Regularizing Generative Adversarial Networks under Limited Data

Recent years have witnessed the rapid progress of generative adversarial networks (GANs). However, the success of the GAN models hinges on a large amount of training data. This work proposes a regularization approach for training robust GAN models on limited data. We theoretically show a connection between the regularized loss and an f-divergence called LeCam-divergence, which we find is more robust under limited training data. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed regularization scheme 1) improves the generalization performance and stabilizes the learning dynamics of GAN models under limited training data, and 2) complements the recent data augmentation methods. These properties facilitate training GAN models to achieve state-of-the-art performance when only limited training data of the ImageNet benchmark is available.

In&Out : Diverse Image Outpainting via GAN Inversion

Image outpainting seeks for a semantically consistent extension of the input image beyond its available content. Compared to inpainting -- filling in missing pixels in a way coherent with the neighboring pixels -- outpainting can be achieved in more diverse ways since the problem is less constrained by the surrounding pixels. Existing image outpainting methods pose the problem as a conditional image-to-image translation task, often generating repetitive structures and textures by replicating the content available in the input image. In this work, we formulate the problem from the perspective of inverting generative adversarial networks. Our generator renders micro-patches conditioned on their joint latent code as well as their individual positions in the image. To outpaint an image, we seek for multiple latent codes not only recovering available patches but also synthesizing diverse outpainting by patch-based generation. This leads to richer structure and content in the outpainted regions. Furthermore, our formulation allows for outpainting conditioned on the categorical input, thereby enabling flexible user controls. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the proposed method performs favorably against existing in- and outpainting methods, featuring higher visual quality and diversity.

Unsupervised Sound Localization via Iterative Contrastive Learning

Sound localization aims to find the source of the audio signal in the visual scene. However, it is labor-intensive to annotate the correlations between the signals sampled from the audio and visual modalities, thus making it difficult to supervise the learning of a machine for this task. In this work, we propose an iterative contrastive learning framework that requires no data annotations. At each iteration, the proposed method takes the 1) localization results in images predicted in the previous iteration, and 2) semantic relationships inferred from the audio signals as the pseudo-labels. We then use the pseudo-labels to learn the correlation between the visual and audio signals sampled from the same video (intra-frame sampling) as well as the association between those extracted across videos (inter-frame relation). Our iterative strategy gradually encourages the localization of the sounding objects and reduces the correlation between the non-sounding regions and the reference audio. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework performs favorably against existing unsupervised and weakly-supervised methods on the sound localization task.

ReMix: Towards Image-to-Image Translation with Limited Data

Image-to-image (I2I) translation methods based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) typically suffer from overfitting when limited training data is available. In this work, we propose a data augmentation method (ReMix) to tackle this issue. We interpolate training samples at the feature level and propose a novel content loss based on the perceptual relations among samples. The generator learns to translate the in-between samples rather than memorizing the training set, and thereby forces the discriminator to generalize. The proposed approach effectively reduces the ambiguity of generation and renders content-preserving results. The ReMix method can be easily incorporated into existing GAN models with minor modifications. Experimental results on numerous tasks demonstrate that GAN models equipped with the ReMix method achieve significant improvements.

Self-Attentive 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation from Videos

We consider the task of estimating 3D human pose and shape from videos. While existing frame-based approaches have made significant progress, these methods are independently applied to each image, thereby often leading to inconsistent predictions. In this work, we present a video-based learning algorithm for 3D human pose and shape estimation. The key insights of our method are two-fold. First, to address the inconsistent temporal prediction issue, we exploit temporal information in videos and propose a self-attention module that jointly considers short-range and long-range dependencies across frames, resulting in temporally coherent estimations. Second, we model human motion with a forecasting module that allows the transition between adjacent frames to be smooth. We evaluate our method on the 3DPW, MPI-INF-3DHP, and Human3.6M datasets. Extensive experimental results show that our algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods.

Neural Re-rendering for Full-frame Video Stabilization

Existing video stabilization methods either require aggressive cropping of frame boundaries or generate distortion artifacts on the stabilized frames. In this work, we present an algorithm for full-frame video stabilization by first estimating dense warp fields. Full-frame stabilized frames can then be synthesized by fusing warped contents from neighboring frames. The core technical novelty lies in our learning-based hybrid-space fusion that alleviates artifacts caused by optical flow inaccuracy and fast-moving objects. We validate the effectiveness of our method on the NUS and selfie video datasets. Extensive experiment results demonstrate the merits of our approach over prior video stabilization methods.

Multi-Stage Progressive Image Restoration

Image restoration tasks demand a complex balance between spatial details and high-level contextualized information while recovering images. In this paper, we propose a novel synergistic design that can optimally balance these competing goals. Our main proposal is a multi-stage architecture, that progressively learns restoration functions for the degraded inputs, thereby breaking down the overall recovery process into more manageable steps. Specifically, our model first learns the contextualized features using encoder-decoder architectures and later combines them with a high-resolution branch that retains local information. At each stage, we introduce a novel per-pixel adaptive design that leverages in-situ supervised attention to reweight the local features. A key ingredient in such a multi-stage architecture is the information exchange between different stages. To this end, we propose a two-faceted approach where the information is not only exchanged sequentially from early to late stages, but lateral connections between feature processing blocks also exist to avoid any loss of information. The resulting tightly interlinked multi-stage architecture, named as MPRNet, delivers strong performance gains on ten datasets across a range of tasks including image deraining, deblurring, and denoising. For example, on the Rain100L, GoPro and DND datasets, we obtain PSNR gains of 4 dB, 0.81 dB and 0.21 dB, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art. The source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/swz30/MPRNet.

Exploiting Raw Images for Real-Scene Super-Resolution

Super-resolution is a fundamental problem in computer vision which aims to overcome the spatial limitation of camera sensors. While significant progress has been made in single image super-resolution, most algorithms only perform well on synthetic data, which limits their applications in real scenarios. In this paper, we study the problem of real-scene single image super-resolution to bridge the gap between synthetic data and real captured images. We focus on two issues of existing super-resolution algorithms: lack of realistic training data and insufficient utilization of visual information obtained from cameras. To address the first issue, we propose a method to generate more realistic training data by mimicking the imaging process of digital cameras. For the second issue, we develop a two-branch convolutional neural network to exploit the radiance information originally-recorded in raw images. In addition, we propose a dense channel-attention block for better image restoration as well as a learning-based guided filter network for effective color correction. Our model is able to generalize to different cameras without deliberately training on images from specific camera types. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can recover fine details and clear structures, and achieve high-quality results for single image super-resolution in real scenes.

Learning Spatial and Spatio-Temporal Pixel Aggregations for Image and Video Denoising

Existing denoising methods typically restore clear results by aggregating pixels from the noisy input. Instead of relying on hand-crafted aggregation schemes, we propose to explicitly learn this process with deep neural networks. We present a spatial pixel aggregation network and learn the pixel sampling and averaging strategies for image denoising. The proposed model naturally adapts to image structures and can effectively improve the denoised results. Furthermore, we develop a spatio-temporal pixel aggregation network for video denoising to efficiently sample pixels across the spatio-temporal space. Our method is able to solve the misalignment issues caused by large motion in dynamic scenes. In addition, we introduce a new regularization term for effectively training the proposed video denoising model. We present extensive analysis of the proposed method and demonstrate that our model performs favorably against the state-of-the-art image and video denoising approaches on both synthetic and real-world data.