Attentive Explanations: Justifying Decisions and Pointing to the Evidence

Deep models are the defacto standard in visual decision models due to their impressive performance on a wide array of visual tasks. However, they are frequently seen as opaque and are unable to explain their decisions. In contrast, humans can justify their decisions with natural language and point to the evidence in the visual world which led to their decisions. We postulate that deep models can do this as well and propose our Pointing and Justification (PJ-X) model which can justify its decision with a sentence and point to the evidence by introspecting its decision and explanation process using an attention mechanism. Unfortunately there is no dataset available with reference explanations for visual decision making. We thus collect two datasets in two domains where it is interesting and challenging to explain decisions. First, we extend the visual question answering task to not only provide an answer but also a natural language explanation for the answer. Second, we focus on explaining human activities which is traditionally more challenging than object classification. We extensively evaluate our PJ-X model, both on the justification and pointing tasks, by comparing it to prior models and ablations using both automatic and human evaluations.

Neural Module Networks

Visual question answering is fundamentally compositional in nature---a question like "where is the dog?" shares substructure with questions like "what color is the dog?" and "where is the cat?" This paper seeks to simultaneously exploit the representational capacity of deep networks and the compositional linguistic structure of questions. We describe a procedure for constructing and learning *neural module networks*, which compose collections of jointly-trained neural "modules" into deep networks for question answering. Our approach decomposes questions into their linguistic substructures, and uses these structures to dynamically instantiate modular networks (with reusable components for recognizing dogs, classifying colors, etc.). The resulting compound networks are jointly trained. We evaluate our approach on two challenging datasets for visual question answering, achieving state-of-the-art results on both the VQA natural image dataset and a new dataset of complex questions about abstract shapes.

End-to-end Learning of Driving Models from Large-scale Video Datasets

Robust perception-action models should be learned from training data with diverse visual appearances and realistic behaviors, yet current approaches to deep visuomotor policy learning have been generally limited to in-situ models learned from a single vehicle or a simulation environment. We advocate learning a generic vehicle motion model from large scale crowd-sourced video data, and develop an end-to-end trainable architecture for learning to predict a distribution over future vehicle egomotion from instantaneous monocular camera observations and previous vehicle state. Our model incorporates a novel FCN-LSTM architecture, which can be learned from large-scale crowd-sourced vehicle action data, and leverages available scene segmentation side tasks to improve performance under a privileged learning paradigm.

Captioning Images with Diverse Objects

Recent captioning models are limited in their ability to scale and describe concepts unseen in paired image-text corpora. We propose the Novel Object Captioner (NOC), a deep visual semantic captioning model that can describe a large number of object categories not present in existing image-caption datasets. Our model takes advantage of external sources -- labeled images from object recognition datasets, and semantic knowledge extracted from unannotated text. We propose minimizing a joint objective which can learn from these diverse data sources and leverage distributional semantic embeddings, enabling the model to generalize and describe novel objects outside of image-caption datasets. We demonstrate that our model exploits semantic information to generate captions for hundreds of object categories in the ImageNet object recognition dataset that are not observed in MSCOCO image-caption training data, as well as many categories that are observed very rarely. Both automatic evaluations and human judgements show that our model considerably outperforms prior work in being able to describe many more categories of objects.

Generalized orderless pooling performs implicit salient matching

Most recent CNN architectures use average pooling as a final feature encoding step. In the field of fine-grained recognition, however, recent global representations like bilinear pooling offer improved performance. In this paper, we generalize average and bilinear pooling to "alpha-pooling", allowing for learning the pooling strategy during training. In addition, we present a novel way to visualize decisions made by these approaches. We identify parts of training images having the highest influence on the prediction of a given test image. It allows for justifying decisions to users and also for analyzing the influence of semantic parts. For example, we can show that the higher capacity VGG16 model focuses much more on the bird's head than, e.g., the lower-capacity VGG-M model when recognizing fine-grained bird categories. Both contributions allow us to analyze the difference when moving between average and bilinear pooling. In addition, experiments show that our generalized approach can outperform both across a variety of standard datasets.

Adapting Deep Visuomotor Representations with Weak Pairwise Constraints

Real-world robotics problems often occur in domains that differ significantly from the robot's prior training environment. For many robotic control tasks, real world experience is expensive to obtain, but data is easy to collect in either an instrumented environment or in simulation. We propose a novel domain adaptation approach for robot perception that adapts visual representations learned on a large easy-to-obtain source dataset (e.g. synthetic images) to a target real-world domain, without requiring expensive manual data annotation of real world data before policy search. Supervised domain adaptation methods minimize cross-domain differences using pairs of aligned images that contain the same object or scene in both the source and target domains, thus learning a domain-invariant representation. However, they require manual alignment of such image pairs. Fully unsupervised adaptation methods rely on minimizing the discrepancy between the feature distributions across domains. We propose a novel, more powerful combination of both distribution and pairwise image alignment, and remove the requirement for expensive annotation by using weakly aligned pairs of images in the source and target domains. Focusing on adapting from simulation to real world data using a PR2 robot, we evaluate our approach on a manipulation task and show that by using weakly paired images, our method compensates for domain shift more effectively than previous techniques, enabling better robot performance in the real world.

Curiosity-driven Exploration by Self-supervised Prediction

In many real-world scenarios, rewards extrinsic to the agent are extremely sparse, or absent altogether. In such cases, curiosity can serve as an intrinsic reward signal to enable the agent to explore its environment and learn skills that might be useful later in its life. We formulate curiosity as the error in an agent's ability to predict the consequence of its own actions in a visual feature space learned by a self-supervised inverse dynamics model. Our formulation scales to high-dimensional continuous state spaces like images, bypasses the difficulties of directly predicting pixels, and, critically, ignores the aspects of the environment that cannot affect the agent. The proposed approach is evaluated in two environments: VizDoom and Super Mario Bros. Three broad settings are investigated: 1) sparse extrinsic reward, where curiosity allows for far fewer interactions with the environment to reach the goal; 2) exploration with no extrinsic reward, where curiosity pushes the agent to explore more efficiently; and 3) generalization to unseen scenarios (e.g. new levels of the same game) where the knowledge gained from earlier experience helps the agent explore new places much faster than starting from scratch. Demo video and code available at https://pathak22.github.io/noreward-rl/

Learning Features by Watching Objects Move

This paper presents a novel yet intuitive approach to unsupervised feature learning. Inspired by the human visual system, we explore whether low-level motion-based grouping cues can be used to learn an effective visual representation. Specifically, we use unsupervised motion-based segmentation on videos to obtain segments, which we use as 'pseudo ground truth' to train a convolutional network to segment objects from a single frame. Given the extensive evidence that motion plays a key role in the development of the human visual system, we hope that this straightforward approach to unsupervised learning will be more effective than cleverly designed 'pretext' tasks studied in the literature. Indeed, our extensive experiments show that this is the case. When used for transfer learning on object detection, our representation significantly outperforms previous unsupervised approaches across multiple settings, especially when training data for the target task is scarce.

Learning Detection with Diverse Proposals

To predict a set of diverse and informative proposals with enriched representations, this paper introduces a differentiable Determinantal Point Process (DPP) layer that is able to augment the object detection architectures. Most modern object detection architectures, such as Faster R-CNN, learn to localize objects by minimizing deviations from the ground-truth but ignore correlation between multiple proposals and object categories. Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) as a widely used proposal pruning scheme ignores label- and instance-level relations between object candidates resulting in multi-labeled detections. In the multi-class case, NMS selects boxes with the largest prediction scores ignoring the semantic relation between categories of potential election. In contrast, our trainable DPP layer, allowing for Learning Detection with Diverse Proposals (LDDP), considers both label-level contextual information and spatial layout relationships between proposals without increasing the number of parameters of the network, and thus improves location and category specifications of final detected bounding boxes substantially during both training and inference schemes. Furthermore, we show that LDDP keeps it superiority over Faster R-CNN even if the number of proposals generated by LDPP is only ~30% as many as those for Faster R-CNN.

Adversarial Feature Learning

The ability of the Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) framework to learn generative models mapping from simple latent distributions to arbitrarily complex data distributions has been demonstrated empirically, with compelling results showing that the latent space of such generators captures semantic variation in the data distribution. Intuitively, models trained to predict these semantic latent representations given data may serve as useful feature representations for auxiliary problems where semantics are relevant. However, in their existing form, GANs have no means of learning the inverse mapping -- projecting data back into the latent space. We propose Bidirectional Generative Adversarial Networks (BiGANs) as a means of learning this inverse mapping, and demonstrate that the resulting learned feature representation is useful for auxiliary supervised discrimination tasks, competitive with contemporary approaches to unsupervised and self-supervised feature learning.