Disjoint Pose and Shape for 3D Face Reconstruction

Existing methods for 3D face reconstruction from a few casually captured images employ deep learning based models along with a 3D Morphable Model(3DMM) as face geometry prior. Structure From Motion(SFM), followed by Multi-View Stereo (MVS), on the other hand, uses dozens of high-resolution images to reconstruct accurate 3D faces.However, it produces noisy and stretched-out results with only two views available. In this paper, taking inspiration from both these methods, we propose an end-to-end pipeline that disjointly solves for pose and shape to make the optimization stable and accurate. We use a face shape prior to estimate face pose and use stereo matching followed by a 3DMM to solve for the shape. The proposed method achieves end-to-end topological consistency, enables iterative face pose refinement procedure, and show remarkable improvement on both quantitative and qualitative results over existing state-of-the-art methods.

Task Oriented Conversational Modelling With Subjective Knowledge

Existing conversational models are handled by a database(DB) and API based systems. However, very often users' questions require information that cannot be handled by such systems. Nonetheless, answers to these questions are available in the form of customer reviews and FAQs. DSTC-11 proposes a three stage pipeline consisting of knowledge seeking turn detection, knowledge selection and response generation to create a conversational model grounded on this subjective knowledge. In this paper, we focus on improving the knowledge selection module to enhance the overall system performance. In particular, we propose entity retrieval methods which result in an accurate and faster knowledge search. Our proposed Named Entity Recognition (NER) based entity retrieval method results in 7X faster search compared to the baseline model. Additionally, we also explore a potential keyword extraction method which can improve the accuracy of knowledge selection. Preliminary results show a 4 \% improvement in exact match score on knowledge selection task. The code is available https://github.com/raja-kumar/knowledge-grounded-TODS

Hybrid and Non-Uniform quantization methods using retro synthesis data for efficient inference

Existing quantization aware training methods attempt to compensate for the quantization loss by leveraging on training data, like most of the post-training quantization methods, and are also time consuming. Both these methods are not effective for privacy constraint applications as they are tightly coupled with training data. In contrast, this paper proposes a data-independent post-training quantization scheme that eliminates the need for training data. This is achieved by generating a faux dataset, hereafter referred to as Retro-Synthesis Data, from the FP32 model layer statistics and further using it for quantization. This approach outperformed state-of-the-art methods including, but not limited to, ZeroQ and DFQ on models with and without Batch-Normalization layers for 8, 6, and 4 bit precisions on ImageNet and CIFAR-10 datasets. We also introduced two futuristic variants of post-training quantization methods namely Hybrid Quantization and Non-Uniform Quantization