M3D-VTON: A Monocular-to-3D Virtual Try-On Network

Virtual 3D try-on can provide an intuitive and realistic view for online shopping and has a huge potential commercial value. However, existing 3D virtual try-on methods mainly rely on annotated 3D human shapes and garment templates, which hinders their applications in practical scenarios. 2D virtual try-on approaches provide a faster alternative to manipulate clothed humans, but lack the rich and realistic 3D representation. In this paper, we propose a novel Monocular-to-3D Virtual Try-On Network (M3D-VTON) that builds on the merits of both 2D and 3D approaches. By integrating 2D information efficiently and learning a mapping that lifts the 2D representation to 3D, we make the first attempt to reconstruct a 3D try-on mesh only taking the target clothing and a person image as inputs. The proposed M3D-VTON includes three modules: 1) The Monocular Prediction Module (MPM) that estimates an initial full-body depth map and accomplishes 2D clothes-person alignment through a novel two-stage warping procedure; 2) The Depth Refinement Module (DRM) that refines the initial body depth to produce more detailed pleat and face characteristics; 3) The Texture Fusion Module (TFM) that fuses the warped clothing with the non-target body part to refine the results. We also construct a high-quality synthesized Monocular-to-3D virtual try-on dataset, in which each person image is associated with a front and a back depth map. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed M3D-VTON can manipulate and reconstruct the 3D human body wearing the given clothing with compelling details and is more efficient than other 3D approaches.

Negational Symmetry of Quantum Neural Networks for Binary Pattern Classification

Entanglement is a physical phenomenon, which has fueled recent successes of quantum algorithms. Although quantum neural networks (QNNs) have shown promising results in solving simple machine learning tasks recently, for the time being, the effect of entanglement in QNNs and the behavior of QNNs in binary pattern classification are still underexplored. In this work, we provide some theoretical insight into the properties of QNNs by presenting and analyzing a new form of invariance embedded in QNNs for both quantum binary classification and quantum representation learning, which we term negational symmetry. Given a quantum binary signal and its negational counterpart where a bitwise NOT operation is applied to each quantum bit of the binary signal, a QNN outputs the same logits. That is to say, QNNs cannot differentiate a quantum binary signal and its negational counterpart in a binary classification task. We further empirically evaluate the negational symmetry of QNNs in binary pattern classification tasks using Google's quantum computing framework. The theoretical and experimental results suggest that negational symmetry is a fundamental property of QNNs, which is not shared by classical models. Our findings also imply that negational symmetry is a double-edged sword in practical quantum applications.

Reconsidering Representation Alignment for Multi-view Clustering

Aligning distributions of view representations is a core component of today's state of the art models for deep multi-view clustering. However, we identify several drawbacks with na\"ively aligning representation distributions. We demonstrate that these drawbacks both lead to less separable clusters in the representation space, and inhibit the model's ability to prioritize views. Based on these observations, we develop a simple baseline model for deep multi-view clustering. Our baseline model avoids representation alignment altogether, while performing similar to, or better than, the current state of the art. We also expand our baseline model by adding a contrastive learning component. This introduces a selective alignment procedure that preserves the model's ability to prioritize views. Our experiments show that the contrastive learning component enhances the baseline model, improving on the current state of the art by a large margin on several datasets.

Joint Optimization of an Autoencoder for Clustering and Embedding

Incorporating k-means-like clustering techniques into (deep) autoencoders constitutes an interesting idea as the clustering may exploit the learned similarities in the embedding to compute a non-linear grouping of data at-hand. Unfortunately, the resulting contributions are often limited by ad-hoc choices, decoupled optimization problems and other issues. We present a theoretically-driven deep clustering approach that does not suffer from these limitations and allows for joint optimization of clustering and embedding. The network in its simplest form is derived from a Gaussian mixture model and can be incorporated seamlessly into deep autoencoders for state-of-the-art performance.

Towards Robust Medical Image Segmentation on Small-Scale Data with Incomplete Labels

The data-driven nature of deep learning models for semantic segmentation requires a large number of pixel-level annotations. However, large-scale and fully labeled medical datasets are often unavailable for practical tasks. Recently, partially supervised methods have been proposed to utilize images with incomplete labels to mitigate the data scarcity problem in the medical domain. As an emerging research area, the breakthroughs made by existing methods rely on either large-scale data or complex model design, which makes them 1) less practical for certain real-life tasks and 2) less robust for small-scale data. It is time to step back and think about the robustness of partially supervised methods and how to maximally utilize small-scale and partially labeled data for medical image segmentation tasks. To bridge the methodological gaps in label-efficient deep learning with partial supervision, we propose RAMP, a simple yet efficient data augmentation framework for partially supervised medical image segmentation by exploiting the assumption that patients share anatomical similarities. We systematically evaluate RAMP and the previous methods in various controlled multi-structure segmentation tasks. Compared to the mainstream approaches, RAMP consistently improves the performance of traditional segmentation networks on small-scale partially labeled data and utilize additional image-wise weak annotations.

Uncertainty-Aware Deep Ensembles for Reliable and Explainable Predictions of Clinical Time Series

Deep learning-based support systems have demonstrated encouraging results in numerous clinical applications involving the processing of time series data. While such systems often are very accurate, they have no inherent mechanism for explaining what influenced the predictions, which is critical for clinical tasks. However, existing explainability techniques lack an important component for trustworthy and reliable decision support, namely a notion of uncertainty. In this paper, we address this lack of uncertainty by proposing a deep ensemble approach where a collection of DNNs are trained independently. A measure of uncertainty in the relevance scores is computed by taking the standard deviation across the relevance scores produced by each model in the ensemble, which in turn is used to make the explanations more reliable. The class activation mapping method is used to assign a relevance score for each time step in the time series. Results demonstrate that the proposed ensemble is more accurate in locating relevant time steps and is more consistent across random initializations, thus making the model more trustworthy. The proposed methodology paves the way for constructing trustworthy and dependable support systems for processing clinical time series for healthcare related tasks.

SCG-Net: Self-Constructing Graph Neural Networks for Semantic Segmentation

Capturing global contextual representations by exploiting long-range pixel-pixel dependencies has shown to improve semantic segmentation performance. However, how to do this efficiently is an open question as current approaches of utilising attention schemes or very deep models to increase the models field of view, result in complex models with large memory consumption. Inspired by recent work on graph neural networks, we propose the Self-Constructing Graph (SCG) module that learns a long-range dependency graph directly from the image and uses it to propagate contextual information efficiently to improve semantic segmentation. The module is optimised via a novel adaptive diagonal enhancement method and a variational lower bound that consists of a customized graph reconstruction term and a Kullback-Leibler divergence regularization term. When incorporated into a neural network (SCG-Net), semantic segmentation is performed in an end-to-end manner and competitive performance (mean F1-scores of 92.0% and 89.8% respectively) on the publicly available ISPRS Potsdam and Vaihingen datasets is achieved, with much fewer parameters, and at a lower computational cost compared to related pure convolutional neural network (CNN) based models.

Self-Constructing Graph Convolutional Networks for Semantic Labeling

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have received increasing attention in many fields. However, due to the lack of prior graphs, their use for semantic labeling has been limited. Here, we propose a novel architecture called the Self-Constructing Graph (SCG), which makes use of learnable latent variables to generate embeddings and to self-construct the underlying graphs directly from the input features without relying on manually built prior knowledge graphs. SCG can automatically obtain optimized non-local context graphs from complex-shaped objects in aerial imagery. We optimize SCG via an adaptive diagonal enhancement method and a variational lower bound that consists of a customized graph reconstruction term and a Kullback-Leibler divergence regularization term. We demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of the proposed SCG on the publicly available ISPRS Vaihingen dataset and our model SCG-Net achieves competitive results in terms of F1-score with much fewer parameters and at a lower computational cost compared to related pure-CNN based work. Our code will be made public soon.

Multi-view Self-Constructing Graph Convolutional Networks with Adaptive Class Weighting Loss for Semantic Segmentation

We propose a novel architecture called the Multi-view Self-Constructing Graph Convolutional Networks (MSCG-Net) for semantic segmentation. Building on the recently proposed Self-Constructing Graph (SCG) module, which makes use of learnable latent variables to self-construct the underlying graphs directly from the input features without relying on manually built prior knowledge graphs, we leverage multiple views in order to explicitly exploit the rotational invariance in airborne images. We further develop an adaptive class weighting loss to address the class imbalance. We demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of the proposed method on the Agriculture-Vision challenge dataset and our model achieves very competitive results (0.547 mIoU) with much fewer parameters and at a lower computational cost compared to related pure-CNN based work. Code will be available at: github.com/samleoqh/MSCG-Net

Code-Aligned Autoencoders for Unsupervised Change Detection in Multimodal Remote Sensing Images

Image translation with convolutional autoencoders has recently been used as an approach to multimodal change detection in bitemporal satellite images. A main challenge is the alignment of the code spaces by reducing the contribution of change pixels to the learning of the translation function. Many existing approaches train the networks by exploiting supervised information of the change areas, which, however, is not always available. We propose to extract relational pixel information captured by domain-specific affinity matrices at the input and use this to enforce alignment of the code spaces and reduce the impact of change pixels on the learning objective. A change prior is derived in an unsupervised fashion from pixel pair affinities that are comparable across domains. To achieve code space alignment we enforce that pixel with similar affinity relations in the input domains should be correlated also in code space. We demonstrate the utility of this procedure in combination with cycle consistency. The proposed approach are compared with state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms. Experiments conducted on four real datasets show the effectiveness of our methodology.