Robust Conditional GAN from Uncertainty-Aware Pairwise Comparisons

Conditional generative adversarial networks have shown exceptional generation performance over the past few years. However, they require large numbers of annotations. To address this problem, we propose a novel generative adversarial network utilizing weak supervision in the form of pairwise comparisons (PC-GAN) for image attribute editing. In the light of Bayesian uncertainty estimation and noise-tolerant adversarial training, PC-GAN can estimate attribute rating efficiently and demonstrate robust performance in noise resistance. Through extensive experiments, we show both qualitatively and quantitatively that PC-GAN performs comparably with fully-supervised methods and outperforms unsupervised baselines.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation via Calibrating Uncertainties

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims at inferring class labels for unlabeled target domain given a related labeled source dataset. Intuitively, a model trained on source domain normally produces higher uncertainties for unseen data. In this work, we build on this assumption and propose to adapt from source to target domain via calibrating their predictive uncertainties. The uncertainty is quantified as the Renyi entropy, from which we propose a general Renyi entropy regularization (RER) framework. We further employ variational Bayes learning for reliable uncertainty estimation. In addition, calibrating the sample variance of network parameters serves as a plug-in regularizer for training. We discuss the theoretical properties of the proposed method and demonstrate its effectiveness on three domain-adaptation tasks.

Effective 3D Humerus and Scapula Extraction using Low-contrast and High-shape-variability MR Data

For the initial shoulder preoperative diagnosis, it is essential to obtain a three-dimensional (3D) bone mask from medical images, e.g., magnetic resonance (MR). However, obtaining high-resolution and dense medical scans is both costly and time-consuming. In addition, the imaging parameters for each 3D scan may vary from time to time and thus increase the variance between images. Therefore, it is practical to consider the bone extraction on low-resolution data which may influence imaging contrast and make the segmentation work difficult. In this paper, we present a joint segmentation for the humerus and scapula bones on a small dataset with low-contrast and high-shape-variability 3D MR images. The proposed network has a deep end-to-end architecture to obtain the initial 3D bone masks. Because the existing scarce and inaccurate human-labeled ground truth, we design a self-reinforced learning strategy to increase performance. By comparing with the non-reinforced segmentation and a classical multi-atlas method with joint label fusion, the proposed approach obtains better results.

MRI Reconstruction via Cascaded Channel-wise Attention Network

We consider an MRI reconstruction problem with input of k-space data at a very low undersampled rate. This can practically benefit patient due to reduced time of MRI scan, but it is also challenging since quality of reconstruction may be compromised. Currently, deep learning based methods dominate MRI reconstruction over traditional approaches such as Compressed Sensing, but they rarely show satisfactory performance in the case of low undersampled k-space data. One explanation is that these methods treat channel-wise features equally, which results in degraded representation ability of the neural network. To solve this problem, we propose a new model called MRI Cascaded Channel-wise Attention Network (MICCAN), highlighted by three components: (i) a variant of U-net with Channel-wise Attention (UCA) module, (ii) a long skip connection and (iii) a combined loss. Our model is able to attend to salient information by filtering irrelevant features and also concentrate on high-frequency information by enforcing low-frequency information bypassed to the final output. We conduct both quantitative evaluation and qualitative analysis of our method on a cardiac dataset. The experiment shows that our method achieves very promising results in terms of three common metrics on the MRI reconstruction with low undersampled k-space data.

Quantized Densely Connected U-Nets for Efficient Landmark Localization

In this paper, we propose quantized densely connected U-Nets for efficient visual landmark localization. The idea is that features of the same semantic meanings are globally reused across the stacked U-Nets. This dense connectivity largely improves the information flow, yielding improved localization accuracy. However, a vanilla dense design would suffer from critical efficiency issue in both training and testing. To solve this problem, we first propose order-K dense connectivity to trim off long-distance shortcuts; then, we use a memory-efficient implementation to significantly boost the training efficiency and investigate an iterative refinement that may slice the model size in half. Finally, to reduce the memory consumption and high precision operations both in training and testing, we further quantize weights, inputs, and gradients of our localization network to low bit-width numbers. We validate our approach in two tasks: human pose estimation and face alignment. The results show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art localization accuracy, but using ~70% fewer parameters, ~98% less model size and saving ~75% training memory compared with other benchmark localizers. The code is available at https://github.com/zhiqiangdon/CU-Net.

Learning to Forecast and Refine Residual Motion for Image-to-Video Generation

We consider the problem of image-to-video translation, where an input image is translated into an output video containing motions of a single object. Recent methods for such problems typically train transformation networks to generate future frames conditioned on the structure sequence. Parallel work has shown that short high-quality motions can be generated by spatiotemporal generative networks that leverage temporal knowledge from the training data. We combine the benefits of both approaches and propose a two-stage generation framework where videos are generated from structures and then refined by temporal signals. To model motions more efficiently, we train networks to learn residual motion between the current and future frames, which avoids learning motion-irrelevant details. We conduct extensive experiments on two image-to-video translation tasks: facial expression retargeting and human pose forecasting. Superior results over the state-of-the-art methods on both tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

StackGAN++: Realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks

Although Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown remarkable success in various tasks, they still face challenges in generating high quality images. In this paper, we propose Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks (StackGAN) aiming at generating high-resolution photo-realistic images. First, we propose a two-stage generative adversarial network architecture, StackGAN-v1, for text-to-image synthesis. The Stage-I GAN sketches the primitive shape and colors of the object based on given text description, yielding low-resolution images. The Stage-II GAN takes Stage-I results and text descriptions as inputs, and generates high-resolution images with photo-realistic details. Second, an advanced multi-stage generative adversarial network architecture, StackGAN-v2, is proposed for both conditional and unconditional generative tasks. Our StackGAN-v2 consists of multiple generators and discriminators in a tree-like structure; images at multiple scales corresponding to the same scene are generated from different branches of the tree. StackGAN-v2 shows more stable training behavior than StackGAN-v1 by jointly approximating multiple distributions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed stacked generative adversarial networks significantly outperform other state-of-the-art methods in generating photo-realistic images.

Jointly Optimize Data Augmentation and Network Training: Adversarial Data Augmentation in Human Pose Estimation

Random data augmentation is a critical technique to avoid overfitting in training deep neural network models. However, data augmentation and network training are usually treated as two isolated processes, limiting the effectiveness of network training. Why not jointly optimize the two? We propose adversarial data augmentation to address this limitation. The main idea is to design an augmentation network (generator) that competes against a target network (discriminator) by generating `hard' augmentation operations online. The augmentation network explores the weaknesses of the target network, while the latter learns from `hard' augmentations to achieve better performance. We also design a reward/penalty strategy for effective joint training. We demonstrate our approach on the problem of human pose estimation and carry out a comprehensive experimental analysis, showing that our method can significantly improve state-of-the-art models without additional data efforts.

Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networks

In this paper, we propose the Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Network (SAGAN) which allows attention-driven, long-range dependency modeling for image generation tasks. Traditional convolutional GANs generate high-resolution details as a function of only spatially local points in lower-resolution feature maps. In SAGAN, details can be generated using cues from all feature locations. Moreover, the discriminator can check that highly detailed features in distant portions of the image are consistent with each other. Furthermore, recent work has shown that generator conditioning affects GAN performance. Leveraging this insight, we apply spectral normalization to the GAN generator and find that this improves training dynamics. The proposed SAGAN achieves the state-of-the-art results, boosting the best published Inception score from 36.8 to 52.52 and reducing Frechet Inception distance from 27.62 to 18.65 on the challenging ImageNet dataset. Visualization of the attention layers shows that the generator leverages neighborhoods that correspond to object shapes rather than local regions of fixed shape.

Improving GANs Using Optimal Transport

We present Optimal Transport GAN (OT-GAN), a variant of generative adversarial nets minimizing a new metric measuring the distance between the generator distribution and the data distribution. This metric, which we call mini-batch energy distance, combines optimal transport in primal form with an energy distance defined in an adversarially learned feature space, resulting in a highly discriminative distance function with unbiased mini-batch gradients. Experimentally we show OT-GAN to be highly stable when trained with large mini-batches, and we present state-of-the-art results on several popular benchmark problems for image generation.