Image Generation from Scene Graphs

To truly understand the visual world our models should be able not only to recognize images but also generate them. To this end, there has been exciting recent progress on generating images from natural language descriptions. These methods give stunning results on limited domains such as descriptions of birds or flowers, but struggle to faithfully reproduce complex sentences with many objects and relationships. To overcome this limitation we propose a method for generating images from scene graphs, enabling explicitly reasoning about objects and their relationships. Our model uses graph convolution to process input graphs, computes a scene layout by predicting bounding boxes and segmentation masks for objects, and converts the layout to an image with a cascaded refinement network. The network is trained adversarially against a pair of discriminators to ensure realistic outputs. We validate our approach on Visual Genome and COCO-Stuff, where qualitative results, ablations, and user studies demonstrate our method's ability to generate complex images with multiple objects.

Iterative Visual Reasoning Beyond Convolutions

We present a novel framework for iterative visual reasoning. Our framework goes beyond current recognition systems that lack the capability to reason beyond stack of convolutions. The framework consists of two core modules: a local module that uses spatial memory to store previous beliefs with parallel updates; and a global graph-reasoning module. Our graph module has three components: a) a knowledge graph where we represent classes as nodes and build edges to encode different types of semantic relationships between them; b) a region graph of the current image where regions in the image are nodes and spatial relationships between these regions are edges; c) an assignment graph that assigns regions to classes. Both the local module and the global module roll-out iteratively and cross-feed predictions to each other to refine estimates. The final predictions are made by combining the best of both modules with an attention mechanism. We show strong performance over plain ConvNets, \eg achieving an $8.4\%$ absolute improvement on ADE measured by per-class average precision. Analysis also shows that the framework is resilient to missing regions for reasoning.

Referring Relationships

Images are not simply sets of objects: each image represents a web of interconnected relationships. These relationships between entities carry semantic meaning and help a viewer differentiate between instances of an entity. For example, in an image of a soccer match, there may be multiple persons present, but each participates in different relationships: one is kicking the ball, and the other is guarding the goal. In this paper, we formulate the task of utilizing these "referring relationships" to disambiguate between entities of the same category. We introduce an iterative model that localizes the two entities in the referring relationship, conditioned on one another. We formulate the cyclic condition between the entities in a relationship by modelling predicates that connect the entities as shifts in attention from one entity to another. We demonstrate that our model can not only outperform existing approaches on three datasets --- CLEVR, VRD and Visual Genome --- but also that it produces visually meaningful predicate shifts, as an instance of interpretable neural networks. Finally, we show that by modelling predicates as attention shifts, we can even localize entities in the absence of their category, allowing our model to find completely unseen categories.

Social GAN: Socially Acceptable Trajectories with Generative Adversarial Networks

Understanding human motion behavior is critical for autonomous moving platforms (like self-driving cars and social robots) if they are to navigate human-centric environments. This is challenging because human motion is inherently multimodal: given a history of human motion paths, there are many socially plausible ways that people could move in the future. We tackle this problem by combining tools from sequence prediction and generative adversarial networks: a recurrent sequence-to-sequence model observes motion histories and predicts future behavior, using a novel pooling mechanism to aggregate information across people. We predict socially plausible futures by training adversarially against a recurrent discriminator, and encourage diverse predictions with a novel variety loss. Through experiments on several datasets we demonstrate that our approach outperforms prior work in terms of accuracy, variety, collision avoidance, and computational complexity.

Neural Task Programming: Learning to Generalize Across Hierarchical Tasks

In this work, we propose a novel robot learning framework called Neural Task Programming (NTP), which bridges the idea of few-shot learning from demonstration and neural program induction. NTP takes as input a task specification (e.g., video demonstration of a task) and recursively decomposes it into finer sub-task specifications. These specifications are fed to a hierarchical neural program, where bottom-level programs are callable subroutines that interact with the environment. We validate our method in three robot manipulation tasks. NTP achieves strong generalization across sequential tasks that exhibit hierarchal and compositional structures. The experimental results show that NTP learns to generalize well to- wards unseen tasks with increasing lengths, variable topologies, and changing objectives.

Emergence of Structured Behaviors from Curiosity-Based Intrinsic Motivation

Infants are experts at playing, with an amazing ability to generate novel structured behaviors in unstructured environments that lack clear extrinsic reward signals. We seek to replicate some of these abilities with a neural network that implements curiosity-driven intrinsic motivation. Using a simple but ecologically naturalistic simulated environment in which the agent can move and interact with objects it sees, the agent learns a world model predicting the dynamic consequences of its actions. Simultaneously, the agent learns to take actions that adversarially challenge the developing world model, pushing the agent to explore novel and informative interactions with its environment. We demonstrate that this policy leads to the self-supervised emergence of a spectrum of complex behaviors, including ego motion prediction, object attention, and object gathering. Moreover, the world model that the agent learns supports improved performance on object dynamics prediction and localization tasks. Our results are a proof-of-principle that computational models of intrinsic motivation might account for key features of developmental visuomotor learning in infants.

Label Efficient Learning of Transferable Representations across Domains and Tasks

We propose a framework that learns a representation transferable across different domains and tasks in a label efficient manner. Our approach battles domain shift with a domain adversarial loss, and generalizes the embedding to novel task using a metric learning-based approach. Our model is simultaneously optimized on labeled source data and unlabeled or sparsely labeled data in the target domain. Our method shows compelling results on novel classes within a new domain even when only a few labeled examples per class are available, outperforming the prevalent fine-tuning approach. In addition, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on the transfer learning task from image object recognition to video action recognition.

ADAPT: Zero-Shot Adaptive Policy Transfer for Stochastic Dynamical Systems

Model-free policy learning has enabled robust performance of complex tasks with relatively simple algorithms. However, this simplicity comes at the cost of requiring an Oracle and arguably very poor sample complexity. This renders such methods unsuitable for physical systems. Variants of model-based methods address this problem through the use of simulators, however, this gives rise to the problem of policy transfer from simulated to the physical system. Model mismatch due to systematic parameter shift and unmodelled dynamics error may cause sub-optimal or unsafe behavior upon direct transfer. We introduce the Adaptive Policy Transfer for Stochastic Dynamics (ADAPT) algorithm that achieves provably safe and robust, dynamically-feasible zero-shot transfer of RL-policies to new domains with dynamics error. ADAPT combines the strengths of offline policy learning in a black-box source simulator with online tube-based MPC to attenuate bounded model mismatch between the source and target dynamics. ADAPT allows online transfer of policy, trained solely in a simulation offline, to a family of unknown targets without fine-tuning. We also formally show that (i) ADAPT guarantees state and control safety through state-action tubes under the assumption of Lipschitz continuity of the divergence in dynamics and, (ii) ADAPT results in a bounded loss of reward accumulation relative to a policy trained and evaluated in the source environment. We evaluate ADAPT on 2 continuous, non-holonomic simulated dynamical systems with 4 different disturbance models, and find that ADAPT performs between 50%-300% better on mean reward accrual than direct policy transfer.

Scalable Annotation of Fine-Grained Categories Without Experts

We present a crowdsourcing workflow to collect image annotations for visually similar synthetic categories without requiring experts. In animals, there is a direct link between taxonomy and visual similarity: e.g. a collie (type of dog) looks more similar to other collies (e.g. smooth collie) than a greyhound (another type of dog). However, in synthetic categories such as cars, objects with similar taxonomy can have very different appearance: e.g. a 2011 Ford F-150 Supercrew-HD looks the same as a 2011 Ford F-150 Supercrew-LL but very different from a 2011 Ford F-150 Supercrew-SVT. We introduce a graph based crowdsourcing algorithm to automatically group visually indistinguishable objects together. Using our workflow, we label 712,430 images by ~1,000 Amazon Mechanical Turk workers; resulting in the largest fine-grained visual dataset reported to date with 2,657 categories of cars annotated at 1/20th the cost of hiring experts.

Fine-Grained Car Detection for Visual Census Estimation

Targeted socioeconomic policies require an accurate understanding of a country's demographic makeup. To that end, the United States spends more than 1 billion dollars a year gathering census data such as race, gender, education, occupation and unemployment rates. Compared to the traditional method of collecting surveys across many years which is costly and labor intensive, data-driven, machine learning driven approaches are cheaper and faster--with the potential ability to detect trends in close to real time. In this work, we leverage the ubiquity of Google Street View images and develop a computer vision pipeline to predict income, per capita carbon emission, crime rates and other city attributes from a single source of publicly available visual data. We first detect cars in 50 million images across 200 of the largest US cities and train a model to predict demographic attributes using the detected cars. To facilitate our work, we have collected the largest and most challenging fine-grained dataset reported to date consisting of over 2600 classes of cars comprised of images from Google Street View and other web sources, classified by car experts to account for even the most subtle of visual differences. We use this data to construct the largest scale fine-grained detection system reported to date. Our prediction results correlate well with ground truth income data (r=0.82), Massachusetts department of vehicle registration, and sources investigating crime rates, income segregation, per capita carbon emission, and other market research. Finally, we learn interesting relationships between cars and neighborhoods allowing us to perform the first large scale sociological analysis of cities using computer vision techniques.