Detecting Out-Of-Distribution Earth Observation Images with Diffusion Models

Earth Observation imagery can capture rare and unusual events, such as disasters and major landscape changes, whose visual appearance contrasts with the usual observations. Deep models trained on common remote sensing data will output drastically different features for these out-of-distribution samples, compared to those closer to their training dataset. Detecting them could therefore help anticipate changes in the observations, either geographical or environmental. In this work, we show that the reconstruction error of diffusion models can effectively serve as unsupervised out-of-distribution detectors for remote sensing images, using them as a plausibility score. Moreover, we introduce ODEED, a novel reconstruction-based scorer using the probability-flow ODE of diffusion models. We validate it experimentally on SpaceNet 8 with various scenarios, such as classical OOD detection with geographical shift and near-OOD setups: pre/post-flood and non-flooded/flooded image recognition. We show that our ODEED scorer significantly outperforms other diffusion-based and discriminative baselines on the more challenging near-OOD scenarios of flood image detection, where OOD images are close to the distribution tail. We aim to pave the way towards better use of generative models for anomaly detection in remote sensing.

Optimization of Rank Losses for Image Retrieval

In image retrieval, standard evaluation metrics rely on score ranking, \eg average precision (AP), recall at k (R@k), normalized discounted cumulative gain (NDCG). In this work we introduce a general framework for robust and decomposable rank losses optimization. It addresses two major challenges for end-to-end training of deep neural networks with rank losses: non-differentiability and non-decomposability. Firstly we propose a general surrogate for ranking operator, SupRank, that is amenable to stochastic gradient descent. It provides an upperbound for rank losses and ensures robust training. Secondly, we use a simple yet effective loss function to reduce the decomposability gap between the averaged batch approximation of ranking losses and their values on the whole training set. We apply our framework to two standard metrics for image retrieval: AP and R@k. Additionally we apply our framework to hierarchical image retrieval. We introduce an extension of AP, the hierarchical average precision $\mathcal{H}$-AP, and optimize it as well as the NDCG. Finally we create the first hierarchical landmarks retrieval dataset. We use a semi-automatic pipeline to create hierarchical labels, extending the large scale Google Landmarks v2 dataset. The hierarchical dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/cvdfoundation/google-landmark. Code will be released at https://github.com/elias-ramzi/SupRank.

Hierarchical Average Precision Training for Pertinent Image Retrieval

Image Retrieval is commonly evaluated with Average Precision (AP) or Recall@k. Yet, those metrics, are limited to binary labels and do not take into account errors' severity. This paper introduces a new hierarchical AP training method for pertinent image retrieval (HAP-PIER). HAPPIER is based on a new H-AP metric, which leverages a concept hierarchy to refine AP by integrating errors' importance and better evaluate rankings. To train deep models with H-AP, we carefully study the problem's structure and design a smooth lower bound surrogate combined with a clustering loss that ensures consistent ordering. Extensive experiments on 6 datasets show that HAPPIER significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods for hierarchical retrieval, while being on par with the latest approaches when evaluating fine-grained ranking performances. Finally, we show that HAPPIER leads to better organization of the embedding space, and prevents most severe failure cases of non-hierarchical methods. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/elias-ramzi/HAPPIER.

Efficient Autoprecoder-based deep learning for massive MU-MIMO Downlink under PA Non-Linearities

This paper introduces a new efficient autoprecoder (AP) based deep learning approach for massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO) downlink systems in which the base station is equipped with a large number of antennas with energy-efficient power amplifiers (PAs) and serves multiple user terminals. We present AP-mMIMO, a new method that jointly eliminates the multiuser interference and compensates the severe nonlinear (NL) PA distortions. Unlike previous works, AP-mMIMO has a low computational complexity, making it suitable for a global energy-efficient system. Specifically, we aim to design the PA-aware precoder and the receive decoder by leveraging the concept of autoprecoder, whereas the end-to-end massive multiuser (MU)-MIMO downlink is designed using a deep neural network (NN). Most importantly, the proposed AP-mMIMO is suited for the varying block fading channel scenario. To deal with such scenarios, we consider a two-stage precoding scheme: 1) a NN-precoder is used to address the PA non-linearities and 2) a linear precoder is used to suppress the multiuser interference. The NN-precoder and the receive decoder are trained off-line and when the channel varies, only the linear precoder changes on-line. This latter is designed by using the widely used zero-forcing precoding scheme or its lowcomplexity version based on matrix polynomials. Numerical simulations show that the proposed AP-mMIMO approach achieves competitive performance with a significantly lower complexity compared to existing literature. Index Terms-multiuser (MU) precoding, massive multipleinput multiple-output (MIMO), energy-efficiency, hardware impairment, power amplifier (PA) nonlinearities, autoprecoder, deep learning, neural network (NN)

Multi-Attribute Balanced Sampling for Disentangled GAN Controls

Various controls over the generated data can be extracted from the latent space of a pre-trained GAN, as it implicitly encodes the semantics of the training data. The discovered controls allow to vary semantic attributes in the generated images but usually lead to entangled edits that affect multiple attributes at the same time. Supervised approaches typically sample and annotate a collection of latent codes, then train classifiers in the latent space to identify the controls. Since the data generated by GANs reflects the biases of the original dataset, so do the resulting semantic controls. We propose to address disentanglement by subsampling the generated data to remove over-represented co-occuring attributes thus balancing the semantics of the dataset before training the classifiers. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach by extracting disentangled linear directions for face manipulation on two popular GAN architectures, PGGAN and StyleGAN, and two datasets, CelebAHQ and FFHQ. We show that this approach outperforms state-of-the-art classifier-based methods while avoiding the need for disentanglement-enforcing post-processing.

Robust and Decomposable Average Precision for Image Retrieval

In image retrieval, standard evaluation metrics rely on score ranking, e.g. average precision (AP). In this paper, we introduce a method for robust and decomposable average precision (ROADMAP) addressing two major challenges for end-to-end training of deep neural networks with AP: non-differentiability and non-decomposability. Firstly, we propose a new differentiable approximation of the rank function, which provides an upper bound of the AP loss and ensures robust training. Secondly, we design a simple yet effective loss function to reduce the decomposability gap between the AP in the whole training set and its averaged batch approximation, for which we provide theoretical guarantees. Extensive experiments conducted on three image retrieval datasets show that ROADMAP outperforms several recent AP approximation methods and highlight the importance of our two contributions. Finally, using ROADMAP for training deep models yields very good performances, outperforming state-of-the-art results on the three datasets.

Web Image Context Extraction with Graph Neural Networks and Sentence Embeddings on the DOM tree

Web Image Context Extraction (WICE) consists in obtaining the textual information describing an image using the content of the surrounding webpage. A common preprocessing step before performing WICE is to render the content of the webpage. When done at a large scale (e.g., for search engine indexation), it may become very computationally costly (up to several seconds per page). To avoid this cost, we introduce a novel WICE approach that combines Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Natural Language Processing models. Our method relies on a graph model containing both node types and text as features. The model is fed through several blocks of GNNs to extract the textual context. Since no labeled WICE dataset with ground truth exists, we train and evaluate the GNNs on a proxy task that consists in finding the semantically closest text to the image caption. We then interpret importance weights to find the most relevant text nodes and define them as the image context. Thanks to GNNs, our model is able to encode both structural and semantic information from the webpage. We show that our approach gives promising results to help address the large-scale WICE problem using only HTML data.

PKSpell: Data-Driven Pitch Spelling and Key Signature Estimation

We present PKSpell: a data-driven approach for the joint estimation of pitch spelling and key signatures from MIDI files. Both elements are fundamental for the production of a full-fledged musical score and facilitate many MIR tasks such as harmonic analysis, section identification, melodic similarity, and search in a digital music library. We design a deep recurrent neural network model that only requires information readily available in all kinds of MIDI files, including performances, or other symbolic encodings. We release a model trained on the ASAP dataset. Our system can be used with these pre-trained parameters and is easy to integrate into a MIR pipeline. We also propose a data augmentation procedure that helps retraining on small datasets. PKSpell achieves strong key signature estimation performance on a challenging dataset. Most importantly, this model establishes a new state-of-the-art performance on the MuseData pitch spelling dataset without retraining.

Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation in Earth Observation: The MiniFrance Suite, Dataset Analysis and Multi-task Network Study

The development of semi-supervised learning techniques is essential to enhance the generalization capacities of machine learning algorithms. Indeed, raw image data are abundant while labels are scarce, therefore it is crucial to leverage unlabeled inputs to build better models. The availability of large databases have been key for the development of learning algorithms with high level performance. Despite the major role of machine learning in Earth Observation to derive products such as land cover maps, datasets in the field are still limited, either because of modest surface coverage, lack of variety of scenes or restricted classes to identify. We introduce a novel large-scale dataset for semi-supervised semantic segmentation in Earth Observation, the MiniFrance suite. MiniFrance has several unprecedented properties: it is large-scale, containing over 2000 very high resolution aerial images, accounting for more than 200 billions samples (pixels); it is varied, covering 16 conurbations in France, with various climates, different landscapes, and urban as well as countryside scenes; and it is challenging, considering land use classes with high-level semantics. Nevertheless, the most distinctive quality of MiniFrance is being the only dataset in the field especially designed for semi-supervised learning: it contains labeled and unlabeled images in its training partition, which reproduces a life-like scenario. Along with this dataset, we present tools for data representativeness analysis in terms of appearance similarity and a thorough study of MiniFrance data, demonstrating that it is suitable for learning and generalizes well in a semi-supervised setting. Finally, we present semi-supervised deep architectures based on multi-task learning and the first experiments on MiniFrance.

Distance transform regression for spatially-aware deep semantic segmentation

Understanding visual scenes relies more and more on dense pixel-wise classification obtained via deep fully convolutional neural networks. However, due to the nature of the networks, predictions often suffer from blurry boundaries and ill-segmented shapes, fueling the need for post-processing. This work introduces a new semantic segmentation regularization based on the regression of a distance transform. After computing the distance transform on the label masks, we train a FCN in a multi-task setting in both discrete and continuous spaces by learning jointly classification and distance regression. This requires almost no modification of the network structure and adds a very low overhead to the training process. Learning to approximate the distance transform back-propagates spatial cues that implicitly regularizes the segmentation. We validate this technique with several architectures on various datasets, and we show significant improvements compared to competitive baselines.