Few-shot semantic segmentation aims to segment novel-class objects in a given query image with only a few labeled support images. Most advanced solutions exploit a metric learning framework that performs segmentation through matching each query feature to a learned class-specific prototype. However, this framework suffers from biased classification due to incomplete feature comparisons. To address this issue, we present an adaptive prototype representation by introducing class-specific and class-agnostic prototypes and thus construct complete sample pairs for learning semantic alignment with query features. The complementary features learning manner effectively enriches feature comparison and helps yield an unbiased segmentation model in the few-shot setting. It is implemented with a two-branch end-to-end network (\ie, a class-specific branch and a class-agnostic branch), which generates prototypes and then combines query features to perform comparisons. In addition, the proposed class-agnostic branch is simple yet effective. In practice, it can adaptively generate multiple class-agnostic prototypes for query images and learn feature alignment in a self-contrastive manner. Extensive experiments on PASCAL-5$^i$ and COCO-20$^i$ demonstrate the superiority of our method. At no expense of inference efficiency, our model achieves state-of-the-art results in both 1-shot and 5-shot settings for semantic segmentation.
Dimension reduction plays a pivotal role in analysing high-dimensional data. However, observations with missing values present serious difficulties in directly applying standard dimension reduction techniques. As a large number of dimension reduction approaches are based on the Gram matrix, we first investigate the effects of missingness on dimension reduction by studying the statistical properties of the Gram matrix with or without missingness, and then we present a bias-corrected Gram matrix with nice statistical properties under heterogeneous missingness. Extensive empirical results, on both simulated and publicly available real datasets, show that the proposed unbiased Gram matrix can significantly improve a broad spectrum of representative dimension reduction approaches.
Network compression has been widely studied since it is able to reduce the memory and computation cost during inference. However, previous methods seldom deal with complicated structures like residual connections, group/depth-wise convolution and feature pyramid network, where channels of multiple layers are coupled and need to be pruned simultaneously. In this paper, we present a general channel pruning approach that can be applied to various complicated structures. Particularly, we propose a layer grouping algorithm to find coupled channels automatically. Then we derive a unified metric based on Fisher information to evaluate the importance of a single channel and coupled channels. Moreover, we find that inference speedup on GPUs is more correlated with the reduction of memory rather than FLOPs, and thus we employ the memory reduction of each channel to normalize the importance. Our method can be used to prune any structures including those with coupled channels. We conduct extensive experiments on various backbones, including the classic ResNet and ResNeXt, mobile-friendly MobileNetV2, and the NAS-based RegNet, both on image classification and object detection which is under-explored. Experimental results validate that our method can effectively prune sophisticated networks, boosting inference speed without sacrificing accuracy.
Few-shot image classification is a challenging problem which aims to achieve the human level of recognition based only on a small number of images. Deep learning algorithms such as meta-learning, transfer learning, and metric learning have been employed recently and achieved the state-of-the-art performance. In this survey, we review representative deep metric learning methods for few-shot classification, and categorize them into three groups according to the major problems and novelties they focus on. We conclude this review with a discussion on current challenges and future trends in few-shot image classification.
Few-shot semantic segmentation aims to segment novel-class objects in a query image with only a few annotated examples in support images. Most of advanced solutions exploit a metric learning framework that performs segmentation through matching each pixel to a learned foreground prototype. However, this framework suffers from biased classification due to incomplete construction of sample pairs with the foreground prototype only. To address this issue, in this paper, we introduce a complementary self-contrastive task into few-shot semantic segmentation. Our new model is able to associate the pixels in a region with the prototype of this region, no matter they are in the foreground or background. To this end, we generate self-contrastive background prototypes directly from the query image, with which we enable the construction of complete sample pairs and thus a complementary and auxiliary segmentation task to achieve the training of a better segmentation model. Extensive experiments on PASCAL-5$^i$ and COCO-20$^i$ demonstrate clearly the superiority of our proposal. At no expense of inference efficiency, our model achieves state-of-the results in both 1-shot and 5-shot settings for few-shot semantic segmentation.
The existing text-guided image synthesis methods can only produce limited quality results with at most \mbox{$\text{256}^2$} resolution and the textual instructions are constrained in a small Corpus. In this work, we propose a unified framework for both face image generation and manipulation that produces diverse and high-quality images with an unprecedented resolution at 1024 from multimodal inputs. More importantly, our method supports open-world scenarios, including both image and text, without any re-training, fine-tuning, or post-processing. To be specific, we propose a brand new paradigm of text-guided image generation and manipulation based on the superior characteristics of a pretrained GAN model. Our proposed paradigm includes two novel strategies. The first strategy is to train a text encoder to obtain latent codes that align with the hierarchically semantic of the aforementioned pretrained GAN model. The second strategy is to directly optimize the latent codes in the latent space of the pretrained GAN model with guidance from a pretrained language model. The latent codes can be randomly sampled from a prior distribution or inverted from a given image, which provides inherent supports for both image generation and manipulation from multi-modal inputs, such as sketches or semantic labels, with textual guidance. To facilitate text-guided multi-modal synthesis, we propose the Multi-Modal CelebA-HQ, a large-scale dataset consisting of real face images and corresponding semantic segmentation map, sketch, and textual descriptions. Extensive experiments on the introduced dataset demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method. Code and data are available at https://github.com/weihaox/TediGAN.
GAN inversion aims to invert a given image back into the latent space of a pretrained GAN model, for the image to be faithfully reconstructed from the inverted code by the generator. As an emerging technique to bridge the real and fake image domains, GAN inversion plays an essential role in enabling the pretrained GAN models such as StyleGAN and BigGAN to be used for real image editing applications. Meanwhile, GAN inversion also provides insights on the interpretation of GAN's latent space and how the realistic images can be generated. In this paper, we provide an overview of GAN inversion with a focus on its recent algorithms and applications. We cover important techniques of GAN inversion and their applications to image restoration and image manipulation. We further elaborate on some trends and challenges for future directions.
In this work, we propose TediGAN, a novel framework for multi-modal image generation and manipulation with textual descriptions. The proposed method consists of three components: StyleGAN inversion module, visual-linguistic similarity learning, and instance-level optimization. The inversion module is to train an image encoder to map real images to the latent space of a well-trained StyleGAN. The visual-linguistic similarity is to learn the text-image matching by mapping the image and text into a common embedding space. The instance-level optimization is for identity preservation in manipulation. Our model can provide the lowest effect guarantee, and produce diverse and high-quality images with an unprecedented resolution at 1024. Using a control mechanism based on style-mixing, our TediGAN inherently supports image synthesis with multi-modal inputs, such as sketches or semantic labels with or without instance (text or real image) guidance. To facilitate text-guided multi-modal synthesis, we propose the Multi-Modal CelebA-HQ, a large-scale dataset consisting of real face images and corresponding semantic segmentation map, sketch, and textual descriptions. Extensive experiments on the introduced dataset demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method. Code and data are available at https://github.com/weihaox/TediGAN.