In Search of a Data Transformation That Accelerates Neural Field Training

Neural field is an emerging paradigm in data representation that trains a neural network to approximate the given signal. A key obstacle that prevents its widespread adoption is the encoding speed-generating neural fields requires an overfitting of a neural network, which can take a significant number of SGD steps to reach the desired fidelity level. In this paper, we delve into the impacts of data transformations on the speed of neural field training, specifically focusing on how permuting pixel locations affect the convergence speed of SGD. Counterintuitively, we find that randomly permuting the pixel locations can considerably accelerate the training. To explain this phenomenon, we examine the neural field training through the lens of PSNR curves, loss landscapes, and error patterns. Our analyses suggest that the random pixel permutations remove the easy-to-fit patterns, which facilitate easy optimization in the early stage but hinder capturing fine details of the signal.

BoIR: Box-Supervised Instance Representation for Multi-Person Pose Estimation

Single-stage multi-person human pose estimation (MPPE) methods have shown great performance improvements, but existing methods fail to disentangle features by individual instances under crowded scenes. In this paper, we propose a bounding box-level instance representation learning called BoIR, which simultaneously solves instance detection, instance disentanglement, and instance-keypoint association problems. Our new instance embedding loss provides a learning signal on the entire area of the image with bounding box annotations, achieving globally consistent and disentangled instance representation. Our method exploits multi-task learning of bottom-up keypoint estimation, bounding box regression, and contrastive instance embedding learning, without additional computational cost during inference. BoIR is effective for crowded scenes, outperforming state-of-the-art on COCO val (0.8 AP), COCO test-dev (0.5 AP), CrowdPose (4.9 AP), and OCHuman (3.5 AP). Code will be available at https://github.com/uyoung-jeong/BoIR

Active Deep Learning Guided by Efficient Gaussian Process Surrogates

The success of active learning relies on the exploration of the underlying data-generating distributions, populating sparsely labeled data areas, and exploitation of the information about the task gained by the baseline (neural network) learners. In this paper, we present a new algorithm that combines these two active learning modes. Our algorithm adopts a Bayesian surrogate for the baseline learner, and it optimizes the exploration process by maximizing the gain of information caused by new labels. Further, by instantly updating the surrogate learner for each new data instance, our model can faithfully simulate and exploit the continuous learning behavior of the learner without having to actually retrain it per label. In experiments with four benchmark classification datasets, our method demonstrated significant performance gain over state-of-the-arts.

S$^2$Contact: Graph-based Network for 3D Hand-Object Contact Estimation with Semi-Supervised Learning

Despite the recent efforts in accurate 3D annotations in hand and object datasets, there still exist gaps in 3D hand and object reconstructions. Existing works leverage contact maps to refine inaccurate hand-object pose estimations and generate grasps given object models. However, they require explicit 3D supervision which is seldom available and therefore, are limited to constrained settings, e.g., where thermal cameras observe residual heat left on manipulated objects. In this paper, we propose a novel semi-supervised framework that allows us to learn contact from monocular images. Specifically, we leverage visual and geometric consistency constraints in large-scale datasets for generating pseudo-labels in semi-supervised learning and propose an efficient graph-based network to infer contact. Our semi-supervised learning framework achieves a favourable improvement over the existing supervised learning methods trained on data with `limited' annotations. Notably, our proposed model is able to achieve superior results with less than half the network parameters and memory access cost when compared with the commonly-used PointNet-based approach. We show benefits from using a contact map that rules hand-object interactions to produce more accurate reconstructions. We further demonstrate that training with pseudo-labels can extend contact map estimations to out-of-domain objects and generalise better across multiple datasets.

Collaborative Learning for Hand and Object Reconstruction with Attention-guided Graph Convolution

Estimating the pose and shape of hands and objects under interaction finds numerous applications including augmented and virtual reality. Existing approaches for hand and object reconstruction require explicitly defined physical constraints and known objects, which limits its application domains. Our algorithm is agnostic to object models, and it learns the physical rules governing hand-object interaction. This requires automatically inferring the shapes and physical interaction of hands and (potentially unknown) objects. We seek to approach this challenging problem by proposing a collaborative learning strategy where two-branches of deep networks are learning from each other. Specifically, we transfer hand mesh information to the object branch and vice versa for the hand branch. The resulting optimisation (training) problem can be unstable, and we address this via two strategies: (i) attention-guided graph convolution which helps identify and focus on mutual occlusion and (ii) unsupervised associative loss which facilitates the transfer of information between the branches. Experiments using four widely-used benchmarks show that our framework achieves beyond state-of-the-art accuracy in 3D pose estimation, as well as recovers dense 3D hand and object shapes. Each technical component above contributes meaningfully in the ablation study.

Testing using Privileged Information by Adapting Features with Statistical Dependence

Given an imperfect predictor, we exploit additional features at test time to improve the predictions made, without retraining and without knowledge of the prediction function. This scenario arises if training labels or data are proprietary, restricted, or no longer available, or if training itself is prohibitively expensive. We assume that the additional features are useful if they exhibit strong statistical dependence to the underlying perfect predictor. Then, we empirically estimate and strengthen the statistical dependence between the initial noisy predictor and the additional features via manifold denoising. As an example, we show that this approach leads to improvement in real-world visual attribute ranking. Project webpage: http://www.jamestompkin.com/tupi

DynaDog+T: A Parametric Animal Model for Synthetic Canine Image Generation

Synthetic data is becoming increasingly common for training computer vision models for a variety of tasks. Notably, such data has been applied in tasks related to humans such as 3D pose estimation where data is either difficult to create or obtain in realistic settings. Comparatively, there has been less work into synthetic animal data and it's uses for training models. Consequently, we introduce a parametric canine model, DynaDog+T, for generating synthetic canine images and data which we use for a common computer vision task, binary segmentation, which would otherwise be difficult due to the lack of available data.

GaussiGAN: Controllable Image Synthesis with 3D Gaussians from Unposed Silhouettes

We present an algorithm that learns a coarse 3D representation of objects from unposed multi-view 2D mask supervision, then uses it to generate detailed mask and image texture. In contrast to existing voxel-based methods for unposed object reconstruction, our approach learns to represent the generated shape and pose with a set of self-supervised canonical 3D anisotropic Gaussians via a perspective camera, and a set of per-image transforms. We show that this approach can robustly estimate a 3D space for the camera and object, while recent baselines sometimes struggle to reconstruct coherent 3D spaces in this setting. We show results on synthetic datasets with realistic lighting, and demonstrate object insertion with interactive posing. With our work, we help move towards structured representations that handle more real-world variation in learning-based object reconstruction.

Look here! A parametric learning based approach to redirect visual attention

Across photography, marketing, and website design, being able to direct the viewer's attention is a powerful tool. Motivated by professional workflows, we introduce an automatic method to make an image region more attention-capturing via subtle image edits that maintain realism and fidelity to the original. From an input image and a user-provided mask, our GazeShiftNet model predicts a distinct set of global parametric transformations to be applied to the foreground and background image regions separately. We present the results of quantitative and qualitative experiments that demonstrate improvements over prior state-of-the-art. In contrast to existing attention shifting algorithms, our global parametric approach better preserves image semantics and avoids typical generative artifacts. Our edits enable inference at interactive rates on any image size, and easily generalize to videos. Extensions of our model allow for multi-style edits and the ability to both increase and attenuate attention in an image region. Furthermore, users can customize the edited images by dialing the edits up or down via interpolations in parameter space. This paper presents a practical tool that can simplify future image editing pipelines.