Learning Aligned Cross-Modal Representations from Weakly Aligned Data

People can recognize scenes across many different modalities beyond natural images. In this paper, we investigate how to learn cross-modal scene representations that transfer across modalities. To study this problem, we introduce a new cross-modal scene dataset. While convolutional neural networks can categorize cross-modal scenes well, they also learn an intermediate representation not aligned across modalities, which is undesirable for cross-modal transfer applications. We present methods to regularize cross-modal convolutional neural networks so that they have a shared representation that is agnostic of the modality. Our experiments suggest that our scene representation can help transfer representations across modalities for retrieval. Moreover, our visualizations suggest that units emerge in the shared representation that tend to activate on consistent concepts independently of the modality.Comment: Conference paper at CVPR 201

Stable and Causal Inference for Discriminative Self-supervised Deep Visual Representations

In recent years, discriminative self-supervised methods have made significant strides in advancing various visual tasks. The central idea of learning a data encoder that is robust to data distortions/augmentations is straightforward yet highly effective. Although many studies have demonstrated the empirical success of various learning methods, the resulting learned representations can exhibit instability and hinder downstream performance. In this study, we analyze discriminative self-supervised methods from a causal perspective to explain these unstable behaviors and propose solutions to overcome them. Our approach draws inspiration from prior works that empirically demonstrate the ability of discriminative self-supervised methods to demix ground truth causal sources to some extent. Unlike previous work on causality-empowered representation learning, we do not apply our solutions during the training process but rather during the inference process to improve time efficiency. Through experiments on both controlled image datasets and realistic image datasets, we show that our proposed solutions, which involve tempering a linear transformation with controlled synthetic data, are effective in addressing these issues.Comment: ICCV 2023 accepted pape

Deformable Capsules for Object Detection

In this study, we introduce a new family of capsule networks, deformable capsules (DeformCaps), to address a very important problem in computer vision: object detection. We propose two new algorithms associated with our DeformCaps: a novel capsule structure (SplitCaps), and a novel dynamic routing algorithm (SE-Routing), which balance computational efficiency with the need for modeling a large number of objects and classes, which have never been achieved with capsule networks before. We demonstrate that the proposed methods allow capsules to efficiently scale-up to large-scale computer vision tasks for the first time, and create the first-ever capsule network for object detection in the literature. Our proposed architecture is a one-stage detection framework and obtains results on MS COCO which are on-par with state-of-the-art one-stage CNN-based methods, while producing fewer false positive detections, generalizing to unusual poses/viewpoints of objects