estimating large amounts of MI. We propose decomposing the full MI estimation problem into a sum of smaller estimation problems by splitting one of the views into progressively more informed subviews and by applying the chain rule on MI between the decomposed views. This expression contains a sum of unconditional and conditional MI terms, each measuring modest chunks of the total MI, which facilitates approximation via contrastive bounds. To maximize the sum, we formulate a contrastive lower bound on the conditional MI which can be approximated efficiently. We refer to our general approach as Decomposed Estimation of Mutual Information (DEMI). We show that DEMI can capture a larger amount of MI than standard non-decomposed contrastive bounds in a synthetic setting, and learns better representations in a vision domain and for dialogue generation.
Deep learning has revolutionized many machine learning tasks in recent years, ranging from image classification and video processing to speech recognition and natural language understanding. The data in these tasks are typically represented in the Euclidean space. However, there is an increasing number of applications where data are generated from non-Euclidean domains and are represented as graphs with complex relationships and interdependency between objects. The complexity of graph data has imposed significant challenges on existing machine learning algorithms. Recently, many studies on extending deep learning approaches for graph data have emerged. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of graph neural networks (GNNs) in data mining and machine learning fields. We propose a new taxonomy to divide the state-of-the-art graph neural networks into different categories. With a focus on graph convolutional networks, we review alternative architectures that have recently been developed; these learning paradigms include graph attention networks, graph autoencoders, graph generative networks, and graph spatial-temporal networks. We further discuss the applications of graph neural networks across various domains and summarize the open source codes and benchmarks of the existing algorithms on different learning tasks. Finally, we propose potential research directions in this fast-growing field.
Generic object detection, aiming at locating object instances from a large number of predefined categories in natural images, is one of the most fundamental and challenging problems in computer vision. Deep learning techniques have emerged in recent years as powerful methods for learning feature representations directly from data, and have led to remarkable breakthroughs in the field of generic object detection. Given this time of rapid evolution, the goal of this paper is to provide a comprehensive survey of the recent achievements in this field brought by deep learning techniques. More than 250 key contributions are included in this survey, covering many aspects of generic object detection research: leading detection frameworks and fundamental subproblems including object feature representation, object proposal generation, context information modeling and training strategies; evaluation issues, specifically benchmark datasets, evaluation metrics, and state of the art performance. We finish by identifying promising directions for future research.
The low resolution of objects of interest in aerial images makes pedestrian detection and action detection extremely challenging tasks. Furthermore, using deep convolutional neural networks to process large images can be demanding in terms of computational requirements. In order to alleviate these challenges, we propose a two-step, yes and no question answering framework to find specific individuals doing one or multiple specific actions in aerial images. First, a deep object detector, Single Shot Multibox Detector (SSD), is used to generate object proposals from small aerial images. Second, another deep network, is used to learn a latent common sub-space which associates the high resolution aerial imagery and the pedestrian action labels that are provided by the human-based sources
Recent advancements in deep neural networks for graph-structured data have led to state-of-the-art performance on recommender system benchmarks. However, making these methods practical and scalable to web-scale recommendation tasks with billions of items and hundreds of millions of users remains a challenge. Here we describe a large-scale deep recommendation engine that we developed and deployed at Pinterest. We develop a data-efficient Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) algorithm PinSage, which combines efficient random walks and graph convolutions to generate embeddings of nodes (i.e., items) that incorporate both graph structure as well as node feature information. Compared to prior GCN approaches, we develop a novel method based on highly efficient random walks to structure the convolutions and design a novel training strategy that relies on harder-and-harder training examples to improve robustness and convergence of the model. We also develop an efficient MapReduce model inference algorithm to generate embeddings using a trained model. We deploy PinSage at Pinterest and train it on 7.5 billion examples on a graph with 3 billion nodes representing pins and boards, and 18 billion edges. According to offline metrics, user studies and A/B tests, PinSage generates higher-quality recommendations than comparable deep learning and graph-based alternatives. To our knowledge, this is the largest application of deep graph embeddings to date and paves the way for a new generation of web-scale recommender systems based on graph convolutional architectures.
Providing model-generated explanations in recommender systems is important to user experience. State-of-the-art recommendation algorithms -- especially the collaborative filtering (CF) based approaches with shallow or deep models -- usually work with various unstructured information sources for recommendation, such as textual reviews, visual images, and various implicit or explicit feedbacks. Though structured knowledge bases were considered in content-based approaches, they have been largely ignored recently due to the availability of vast amount of data and the learning power of many complex models. However, structured knowledge bases exhibit unique advantages in personalized recommendation systems. When the explicit knowledge about users and items is considered for recommendation, the system could provide highly customized recommendations based on users' historical behaviors and the knowledge is helpful for providing informed explanations regarding the recommended items. In this work, we propose to reason over knowledge base embeddings for explainable recommendation. Specifically, we propose a knowledge base representation learning framework to embed heterogeneous entities for recommendation, and based on the embedded knowledge base, a soft matching algorithm is proposed to generate personalized explanations for the recommended items. Experimental results on real-world e-commerce datasets verified the superior recommendation performance and the explainability power of our approach compared with state-of-the-art baselines.