Multi-label zero-shot learning strives to classify images into multiple unseen categories for which no data is available during training. The test samples can additionally contain seen categories in the generalized variant. Existing approaches rely on learning either shared or label-specific attention from the seen classes. Nevertheless, computing reliable attention maps for unseen classes during inference in a multi-label setting is still a challenge. In contrast, state-of-the-art single-label generative adversarial network (GAN) based approaches learn to directly synthesize the class-specific visual features from the corresponding class attribute embeddings. However, synthesizing multi-label features from GANs is still unexplored in the context of zero-shot setting. In this work, we introduce different fusion approaches at the attribute-level, feature-level and cross-level (across attribute and feature-levels) for synthesizing multi-label features from their corresponding multi-label class embedding. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to tackle the problem of multi-label feature synthesis in the (generalized) zero-shot setting. Comprehensive experiments are performed on three zero-shot image classification benchmarks: NUS-WIDE, Open Images and MS COCO. Our cross-level fusion-based generative approach outperforms the state-of-the-art on all three datasets. Furthermore, we show the generalization capabilities of our fusion approach in the zero-shot detection task on MS COCO, achieving favorable performance against existing methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/akshitac8/Generative_MLZSL.
We study incremental learning for semantic segmentation where when learning new classes we have no access to the labeled data of previous tasks. When incrementally learning new classes, deep neural networks suffer from catastrophic forgetting of previous learned knowledge. To address this problem, we propose to apply a self-training approach that leverages unlabeled data, which is used for rehearsal of previous knowledge. Additionally, conflict reduction is proposed to resolve the conflicts of pseudo labels generated from both the old and new models. We show that maximizing self-entropy can further improve results by smoothing the overconfident predictions. The experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art results: obtaining a relative gain of up to 114% on Pascal-VOC 2012 and 8.5% on the more challenging ADE20K compared to previous state-of-the-art methods.
Image-to-image translation has recently achieved remarkable results. But despite current success, it suffers from inferior performance when translations between classes require large shape changes. We attribute this to the high-resolution bottlenecks which are used by current state-of-the-art image-to-image methods. Therefore, in this work, we propose a novel deep hierarchical Image-to-Image Translation method, called DeepI2I. We learn a model by leveraging hierarchical features: (a) structural information contained in the shallow layers and (b) semantic information extracted from the deep layers. To enable the training of deep I2I models on small datasets, we propose a novel transfer learning method, that transfers knowledge from pre-trained GANs. Specifically, we leverage the discriminator of a pre-trained GANs (i.e. BigGAN or StyleGAN) to initialize both the encoder and the discriminator and the pre-trained generator to initialize the generator of our model. Applying knowledge transfer leads to an alignment problem between the encoder and generator. We introduce an adaptor network to address this. On many-class image-to-image translation on three datasets (Animal faces, Birds, and Foods) we decrease mFID by at least 35% when compared to the state-of-the-art. Furthermore, we qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate that transfer learning significantly improves the performance of I2I systems, especially for small datasets. Finally, we are the first to perform I2I translations for domains with over 100 classes.
For future learning systems incremental learning is desirable, because it allows for: efficient resource usage by eliminating the need to retrain from scratch at the arrival of new data; reduced memory usage by preventing or limiting the amount of data required to be stored -- also important when privacy limitations are imposed; and learning that more closely resembles human learning. The main challenge for incremental learning is catastrophic forgetting, which refers to the precipitous drop in performance on previously learned tasks after learning a new one. Incremental learning of deep neural networks has seen explosive growth in recent years. Initial work focused on task incremental learning, where a task-ID is provided at inference time. Recently we have seen a shift towards class-incremental learning where the learner must classify at inference time between all classes seen in previous tasks without recourse to a task-ID. In this paper, we provide a complete survey of existing methods for incremental learning, and in particular we perform an extensive experimental evaluation on twelve class-incremental methods. We consider several new experimental scenarios, including a comparison of class-incremental methods on multiple large-scale datasets, investigation into small and large domain shifts, and comparison on various network architectures.
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer the knowledge learned from labeled source domain to unlabeled target domain. Existing UDA methods require access to the data from the source domain, during adaptation to the target domain, which may not be feasible in some real-world situations. In this paper, we address Source-free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (SFUDA), where the model has no access to any source data during the adaptation period. We propose a novel framework named BAIT to tackle SFUDA. Specifically, we first train the model on source domain. With the source-specific classifier head (referred to as anchor classifier) fixed, we further introduce a new learnable classifier head (referred to as bait classifier), which is initialized by the anchor classifier. When adapting the source model to the target domain, the source data are no more accessible and the bait classifier aims to push the target features towards the right side of the decision boundary of the anchor classifier, thus achieving the feature alignment. Experiment results show that proposed BAIT achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with existing normal UDA methods and several SFUDA methods.
Active learning emerged as an alternative to alleviate the effort to label huge amount of data for data hungry applications (such as image/video indexing and retrieval, autonomous driving, etc.). The goal of active learning is to automatically select a number of unlabeled samples for annotation (according to a budget), based on an acquisition function, which indicates how valuable a sample is for training the model. The learning loss method is a task-agnostic approach which attaches a module to learn to predict the target loss of unlabeled data, and select data with the highest loss for labeling. In this work, we follow this strategy but we define the acquisition function as a learning to rank problem and rethink the structure of the loss prediction module, using a simple but effective listwise approach. Experimental results on four datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms recent state-of-the-art active learning approaches for both image classification and regression tasks.
Most of the saliency methods are evaluated on their ability to generate saliency maps, and not on their functionality in a complete vision pipeline, like for instance, image classification. In the current paper, we propose an approach which does not require explicit saliency maps to improve image classification, but they are learned implicitely, during the training of an end-to-end image classification task. We show that our approach obtains similar results as the case when the saliency maps are provided explicitely. Combining RGB data with saliency maps represents a significant advantage for object recognition, especially for the case when training data is limited. We validate our method on several datasets for fine-grained classification tasks (Flowers, Birds and Cars). In addition, we show that our saliency estimation method, which is trained without any saliency groundtruth data, obtains competitive results on real image saliency benchmark (Toronto), and outperforms deep saliency models with synthetic images (SID4VAM).
Research on continual learning has led to a variety of approaches to mitigating catastrophic forgetting in feed-forward classification networks. Until now surprisingly little attention has been focused on continual learning of recurrent models applied to problems like image captioning. In this paper we take a systematic look at continual learning of LSTM-based models for image captioning. We propose an attention-based approach that explicitly accommodates the transient nature of vocabularies in continual image captioning tasks -- i.e. that task vocabularies are not disjoint. We call our method Recurrent Attention to Transient Tasks (RATT), and also show how to adapt continual learning approaches based on weight egularization and knowledge distillation to recurrent continual learning problems. We apply our approaches to incremental image captioning problem on two new continual learning benchmarks we define using the MS-COCO and Flickr30 datasets. Our results demonstrate that RATT is able to sequentially learn five captioning tasks while incurring no forgetting of previously learned ones.
The influence of class orderings in the evaluation of incremental learning has received very little attention. In this paper, we investigate the impact of class orderings for incrementally learned classifiers. We propose a method to compute various orderings for a dataset. The orderings are derived by simulated annealing optimization from the confusion matrix and reflect different incremental learning scenarios, including maximally and minimally confusing tasks. We evaluate a wide range of state-of-the-art incremental learning methods on the proposed orderings. Results show that orderings can have a significant impact on performance and the ranking of the methods.