Adaptive Appearance Rendering

We propose an approach to generate images of people given a desired appearance and pose. Disentangled representations of pose and appearance are necessary to handle the compound variability in the resulting generated images. Hence, we develop an approach based on intermediate representations of poses and appearance: our pose-guided appearance rendering network firstly encodes the targets' poses using an encoder-decoder neural network. Then the targets' appearances are encoded by learning adaptive appearance filters using a fully convolutional network. Finally, these filters are placed in the encoder-decoder neural networks to complete the rendering. We demonstrate that our model can generate images and videos that are superior to state-of-the-art methods, and can handle pose guided appearance rendering in both image and video generation.

Learning Discriminative Prototypes with Dynamic Time Warping

Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) is widely used for temporal data processing. However, existing methods can neither learn the discriminative prototypes of different classes nor exploit such prototypes for further analysis. We propose Discriminative Prototype DTW (DP-DTW), a novel method to learn class-specific discriminative prototypes for temporal recognition tasks. DP-DTW shows superior performance compared to conventional DTWs on time series classification benchmarks. Combined with end-to-end deep learning, DP-DTW can handle challenging weakly supervised action segmentation problems and achieves state of the art results on standard benchmarks. Moreover, detailed reasoning on the input video is enabled by the learned action prototypes. Specifically, an action-based video summarization can be obtained by aligning the input sequence with action prototypes.

Variational Selective Autoencoder: Learning from Partially-Observed Heterogeneous Data

Learning from heterogeneous data poses challenges such as combining data from various sources and of different types. Meanwhile, heterogeneous data are often associated with missingness in real-world applications due to heterogeneity and noise of input sources. In this work, we propose the variational selective autoencoder (VSAE), a general framework to learn representations from partially-observed heterogeneous data. VSAE learns the latent dependencies in heterogeneous data by modeling the joint distribution of observed data, unobserved data, and the imputation mask which represents how the data are missing. It results in a unified model for various downstream tasks including data generation and imputation. Evaluation on both low-dimensional and high-dimensional heterogeneous datasets for these two tasks shows improvement over state-of-the-art models.

Activity Graph Transformer for Temporal Action Localization

We introduce Activity Graph Transformer, an end-to-end learnable model for temporal action localization, that receives a video as input and directly predicts a set of action instances that appear in the video. Detecting and localizing action instances in untrimmed videos requires reasoning over multiple action instances in a video. The dominant paradigms in the literature process videos temporally to either propose action regions or directly produce frame-level detections. However, sequential processing of videos is problematic when the action instances have non-sequential dependencies and/or non-linear temporal ordering, such as overlapping action instances or re-occurrence of action instances over the course of the video. In this work, we capture this non-linear temporal structure by reasoning over the videos as non-sequential entities in the form of graphs. We evaluate our model on challenging datasets: THUMOS14, Charades, and EPIC-Kitchens-100. Our results show that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art by a considerable margin.

Neural fidelity warping for efficient robot morphology design

We consider the problem of optimizing a robot morphology to achieve the best performance for a target task, under computational resource limitations. The evaluation process for each morphological design involves learning a controller for the design, which can consume substantial time and computational resources. To address the challenge of expensive robot morphology evaluation, we present a continuous multi-fidelity Bayesian Optimization framework that efficiently utilizes computational resources via low-fidelity evaluations. We identify the problem of non-stationarity over fidelity space. Our proposed fidelity warping mechanism can learn representations of learning epochs and tasks to model non-stationary covariances between continuous fidelity evaluations which prove challenging for off-the-shelf stationary kernels. Various experiments demonstrate that our method can utilize the low-fidelity evaluations to efficiently search for the optimal robot morphology, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

MCMI: Multi-Cycle Image Translation with Mutual Information Constraints

We present a mutual information-based framework for unsupervised image-to-image translation. Our MCMI approach treats single-cycle image translation models as modules that can be used recurrently in a multi-cycle translation setting where the translation process is bounded by mutual information constraints between the input and output images. The proposed mutual information constraints can improve cross-domain mappings by optimizing out translation functions that fail to satisfy the Markov property during image translations. We show that models trained with MCMI produce higher quality images and learn more semantically-relevant mappings compared to state-of-the-art image translation methods. The MCMI framework can be applied to existing unpaired image-to-image translation models with minimum modifications. Qualitative experiments and a perceptual study demonstrate the image quality improvements and generality of our approach using several backbone models and a variety of image datasets.

House-GAN: Relational Generative Adversarial Networks for Graph-constrained House Layout Generation

This paper proposes a novel graph-constrained generative adversarial network, whose generator and discriminator are built upon relational architecture. The main idea is to encode the constraint into the graph structure of its relational networks. We have demonstrated the proposed architecture for a new house layout generation problem, whose task is to take an architectural constraint as a graph (i.e., the number and types of rooms with their spatial adjacency) and produce a set of axis-aligned bounding boxes of rooms. We measure the quality of generated house layouts with the three metrics: the realism, the diversity, and the compatibility with the input graph constraint. Our qualitative and quantitative evaluations over 117,000 real floorplan images demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms existing methods and baselines. We will publicly share all our code and data.

Modeling Continuous Stochastic Processes with Dynamic Normalizing Flows

Normalizing flows transform a simple base distribution into a complex target distribution and have proved to be powerful models for data generation and density estimation. In this work, we propose a novel type of normalizing flow driven by a differential deformation of the continuous-time Wiener process. As a result, we obtain a rich time series model whose observable process inherits many of the appealing properties of its base process, such as efficient computation of likelihoods and marginals. Furthermore, our continuous treatment provides a natural framework for irregular time series with an independent arrival process, including straightforward interpolation. We illustrate the desirable properties of the proposed model on popular stochastic processes and demonstrate its superior flexibility to variational RNN and latent ODE baselines in a series of experiments on synthetic and real-world data.

Variational Hyper RNN for Sequence Modeling

In this work, we propose a novel probabilistic sequence model that excels at capturing high variability in time series data, both across sequences and within an individual sequence. Our method uses temporal latent variables to capture information about the underlying data pattern and dynamically decodes the latent information into modifications of weights of the base decoder and recurrent model. The efficacy of the proposed method is demonstrated on a range of synthetic and real-world sequential data that exhibit large scale variations, regime shifts, and complex dynamics.