Image galleries provide a rich source of diverse information about a product which can be leveraged across many recommendation and retrieval applications. We study the problem of building a universal image gallery encoder through multi-task learning (MTL) approach and demonstrate that it is indeed a practical way to achieve generalizability of learned representations to new downstream tasks. Additionally, we analyze the relative predictive performance of MTL-trained solutions against optimal and substantially more expensive solutions, and find signals that MTL can be a useful mechanism to address sparsity in low-resource binary tasks.
Empirical works suggest that various semantics emerge in the latent space of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) when being trained to generate images. To perform real image editing, it requires an accurate mapping from the real image to the latent space to leveraging these learned semantics, which is important yet difficult. An in-domain GAN inversion approach is recently proposed to constraint the inverted code within the latent space by forcing the reconstructed image obtained from the inverted code within the real image space. Empirically, we find that the inverted code by the in-domain GAN can deviate from the latent space significantly. To solve this problem, we propose a force-in-domain GAN based on the in-domain GAN, which utilizes a discriminator to force the inverted code within the latent space. The force-in-domain GAN can also be interpreted by a cycle-GAN with slight modification. Extensive experiments show that our force-in-domain GAN not only reconstructs the target image at the pixel level, but also align the inverted code with the latent space well for semantic editing.
We introduce Cubical Ripser for computing persistent homology of image and volume data (more precisely, weighted cubical complexes). To our best knowledge, Cubical Ripser is currently the fastest and the most memory-efficient program for computing persistent homology of weighted cubical complexes. We demonstrate our software with an example of image analysis in which persistent homology and convolutional neural networks are successfully combined. Our open-source implementation is available online.
Central to active learning (AL) is what data should be selected for annotation. Existing works attempt to select highly uncertain or informative data for annotation. Nevertheless, it remains unclear how selected data impacts the test performance of the task model used in AL. In this work, we explore such an impact by theoretically proving that selecting unlabeled data of higher gradient norm leads to a lower upper bound of test loss, resulting in a better test performance. However, due to the lack of label information, directly computing gradient norm for unlabeled data is infeasible. To address this challenge, we propose two schemes, namely expected-gradnorm and entropy-gradnorm. The former computes the gradient norm by constructing an expected empirical loss while the latter constructs an unsupervised loss with entropy. Furthermore, we integrate the two schemes in a universal AL framework. We evaluate our method on classical image classification and semantic segmentation tasks. To demonstrate its competency in domain applications and its robustness to noise, we also validate our method on a cellular imaging analysis task, namely cryo-Electron Tomography subtomogram classification. Results demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance against the state-of-the-art. Our source code is available at https://github.com/xulabs/aitom
The emergent ecosystems of intelligent edge devices in diverse Internet of Things (IoT) applications, from automatic surveillance to precision agriculture, increasingly rely on recording and processing variety of image data. Due to resource constraints, e.g., energy and communication bandwidth requirements, these applications require compressing the recorded images before transmission. For these applications, image compression commonly requires: (1) maintaining features for coarse-grain pattern recognition instead of the high-level details for human perception due to machine-to-machine communications; (2) high compression ratio that leads to improved energy and transmission efficiency; (3) large dynamic range of compression and an easy trade-off between compression factor and quality of reconstruction to accommodate a wide diversity of IoT applications as well as their time-varying energy/performance needs. To address these requirements, we propose, MAGIC, a novel machine learning (ML) guided image compression framework that judiciously sacrifices visual quality to achieve much higher compression when compared to traditional techniques, while maintaining accuracy for coarse-grained vision tasks. The central idea is to capture application-specific domain knowledge and efficiently utilize it in achieving high compression. We demonstrate that the MAGIC framework is configurable across a wide range of compression/quality and is capable of compressing beyond the standard quality factor limits of both JPEG 2000 and WebP. We perform experiments on representative IoT applications using two vision datasets and show up to 42.65x compression at similar accuracy with respect to the source. We highlight low variance in compression rate across images using our technique as compared to JPEG 2000 and WebP.
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) constitute a class of Deep Learning models which have been used in the recent past to resolve many problems in computer vision, in particular optical flow estimation. Measuring displacement and strain fields can be regarded as a particular case of this problem. However, it seems that CNNs have never been used so far to perform such measurements. This work is aimed at implementing a CNN able to retrieve displacement and strain fields from pairs of reference and deformed images of a flat speckled surface, as Digital Image Correlation (DIC) does. This paper explains how a CNN called StrainNet can be developed to reach this goal, and how specific ground truth datasets are elaborated to train this CNN. The main result is that StrainNet successfully performs such measurements, and that it achieves competing results in terms of metrological performance and computing time. The conclusion is that CNNs like StrainNet offer a viable alternative to DIC, especially for real-time applications.
Single-agent reinforcement learning algorithms in a multi-agent environment are inadequate for fostering cooperation. If intelligent agents are to interact and work together to solve complex problems, methods that counter non-cooperative behavior are needed to facilitate the training of multiple agents. This is the goal of cooperative AI. Recent work in adversarial machine learning, however, shows that models (e.g., image classifiers) can be easily deceived into making incorrect decisions. In addition, some past research in cooperative AI has relied on new notions of representations, like public beliefs, to accelerate the learning of optimally cooperative behavior. Hence, cooperative AI might introduce new weaknesses not investigated in previous machine learning research. In this paper, our contributions include: (1) arguing that three algorithms inspired by human-like social intelligence introduce new vulnerabilities, unique to cooperative AI, that adversaries can exploit, and (2) an experiment showing that simple, adversarial perturbations on the agents' beliefs can negatively impact performance. This evidence points to the possibility that formal representations of social behavior are vulnerable to adversarial attacks.
Image retrieval methods that employ hashing or vector quantization have achieved great success by taking advantage of deep learning. However, these approaches do not meet expectations unless expensive label information is sufficient. To resolve this issue, we propose the first quantization-based semi-supervised image retrieval scheme: Generalized Product Quantization (GPQ) network. We design a novel metric learning strategy that preserves semantic similarity between labeled data, and employ entropy regularization term to fully exploit inherent potentials of unlabeled data. Our solution increases the generalization capacity of the quantization network, which allows overcoming previous limitations in the retrieval community. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that GPQ yields state-of-the-art performance on large-scale real image benchmark datasets.
Computed Tomography Angiography is a key modality providing insights into the cerebrovascular vessel tree that are crucial for the diagnosis and treatment of ischemic strokes, in particular in cases of large vessel occlusions (LVO). Thus, the clinical workflow greatly benefits from an automated detection of patients suffering from LVOs. This work uses convolutional neural networks for case-level classification trained with elastic deformation of the vessel tree segmentation masks to artificially augment training data. Using only masks as the input to our model uniquely allows us to apply such deformations much more aggressively than one could with conventional image volumes while retaining sample realism. The neural network classifies the presence of an LVO and the affected hemisphere. In a 5-fold cross validated ablation study, we demonstrate that the use of the suggested augmentation enables us to train robust models even from few data sets. Training the EfficientNetB1 architecture on 100 data sets, the proposed augmentation scheme was able to raise the ROC AUC to 0.85 from a baseline value of 0.56 using no augmentation. The best performance was achieved using a 3D-DenseNet yielding an AUC of 0.87. The augmentation had positive impact in classification of the affected hemisphere as well, where the 3D-DenseNet reached an AUC of 0.93 on both sides.
In this technical report, we present our approaches for the continual object detection track of the SODA10M challenge. We adapt ResNet50-FPN as the baseline and try several improvements for the final submission model. We find that task-specific replay scheme, learning rate scheduling, model calibration, and using original image scale helps to improve performance for both large and small objects in images. Our team `hypertune28' secured the second position among 52 participants in the challenge. This work will be presented at the ICCV 2021 Workshop on Self-supervised Learning for Next-Generation Industry-level Autonomous Driving (SSLAD).