Self-Supervised Learning for Visual Relationship Detection through Masked Bounding Box Reconstruction

We present a novel self-supervised approach for representation learning, particularly for the task of Visual Relationship Detection (VRD). Motivated by the effectiveness of Masked Image Modeling (MIM), we propose Masked Bounding Box Reconstruction (MBBR), a variation of MIM where a percentage of the entities/objects within a scene are masked and subsequently reconstructed based on the unmasked objects. The core idea is that, through object-level masked modeling, the network learns context-aware representations that capture the interaction of objects within a scene and thus are highly predictive of visual object relationships. We extensively evaluate learned representations, both qualitatively and quantitatively, in a few-shot setting and demonstrate the efficacy of MBBR for learning robust visual representations, particularly tailored for VRD. The proposed method is able to surpass state-of-the-art VRD methods on the Predicate Detection (PredDet) evaluation setting, using only a few annotated samples. We make our code available at https://github.com/deeplab-ai/SelfSupervisedVRD.

Interpretable Visual Question Answering via Reasoning Supervision

Transformer-based architectures have recently demonstrated remarkable performance in the Visual Question Answering (VQA) task. However, such models are likely to disregard crucial visual cues and often rely on multimodal shortcuts and inherent biases of the language modality to predict the correct answer, a phenomenon commonly referred to as lack of visual grounding. In this work, we alleviate this shortcoming through a novel architecture for visual question answering that leverages common sense reasoning as a supervisory signal. Reasoning supervision takes the form of a textual justification of the correct answer, with such annotations being already available on large-scale Visual Common Sense Reasoning (VCR) datasets. The model's visual attention is guided toward important elements of the scene through a similarity loss that aligns the learned attention distributions guided by the question and the correct reasoning. We demonstrate both quantitatively and qualitatively that the proposed approach can boost the model's visual perception capability and lead to performance increase, without requiring training on explicit grounding annotations.

SHARP Challenge 2023: Solving CAD History and pArameters Recovery from Point clouds and 3D scans. Overview, Datasets, Metrics, and Baselines

Recent breakthroughs in geometric Deep Learning (DL) and the availability of large Computer-Aided Design (CAD) datasets have advanced the research on learning CAD modeling processes and relating them to real objects. In this context, 3D reverse engineering of CAD models from 3D scans is considered to be one of the most sought-after goals for the CAD industry. However, recent efforts assume multiple simplifications limiting the applications in real-world settings. The SHARP Challenge 2023 aims at pushing the research a step closer to the real-world scenario of CAD reverse engineering through dedicated datasets and tracks. In this paper, we define the proposed SHARP 2023 tracks, describe the provided datasets, and propose a set of baseline methods along with suitable evaluation metrics to assess the performance of the track solutions. All proposed datasets along with useful routines and the evaluation metrics are publicly available.

An Incremental Learning framework for Large-scale CTR Prediction

In this work we introduce an incremental learning framework for Click-Through-Rate (CTR) prediction and demonstrate its effectiveness for Taboola's massive-scale recommendation service. Our approach enables rapid capture of emerging trends through warm-starting from previously deployed models and fine tuning on "fresh" data only. Past knowledge is maintained via a teacher-student paradigm, where the teacher acts as a distillation technique, mitigating the catastrophic forgetting phenomenon. Our incremental learning framework enables significantly faster training and deployment cycles (x12 speedup). We demonstrate a consistent Revenue Per Mille (RPM) lift over multiple traffic segments and a significant CTR increase on newly introduced items.

From Keypoints to Object Landmarks via Self-Training Correspondence: A novel approach to Unsupervised Landmark Discovery

This paper proposes a novel paradigm for the unsupervised learning of object landmark detectors. Contrary to existing methods that build on auxiliary tasks such as image generation or equivariance, we propose a self-training approach where, departing from generic keypoints, a landmark detector and descriptor is trained to improve itself, tuning the keypoints into distinctive landmarks. To this end, we propose an iterative algorithm that alternates between producing new pseudo-labels through feature clustering and learning distinctive features for each pseudo-class through contrastive learning. With a shared backbone for the landmark detector and descriptor, the keypoint locations progressively converge to stable landmarks, filtering those less stable. Compared to previous works, our approach can learn points that are more flexible in terms of capturing large viewpoint changes. We validate our method on a variety of difficult datasets, including LS3D, BBCPose, Human3.6M and PennAction, achieving new state of the art results.

Convolutive Audio Source Separation using Robust ICA and an intelligent evolving permutation ambiguity solution

Audio source separation is the task of isolating sound sources that are active simultaneously in a room captured by a set of microphones. Convolutive audio source separation of equal number of sources and microphones has a number of shortcomings including the complexity of frequency-domain ICA, the permutation ambiguity and the problem's scalabity with increasing number of sensors. In this paper, the authors propose a multiple-microphone audio source separation algorithm based on a previous work of Mitianoudis and Davies (2003). Complex FastICA is substituted by Robust ICA increasing robustness and performance. Permutation ambiguity is solved using two methodologies. The first is using the Likelihood Ration Jump solution, which is now modified to decrease computational complexity in the case of multiple microphones. The application of the MuSIC algorithm, as a preprocessing step to the previous solution, forms a second methodology with promising results.