Contrastive Learning for Weakly Supervised Phrase Grounding

Phrase grounding, the problem of associating image regions to caption words, is a crucial component of vision-language tasks. We show that phrase grounding can be learned by optimizing word-region attention to maximize a lower bound on mutual information between images and caption words. Given pairs of images and captions, we maximize compatibility of the attention-weighted regions and the words in the corresponding caption, compared to non-corresponding pairs of images and captions. A key idea is to construct effective negative captions for learning through language model guided word substitutions. Training with our negatives yields a $\sim10\%$ absolute gain in accuracy over randomly-sampled negatives from the training data. Our weakly supervised phrase grounding model trained on COCO-Captions shows a healthy gain of $5.7\%$ to achieve $76.7\%$ accuracy on Flickr30K Entities benchmark.

Boundary Cues for 3D Object Shape Recovery

Early work in computer vision considered a host of geometric cues for both shape reconstruction and recognition. However, since then, the vision community has focused heavily on shading cues for reconstruction, and moved towards data-driven approaches for recognition. In this paper, we reconsider these perhaps overlooked "boundary" cues (such as self occlusions and folds in a surface), as well as many other established constraints for shape reconstruction. In a variety of user studies and quantitative tasks, we evaluate how well these cues inform shape reconstruction (relative to each other) in terms of both shape quality and shape recognition. Our findings suggest many new directions for future research in shape reconstruction, such as automatic boundary cue detection and relaxing assumptions in shape from shading (e.g. orthographic projection, Lambertian surfaces).

Dreaming to Distill: Data-free Knowledge Transfer via DeepInversion

We introduce DeepInversion, a new method for synthesizing images from the image distribution used to train a deep neural network. We 'invert' a trained network (teacher) to synthesize class-conditional input images starting from random noise, without using any additional information about the training dataset. Keeping the teacher fixed, our method optimizes the input while regularizing the distribution of intermediate feature maps using information stored in the batch normalization layers of the teacher. Further, we improve the diversity of synthesized images using Adaptive DeepInversion, which maximizes the Jensen-Shannon divergence between the teacher and student network logits. The resulting synthesized images from networks trained on the CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets demonstrate high fidelity and degree of realism, and help enable a new breed of data-free applications - ones that do not require any real images or labeled data. We demonstrate the applicability of our proposed method to three tasks of immense practical importance -- (i) data-free network pruning, (ii) data-free knowledge transfer, and (iii) data-free continual learning.

3D Manhattan Room Layout Reconstruction from a Single 360 Image

Recent approaches for predicting layouts from 360 panoramas produce excellent results. These approaches build on a common framework consisting of three steps: a pre-processing step based on edge-based alignment, prediction of layout elements, and a post-processing step by fitting a 3D layout to the layout elements. Until now, it has been difficult to compare the methods due to multiple different design decisions, such as the encoding network (e.g. SegNet or ResNet), type of elements predicted (e.g. corners, wall/floor boundaries, or semantic segmentation), or method of fitting the 3D layout. To address this challenge, we summarize and describe the common framework, the variants, and the impact of the design decisions. For a complete evaluation, we also propose extended annotations for the Matterport3D dataset, and introduce two depth-based evaluation metrics.

ViCo: Word Embeddings from Visual Co-occurrences

We propose to learn word embeddings from visual co-occurrences. Two words co-occur visually if both words apply to the same image or image region. Specifically, we extract four types of visual co-occurrences between object and attribute words from large-scale, textually-annotated visual databases like VisualGenome and ImageNet. We then train a multi-task log-bilinear model that compactly encodes word "meanings" represented by each co-occurrence type into a single visual word-vector. Through unsupervised clustering, supervised partitioning, and a zero-shot-like generalization analysis we show that our word embeddings complement text-only embeddings like GloVe by better representing similarities and differences between visual concepts that are difficult to obtain from text corpora alone. We further evaluate our embeddings on five downstream applications, four of which are vision-language tasks. Augmenting GloVe with our embeddings yields gains on all tasks. We also find that random embeddings perform comparably to learned embeddings on all supervised vision-language tasks, contrary to conventional wisdom.

Anchor Tasks: Inexpensive, Shared, and Aligned Tasks for Domain Adaptation

We introduce a novel domain adaptation formulation from synthetic dataset (source domain) to real dataset (target domain) for the category of tasks with per-pixel predictions. The annotations of these tasks are relatively hard to acquire in the real world, such as single-view depth estimation or surface normal estimation. Our key idea is to introduce anchor tasks, whose annotations are (1) less expensive to acquire than the main task, such as facial landmarks and semantic segmentations; and (2) shared in availability for both synthetic and real datasets so that it serves as "anchor" between tasks; and finally (3) aligned spatially with main task annotations on a per-pixel basis so that it also serves as spatial anchor between tasks' outputs. To further utilize spatial alignment between the anchor and main tasks, we introduce a novel freeze approach that freezes the final layers of our network after training on the source domain so that spatial and contextual relationship between tasks are maintained when adapting on the target domain. We evaluate our methods on two pairs of datasets, performing surface normal estimation in indoor scenes and faces, using semantic segmentation and facial landmarks as anchor tasks separately. We show the importance of using anchor tasks in both synthetic and real domains, and that the freeze approach outperforms competing approaches, reaching results in facial images on par with the state-of-the-art system that leverages detailed facial appearance model.

Silhouette Guided Point Cloud Reconstruction beyond Occlusion

One major challenge in 3D reconstruction is to infer the complete shape geometry from partial foreground occlusions. In this paper, we propose a method to reconstruct the complete 3D shape of an object from a single RGB image, with robustness to occlusion. Given the image and a silhouette of the visible region, our approach completes the silhouette of the occluded region and then generates a point cloud. We show improvements for reconstruction of non-occluded and partially occluded objects by providing the predicted complete silhouette as guidance. We also improve state-of-the-art for 3D shape prediction with a 2D reprojection loss from multiple synthetic views and a surface-based smoothing and refinement step. Experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our approach both quantitatively and qualitatively on synthetic and real scene datasets.

No-Frills Human-Object Interaction Detection: Factorization, Appearance and Layout Encodings, and Training Techniques

We show that with an appropriate factorization, and encodings of layout and appearance constructed from outputs of pretrained object detectors, a relatively simple model outperforms more sophisticated approaches on human-object interaction detection. Our model includes factors for detection scores, human and object appearance, and coarse (box-pair configuration) and optionally fine-grained layout (human pose). We also develop training techniques that improve learning efficiency by: (i) eliminating train-inference mismatch; (ii) rejecting easy negatives during mini-batch training; and (iii) using a ratio of negatives to positives that is two orders of magnitude larger than existing approaches while constructing training mini-batches. We conduct a thorough ablation study to understand the importance of different factors and training techniques using the challenging HICO-Det dataset.

Pixels, voxels, and views: A study of shape representations for single view 3D object shape prediction

The goal of this paper is to compare surface-based and volumetric 3D object shape representations, as well as viewer-centered and object-centered reference frames for single-view 3D shape prediction. We propose a new algorithm for predicting depth maps from multiple viewpoints, with a single depth or RGB image as input. By modifying the network and the way models are evaluated, we can directly compare the merits of voxels vs. surfaces and viewer-centered vs. object-centered for familiar vs. unfamiliar objects, as predicted from RGB or depth images. Among our findings, we show that surface-based methods outperform voxel representations for objects from novel classes and produce higher resolution outputs. We also find that using viewer-centered coordinates is advantageous for novel objects, while object-centered representations are better for more familiar objects. Interestingly, the coordinate frame significantly affects the shape representation learned, with object-centered placing more importance on implicitly recognizing the object category and viewer-centered producing shape representations with less dependence on category recognition.