Negative Data Augmentation

Data augmentation is often used to enlarge datasets with synthetic samples generated in accordance with the underlying data distribution. To enable a wider range of augmentations, we explore negative data augmentation strategies (NDA)that intentionally create out-of-distribution samples. We show that such negative out-of-distribution samples provide information on the support of the data distribution, and can be leveraged for generative modeling and representation learning. We introduce a new GAN training objective where we use NDA as an additional source of synthetic data for the discriminator. We prove that under suitable conditions, optimizing the resulting objective still recovers the true data distribution but can directly bias the generator towards avoiding samples that lack the desired structure. Empirically, models trained with our method achieve improved conditional/unconditional image generation along with improved anomaly detection capabilities. Further, we incorporate the same negative data augmentation strategy in a contrastive learning framework for self-supervised representation learning on images and videos, achieving improved performance on downstream image classification, object detection, and action recognition tasks. These results suggest that prior knowledge on what does not constitute valid data is an effective form of weak supervision across a range of unsupervised learning tasks.

Efficient Conditional Pre-training for Transfer Learning

Almost all the state-of-the-art neural networks for computer vision tasks are trained by (1) Pre-training on a large scale dataset and (2) finetuning on the target dataset. This strategy helps reduce the dependency on the target dataset and improves convergence rate and generalization on the target task. Although pre-training on large scale datasets is very useful, its foremost disadvantage is high training cost. To address this, we propose efficient target dataset conditioned filtering methods to remove less relevant samples from the pre-training dataset. Unlike prior work, we focus on efficiency, adaptability, and flexibility in addition to performance. Additionally, we discover that lowering image resolutions in the pre-training step offers a great trade-off between cost and performance. We validate our techniques by pre-training on ImageNet in both the unsupervised and supervised settings and finetuning on a diverse collection of target datasets and tasks. Our proposed methods drastically reduce pre-training cost and provide strong performance boosts.

Geography-Aware Self-Supervised Learning

Contrastive learning methods have significantly narrowed the gap between supervised and unsupervised learning on computer vision tasks. In this paper, we explore their application to remote sensing, where unlabeled data is often abundant but labeled data is scarce. We first show that due to their different characteristics, a non-trivial gap persists between contrastive and supervised learning on standard benchmarks. To close the gap, we propose novel training methods that exploit the spatiotemporal structure of remote sensing data. We leverage spatially aligned images over time to construct temporal positive pairs in contrastive learning and geo-location to design pre-text tasks. Our experiments show that our proposed method closes the gap between contrastive and supervised learning on image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation for remote sensing and other geo-tagged image datasets.

Efficient Poverty Mapping using Deep Reinforcement Learning

The combination of high-resolution satellite imagery and machine learning have proven useful in many sustainability-related tasks, including poverty prediction, infrastructure measurement, and forest monitoring. However, the accuracy afforded by high-resolution imagery comes at a cost, as such imagery is extremely expensive to purchase at scale. This creates a substantial hurdle to the efficient scaling and widespread adoption of high-resolution-based approaches. To reduce acquisition costs while maintaining accuracy, we propose a reinforcement learning approach in which free low-resolution imagery is used to dynamically identify where to acquire costly high-resolution images, prior to performing a deep learning task on the high-resolution images. We apply this approach to the task of poverty prediction in Uganda, building on an earlier approach that used object detection to count objects and use these counts to predict poverty. Our approach exceeds previous performance benchmarks on this task while using 80% fewer high-resolution images. Our approach could have application in many sustainability domains that require high-resolution imagery.

Generating Interpretable Poverty Maps using Object Detection in Satellite Images

Accurate local-level poverty measurement is an essential task for governments and humanitarian organizations to track the progress towards improving livelihoods and distribute scarce resources. Recent computer vision advances in using satellite imagery to predict poverty have shown increasing accuracy, but they do not generate features that are interpretable to policymakers, inhibiting adoption by practitioners. Here we demonstrate an interpretable computational framework to accurately predict poverty at a local level by applying object detectors to high resolution (30cm) satellite images. Using the weighted counts of objects as features, we achieve 0.539 Pearson's r^2 in predicting village-level poverty in Uganda, a 31% improvement over existing (and less interpretable) benchmarks. Feature importance and ablation analysis reveal intuitive relationships between object counts and poverty predictions. Our results suggest that interpretability does not have to come at the cost of performance, at least in this important domain.

SieveNet: A Unified Framework for Robust Image-Based Virtual Try-On

Image-based virtual try-on for fashion has gained considerable attention recently. The task requires trying on a clothing item on a target model image. An efficient framework for this is composed of two stages: (1) warping (transforming) the try-on cloth to align with the pose and shape of the target model, and (2) a texture transfer module to seamlessly integrate the warped try-on cloth onto the target model image. Existing methods suffer from artifacts and distortions in their try-on output. In this work, we present SieveNet, a framework for robust image-based virtual try-on. Firstly, we introduce a multi-stage coarse-to-fine warping network to better model fine-grained intricacies (while transforming the try-on cloth) and train it with a novel perceptual geometric matching loss. Next, we introduce a try-on cloth conditioned segmentation mask prior to improve the texture transfer network. Finally, we also introduce a dueling triplet loss strategy for training the texture translation network which further improves the quality of the generated try-on results. We present extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations of each component of the proposed pipeline and show significant performance improvements against the current state-of-the-art method.

DeepFix: A Fully Convolutional Neural Network for predicting Human Eye Fixations

Understanding and predicting the human visual attentional mechanism is an active area of research in the fields of neuroscience and computer vision. In this work, we propose DeepFix, a first-of-its-kind fully convolutional neural network for accurate saliency prediction. Unlike classical works which characterize the saliency map using various hand-crafted features, our model automatically learns features in a hierarchical fashion and predicts saliency map in an end-to-end manner. DeepFix is designed to capture semantics at multiple scales while taking global context into account using network layers with very large receptive fields. Generally, fully convolutional nets are spatially invariant which prevents them from modeling location dependent patterns (e.g. centre-bias). Our network overcomes this limitation by incorporating a novel Location Biased Convolutional layer. We evaluate our model on two challenging eye fixation datasets -- MIT300, CAT2000 and show that it outperforms other recent approaches by a significant margin.