FaceCoresetNet: Differentiable Coresets for Face Set Recognition

In set-based face recognition, we aim to compute the most discriminative descriptor from an unbounded set of images and videos showing a single person. A discriminative descriptor balances two policies when aggregating information from a given set. The first is a quality-based policy: emphasizing high-quality and down-weighting low-quality images. The second is a diversity-based policy: emphasizing unique images in the set and down-weighting multiple occurrences of similar images as found in video clips which can overwhelm the set representation. This work frames face-set representation as a differentiable coreset selection problem. Our model learns how to select a small coreset of the input set that balances quality and diversity policies using a learned metric parameterized by the face quality, optimized end-to-end. The selection process is a differentiable farthest-point sampling (FPS) realized by approximating the non-differentiable Argmax operation with differentiable sampling from the Gumbel-Softmax distribution of distances. The small coreset is later used as queries in a self and cross-attention architecture to enrich the descriptor with information from the whole set. Our model is order-invariant and linear in the input set size. We set a new SOTA to set face verification on the IJB-B and IJB-C datasets. Our code is publicly available.

Coarse-to-Fine Multi-Scene Pose Regression with Transformers

Absolute camera pose regressors estimate the position and orientation of a camera given the captured image alone. Typically, a convolutional backbone with a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) head is trained using images and pose labels to embed a single reference scene at a time. Recently, this scheme was extended to learn multiple scenes by replacing the MLP head with a set of fully connected layers. In this work, we propose to learn multi-scene absolute camera pose regression with Transformers, where encoders are used to aggregate activation maps with self-attention and decoders transform latent features and scenes encoding into pose predictions. This allows our model to focus on general features that are informative for localization, while embedding multiple scenes in parallel. We extend our previous MS-Transformer approach \cite{shavit2021learning} by introducing a mixed classification-regression architecture that improves the localization accuracy. Our method is evaluated on commonly benchmark indoor and outdoor datasets and has been shown to exceed both multi-scene and state-of-the-art single-scene absolute pose regressors.

Image Segmentation via Probabilistic Graph Matching

This work presents an unsupervised and semi-automatic image segmentation approach where we formulate the segmentation as a inference problem based on unary and pairwise assignment probabilities computed using low-level image cues. The inference is solved via a probabilistic graph matching scheme, which allows rigorous incorporation of low level image cues and automatic tuning of parameters. The proposed scheme is experimentally shown to compare favorably with contemporary semi-supervised and unsupervised image segmentation schemes, when applied to contemporary state-of-the-art image sets.

Age-Invariant Face Embedding using the Wasserstein Distance

In this work, we study face verification in datasets where images of the same individuals exhibit significant age differences. This poses a major challenge for current face recognition and verification techniques. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach that utilizes multitask learning and a Wasserstein distance discriminator to disentangle age and identity embeddings of facial images. Our approach employs multitask learning with a Wasserstein distance discriminator that minimizes the mutual information between the age and identity embeddings by minimizing the Jensen-Shannon divergence. This improves the encoding of age and identity information in face images and enhances the performance of face verification in age-variant datasets. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach using multiple age-variant face datasets and demonstrate its superiority over state-of-the-art methods in terms of face verification accuracy.

Deep Convolutional Tables: Deep Learning without Convolutions

We propose a novel formulation of deep networks that do not use dot-product neurons and rely on a hierarchy of voting tables instead, denoted as Convolutional Tables (CT), to enable accelerated CPU-based inference. Convolutional layers are the most time-consuming bottleneck in contemporary deep learning techniques, severely limiting their use in Internet of Things and CPU-based devices. The proposed CT performs a fern operation at each image location: it encodes the location environment into a binary index and uses the index to retrieve the desired local output from a table. The results of multiple tables are combined to derive the final output. The computational complexity of a CT transformation is independent of the patch (filter) size and grows gracefully with the number of channels, outperforming comparable convolutional layers. It is shown to have a better capacity:compute ratio than dot-product neurons, and that deep CT networks exhibit a universal approximation property similar to neural networks. As the transformation involves computing discrete indices, we derive a soft relaxation and gradient-based approach for training the CT hierarchy. Deep CT networks have been experimentally shown to have accuracy comparable to that of CNNs of similar architectures. In the low compute regime, they enable an error:speed trade-off superior to alternative efficient CNN architectures.

Learning to Localize in Unseen Scenes with Relative Pose Regressors

Relative pose regressors (RPRs) localize a camera by estimating its relative translation and rotation to a pose-labelled reference. Unlike scene coordinate regression and absolute pose regression methods, which learn absolute scene parameters, RPRs can (theoretically) localize in unseen environments, since they only learn the residual pose between camera pairs. In practice, however, the performance of RPRs is significantly degraded in unseen scenes. In this work, we propose to aggregate paired feature maps into latent codes, instead of operating on global image descriptors, in order to improve the generalization of RPRs. We implement aggregation with concatenation, projection, and attention operations (Transformer Encoders) and learn to regress the relative pose parameters from the resulting latent codes. We further make use of a recently proposed continuous representation of rotation matrices, which alleviates the limitations of the commonly used quaternions. Compared to state-of-the-art RPRs, our model is shown to localize significantly better in unseen environments, across both indoor and outdoor benchmarks, while maintaining competitive performance in seen scenes. We validate our findings and architecture design through multiple ablations. Our code and pretrained models is publicly available.

Estimating Extreme 3D Image Rotation with Transformer Cross-Attention

The estimation of large and extreme image rotation plays a key role in multiple computer vision domains, where the rotated images are related by a limited or a non-overlapping field of view. Contemporary approaches apply convolutional neural networks to compute a 4D correlation volume to estimate the relative rotation between image pairs. In this work, we propose a cross-attention-based approach that utilizes CNN feature maps and a Transformer-Encoder, to compute the cross-attention between the activation maps of the image pairs, which is shown to be an improved equivalent of the 4D correlation volume, used in previous works. In the suggested approach, higher attention scores are associated with image regions that encode visual cues of rotation. Our approach is end-to-end trainable and optimizes a simple regression loss. It is experimentally shown to outperform contemporary state-of-the-art schemes when applied to commonly used image rotation datasets and benchmarks, and establishes a new state-of-the-art accuracy on these datasets. We make our code publicly available.

HyperPose: Camera Pose Localization using Attention Hypernetworks

In this study, we propose the use of attention hypernetworks in camera pose localization. The dynamic nature of natural scenes, including changes in environment, perspective, and lighting, creates an inherent domain gap between the training and test sets that limits the accuracy of contemporary localization networks. To overcome this issue, we suggest a camera pose regressor that integrates a hypernetwork. During inference, the hypernetwork generates adaptive weights for the localization regression heads based on the input image, effectively reducing the domain gap. We also suggest the use of a Transformer-Encoder as the hypernetwork, instead of the common multilayer perceptron, to derive an attention hypernetwork. The proposed approach achieves superior results compared to state-of-the-art methods on contemporary datasets. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first instance of using hypernetworks in camera pose regression, as well as using Transformer-Encoders as hypernetworks. We make our code publicly available.

Learning to embed semantic similarity for joint image-text retrieval

We present a deep learning approach for learning the joint semantic embeddings of images and captions in a Euclidean space, such that the semantic similarity is approximated by the L2 distances in the embedding space. For that, we introduce a metric learning scheme that utilizes multitask learning to learn the embedding of identical semantic concepts using a center loss. By introducing a differentiable quantization scheme into the end-to-end trainable network, we derive a semantic embedding of semantically similar concepts in Euclidean space. We also propose a novel metric learning formulation using an adaptive margin hinge loss, that is refined during the training phase. The proposed scheme was applied to the MS-COCO, Flicke30K and Flickr8K datasets, and was shown to compare favorably with contemporary state-of-the-art approaches.

Camera Pose Auto-Encoders for Improving Pose Regression

Absolute pose regressor (APR) networks are trained to estimate the pose of the camera given a captured image. They compute latent image representations from which the camera position and orientation are regressed. APRs provide a different tradeoff between localization accuracy, runtime, and memory, compared to structure-based localization schemes that provide state-of-the-art accuracy. In this work, we introduce Camera Pose Auto-Encoders (PAEs), multilayer perceptrons that are trained via a Teacher-Student approach to encode camera poses using APRs as their teachers. We show that the resulting latent pose representations can closely reproduce APR performance and demonstrate their effectiveness for related tasks. Specifically, we propose a light-weight test-time optimization in which the closest train poses are encoded and used to refine camera position estimation. This procedure achieves a new state-of-the-art position accuracy for APRs, on both the CambridgeLandmarks and 7Scenes benchmarks. We also show that train images can be reconstructed from the learned pose encoding, paving the way for integrating visual information from the train set at a low memory cost. Our code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/yolish/camera-pose-auto-encoders.