Password-conditioned Anonymization and Deanonymization with Face Identity Transformers

Cameras are prevalent in our daily lives, and enable many useful systems built upon computer vision technologies such as smart cameras and home robots for service applications. However, there is also an increasing societal concern as the captured images/videos may contain privacy-sensitive information (e.g., face identity). We propose a novel face identity transformer which enables automated photo-realistic password-based anonymization as well as deanonymization of human faces appearing in visual data. Our face identity transformer is trained to (1) remove face identity information after anonymization, (2) make the recovery of the original face possible when given the correct password, and (3) return a wrong--but photo-realistic--face given a wrong password. Extensive experiments show that our approach enables multimodal password-conditioned face anonymizations and deanonymizations, without sacrificing privacy compared to existing anonymization approaches.

MixNMatch: Multifactor Disentanglement and Encoding for Conditional Image Generation

We present MixNMatch, a conditional generative model that learns to disentangle and encode background, object pose, shape, and texture from real images with minimal supervision, for mix-and-match image generation. We build upon FineGAN, an unconditional generative model, to learn the desired disentanglement and image generator, and leverage adversarial joint image-code distribution matching to learn the latent factor encoders. MixNMatch requires bounding boxes during training to model background, but requires no other supervision. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate MixNMatch's ability to accurately disentangle, encode, and combine multiple factors for mix-and-match image generation, including sketch2color, cartoon2img, and img2gif applications. Our code/models/demo can be found at https://github.com/Yuheng-Li/MixNMatch

MixNMatch: Multifactor Disentanglement and Encodingfor Conditional Image Generation

We present MixNMatch, a conditional generative model that learns to disentangle and encode background, object pose, shape, and texture from real images with minimal supervision, for mix-and-match image generation. We build upon FineGAN, an unconditional generative model, to learn the desired disentanglement and image generator, and leverage adversarial joint image-code distribution matching to learn the latent factor encoders. MixNMatch requires bounding boxes during training to model background, but requires no other supervision. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate MixNMatch's ability to accurately disentangle, encode, and combine multiple factors for mix-and-match image generation, including sketch2color, cartoon2img, and img2gif applications. Our code/models/demo can be found at https://github.com/Yuheng-Li/MixNMatch

Elastic-InfoGAN: Unsupervised Disentangled Representation Learning in Imbalanced Data

We propose a novel unsupervised generative model, Elastic-InfoGAN, that learns to disentangle object identity from other low-level aspects in class-imbalanced datasets. We first investigate the issues surrounding the assumptions about uniformity made by InfoGAN, and demonstrate its ineffectiveness to properly disentangle object identity in imbalanced data. Our key idea is to make the discovery of the discrete latent factor of variation invariant to identity-preserving transformations in real images, and use that as the signal to learn the latent distribution's parameters. Experiments on both artificial (MNIST) and real-world (YouTube-Faces) datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in imbalanced data by: (i) better disentanglement of object identity as a latent factor of variation; and (ii) better approximation of class imbalance in the data, as reflected in the learned parameters of the latent distribution.

YOLACT: Real-time Instance Segmentation

We present a simple, fully-convolutional model for real-time instance segmentation that achieves 29.8 mAP on MS COCO at 33 fps evaluated on a single Titan Xp, which is significantly faster than any previous competitive approach. Moreover, we obtain this result after training on only one GPU. We accomplish this by breaking instance segmentation into two parallel subtasks: (1) generating a set of prototype masks and (2) predicting per-instance mask coefficients. Then we produce instance masks by linearly combining the prototypes with the mask coefficients. We find that because this process doesn't depend on repooling, this approach produces very high-quality masks and exhibits temporal stability for free. Furthermore, we analyze the emergent behavior of our prototypes and show they learn to localize instances on their own in a translation variant manner, despite being fully-convolutional. Finally, we also propose Fast NMS, a drop-in 12 ms faster replacement for standard NMS that only has a marginal performance penalty.

FineGAN: Unsupervised Hierarchical Disentanglement for Fine-Grained Object Generation and Discovery

We propose FineGAN, a novel unsupervised GAN framework, which disentangles the background, object shape, and object appearance to hierarchically generate images of fine-grained object categories. To disentangle the factors without any supervision, our key idea is to use information theory to associate each factor to a latent code, and to condition the relationships between the codes in a specific way to induce the desired hierarchy. Through extensive experiments, we show that FineGAN achieves the desired disentanglement to generate realistic and diverse images belonging to fine-grained classes of birds, dogs, and cars. Using FineGAN's automatically learned features, we also cluster real images as a first attempt at solving the novel problem of unsupervised fine-grained object category discovery. Our video demo can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkk0SeWGu-8.

Hide-and-Seek: A Data Augmentation Technique for Weakly-Supervised Localization and Beyond

We propose 'Hide-and-Seek' a general purpose data augmentation technique, which is complementary to existing data augmentation techniques and is beneficial for various visual recognition tasks. The key idea is to hide patches in a training image randomly, in order to force the network to seek other relevant content when the most discriminative content is hidden. Our approach only needs to modify the input image and can work with any network to improve its performance. During testing, it does not need to hide any patches. The main advantage of Hide-and-Seek over existing data augmentation techniques is its ability to improve object localization accuracy in the weakly-supervised setting, and we therefore use this task to motivate the approach. However, Hide-and-Seek is not tied only to the image localization task, and can generalize to other forms of visual input like videos, as well as other recognition tasks like image classification, temporal action localization, semantic segmentation, emotion recognition, age/gender estimation, and person re-identification. We perform extensive experiments to showcase the advantage of Hide-and-Seek on these various visual recognition problems.

A Visual Attention Grounding Neural Model for Multimodal Machine Translation

We introduce a novel multimodal machine translation model that utilizes parallel visual and textual information. Our model jointly optimizes the learning of a shared visual-language embedding and a translator. The model leverages a visual attention grounding mechanism that links the visual semantics with the corresponding textual semantics. Our approach achieves competitive state-of-the-art results on the Multi30K and the Ambiguous COCO datasets. We also collected a new multilingual multimodal product description dataset to simulate a real-world international online shopping scenario. On this dataset, our visual attention grounding model outperforms other methods by a large margin.

DOCK: Detecting Objects by transferring Common-sense Knowledge

We present a scalable approach for Detecting Objects by transferring Common-sense Knowledge (DOCK) from source to target categories. In our setting, the training data for the source categories have bounding box annotations, while those for the target categories only have image-level annotations. Current state-of-the-art approaches focus on image-level visual or semantic similarity to adapt a detector trained on the source categories to the new target categories. In contrast, our key idea is to (i) use similarity not at the image-level, but rather at the region-level, and (ii) leverage richer common-sense (based on attribute, spatial, etc.) to guide the algorithm towards learning the correct detections. We acquire such common-sense cues automatically from readily-available knowledge bases without any extra human effort. On the challenging MS COCO dataset, we find that common-sense knowledge can substantially improve detection performance over existing transfer-learning baselines.