Semi-supervised domain adaptation with CycleGAN guided by a downstream task loss

Domain adaptation is of huge interest as labeling is an expensive and error-prone task, especially when labels are needed on pixel-level like in semantic segmentation. Therefore, one would like to be able to train neural networks on synthetic domains, where data is abundant and labels are precise. However, these models often perform poorly on out-of-domain images. To mitigate the shift in the input, image-to-image approaches can be used. Nevertheless, standard image-to-image approaches that bridge the domain of deployment with the synthetic training domain do not focus on the downstream task but only on the visual inspection level. We therefore propose a "task aware" version of a GAN in an image-to-image domain adaptation approach. With the help of a small amount of labeled ground truth data, we guide the image-to-image translation to a more suitable input image for a semantic segmentation network trained on synthetic data (synthetic-domain expert). The main contributions of this work are 1) a modular semi-supervised domain adaptation method for semantic segmentation by training a downstream task aware CycleGAN while refraining from adapting the synthetic semantic segmentation expert 2) the demonstration that the method is applicable to complex domain adaptation tasks and 3) a less biased domain gap analysis by using from scratch networks. We evaluate our method on a classification task as well as on semantic segmentation. Our experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms CycleGAN - a standard image-to-image approach - by 7 percent points in accuracy in a classification task using only 70 (10%) ground truth images. For semantic segmentation we can show an improvement of about 4 to 7 percent points in mean Intersection over union on the Cityscapes evaluation dataset with only 14 ground truth images during training.

Automated Detection of Label Errors in Semantic Segmentation Datasets via Deep Learning and Uncertainty Quantification

In this work, we for the first time present a method for detecting label errors in image datasets with semantic segmentation, i.e., pixel-wise class labels. Annotation acquisition for semantic segmentation datasets is time-consuming and requires plenty of human labor. In particular, review processes are time consuming and label errors can easily be overlooked by humans. The consequences are biased benchmarks and in extreme cases also performance degradation of deep neural networks (DNNs) trained on such datasets. DNNs for semantic segmentation yield pixel-wise predictions, which makes detection of label errors via uncertainty quantification a complex task. Uncertainty is particularly pronounced at the transitions between connected components of the prediction. By lifting the consideration of uncertainty to the level of predicted components, we enable the usage of DNNs together with component-level uncertainty quantification for the detection of label errors. We present a principled approach to benchmarking the task of label error detection by dropping labels from the Cityscapes dataset as well from a dataset extracted from the CARLA driving simulator, where in the latter case we have the labels under control. Our experiments show that our approach is able to detect the vast majority of label errors while controlling the number of false label error detections. Furthermore, we apply our method to semantic segmentation datasets frequently used by the computer vision community and present a collection of label errors along with sample statistics.

False Negative Reduction in Semantic Segmentation under Domain Shift using Depth Estimation

State-of-the-art deep neural networks demonstrate outstanding performance in semantic segmentation. However, their performance is tied to the domain represented by the training data. Open world scenarios cause inaccurate predictions which is hazardous in safety relevant applications like automated driving. In this work, we enhance semantic segmentation predictions using monocular depth estimation to improve segmentation by reducing the occurrence of non-detected objects in presence of domain shift. To this end, we infer a depth heatmap via a modified segmentation network which generates foreground-background masks, operating in parallel to a given semantic segmentation network. Both segmentation masks are aggregated with a focus on foreground classes (here road users) to reduce false negatives. To also reduce the occurrence of false positives, we apply a pruning based on uncertainty estimates. Our approach is modular in a sense that it post-processes the output of any semantic segmentation network. In our experiments, we observe less non-detected objects of most important classes and an enhanced generalization to other domains compared to the basic semantic segmentation prediction.

What should AI see? Using the Public's Opinion to Determine the Perception of an AI

Deep neural networks (DNN) have made impressive progress in the interpretation of image data, so that it is conceivable and to some degree realistic to use them in safety critical applications like automated driving. From an ethical standpoint, the AI algorithm should take into account the vulnerability of objects or subjects on the street that ranges from "not at all", e.g. the road itself, to "high vulnerability" of pedestrians. One way to take this into account is to define the cost of confusion of one semantic category with another and use cost-based decision rules for the interpretation of probabilities, which are the output of DNNs. However, it is an open problem how to define the cost structure, who should be in charge to do that, and thereby define what AI-algorithms will actually "see". As one possible answer, we follow a participatory approach and set up an online survey to ask the public to define the cost structure. We present the survey design and the data acquired along with an evaluation that also distinguishes between perspective (car passenger vs. external traffic participant) and gender. Using simulation based $F$-tests, we find highly significant differences between the groups. These differences have consequences on the reliable detection of pedestrians in a safety critical distance to the self-driving car. We discuss the ethical problems that are related to this approach and also discuss the problems emerging from human-machine interaction through the survey from a psychological point of view. Finally, we include comments from industry leaders in the field of AI safety on the applicability of survey based elements in the design of AI functionalities in automated driving.

Uncertainty Quantification and Resource-Demanding Computer Vision Applications of Deep Learning

Bringing deep neural networks (DNNs) into safety critical applications such as automated driving, medical imaging and finance, requires a thorough treatment of the model's uncertainties. Training deep neural networks is already resource demanding and so is also their uncertainty quantification. In this overview article, we survey methods that we developed to teach DNNs to be uncertain when they encounter new object classes. Additionally, we present training methods to learn from only a few labels with help of uncertainty quantification. Note that this is typically paid with a massive overhead in computation of an order of magnitude and more compared to ordinary network training. Finally, we survey our work on neural architecture search which is also an order of magnitude more resource demanding then ordinary network training.

Detecting and Learning the Unknown in Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation is a crucial component for perception in automated driving. Deep neural networks (DNNs) are commonly used for this task and they are usually trained on a closed set of object classes appearing in a closed operational domain. However, this is in contrast to the open world assumption in automated driving that DNNs are deployed to. Therefore, DNNs necessarily face data that they have never encountered previously, also known as anomalies, which are extremely safety-critical to properly cope with. In this work, we first give an overview about anomalies from an information-theoretic perspective. Next, we review research in detecting semantically unknown objects in semantic segmentation. We demonstrate that training for high entropy responses on anomalous objects outperforms other recent methods, which is in line with our theoretical findings. Moreover, we examine a method to assess the occurrence frequency of anomalies in order to select anomaly types to include into a model's set of semantic categories. We demonstrate that these anomalies can then be learned in an unsupervised fashion, which is particularly suitable in online applications based on deep learning.

UQGAN: A Unified Model for Uncertainty Quantification of Deep Classifiers trained via Conditional GANs

We present an approach to quantifying both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty for deep neural networks in image classification, based on generative adversarial networks (GANs). While most works in the literature that use GANs to generate out-of-distribution (OoD) examples only focus on the evaluation of OoD detection, we present a GAN based approach to learn a classifier that exhibits proper uncertainties for OoD examples as well as for false positives (FPs). Instead of shielding the entire in-distribution data with GAN generated OoD examples which is state-of-the-art, we shield each class separately with out-of-class examples generated by a conditional GAN and complement this with a one-vs-all image classifier. In our experiments, in particular on CIFAR10, we improve over the OoD detection and FP detection performance of state-of-the-art GAN-training based classifiers. Furthermore, we also find that the generated GAN examples do not significantly affect the calibration error of our classifier and result in a significant gain in model accuracy.

Towards Unsupervised Open World Semantic Segmentation

For the semantic segmentation of images, state-of-the-art deep neural networks (DNNs) achieve high segmentation accuracy if that task is restricted to a closed set of classes. However, as of now DNNs have limited ability to operate in an open world, where they are tasked to identify pixels belonging to unknown objects and eventually to learn novel classes, incrementally. Humans have the capability to say: I don't know what that is, but I've already seen something like that. Therefore, it is desirable to perform such an incremental learning task in an unsupervised fashion. We introduce a method where unknown objects are clustered based on visual similarity. Those clusters are utilized to define new classes and serve as training data for unsupervised incremental learning. More precisely, the connected components of a predicted semantic segmentation are assessed by a segmentation quality estimate. connected components with a low estimated prediction quality are candidates for a subsequent clustering. Additionally, the component-wise quality assessment allows for obtaining predicted segmentation masks for the image regions potentially containing unknown objects. The respective pixels of such masks are pseudo-labeled and afterwards used for re-training the DNN, i.e., without the use of ground truth generated by humans. In our experiments we demonstrate that, without access to ground truth and even with few data, a DNN's class space can be extended by a novel class, achieving considerable segmentation accuracy.

Does Redundancy in AI Perception Systems Help to Test for Super-Human Automated Driving Performance?

While automated driving is often advertised with better-than-human driving performance, this work reviews that it is nearly impossible to provide direct statistical evidence on the system level that this is actually the case. The amount of labeled data needed would exceed dimensions of present day technical and economical capabilities. A commonly used strategy therefore is the use of redundancy along with the proof of sufficient subsystems' performances. As it is known, this strategy is efficient especially for the case of subsystems operating independently, i.e. the occurrence of errors is independent in a statistical sense. Here, we give some first considerations and experimental evidence that this strategy is not a free ride as the errors of neural networks fulfilling the same computer vision task, at least for some cases, show correlated occurrences of errors. This remains true, if training data, architecture, and training are kept separate or independence is trained using special loss functions. Using data from different sensors (realized by up to five 2D projections of the 3D MNIST data set) in our experiments is more efficiently reducing correlations, however not to an extent that is realizing the potential of reduction of testing data that can be obtained for redundant and statistically independent subsystems.

False Positive Detection and Prediction Quality Estimation for LiDAR Point Cloud Segmentation

We present a novel post-processing tool for semantic segmentation of LiDAR point cloud data, called LidarMetaSeg, which estimates the prediction quality segmentwise. For this purpose we compute dispersion measures based on network probability outputs as well as feature measures based on point cloud input features and aggregate them on segment level. These aggregated measures are used to train a meta classification model to predict whether a predicted segment is a false positive or not and a meta regression model to predict the segmentwise intersection over union. Both models can then be applied to semantic segmentation inferences without knowing the ground truth. In our experiments we use different LiDAR segmentation models and datasets and analyze the power of our method. We show that our results outperform other standard approaches.