52,679 research outputs found
Challenging Common Assumptions in the Unsupervised Learning of Disentangled Representations
The key idea behind the unsupervised learning of disentangled representations
is that real-world data is generated by a few explanatory factors of variation
which can be recovered by unsupervised learning algorithms. In this paper, we
provide a sober look at recent progress in the field and challenge some common
assumptions. We first theoretically show that the unsupervised learning of
disentangled representations is fundamentally impossible without inductive
biases on both the models and the data. Then, we train more than 12000 models
covering most prominent methods and evaluation metrics in a reproducible
large-scale experimental study on seven different data sets. We observe that
while the different methods successfully enforce properties ``encouraged'' by
the corresponding losses, well-disentangled models seemingly cannot be
identified without supervision. Furthermore, increased disentanglement does not
seem to lead to a decreased sample complexity of learning for downstream tasks.
Our results suggest that future work on disentanglement learning should be
explicit about the role of inductive biases and (implicit) supervision,
investigate concrete benefits of enforcing disentanglement of the learned
representations, and consider a reproducible experimental setup covering
several data sets
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric
While it is nearly effortless for humans to quickly assess the perceptual
similarity between two images, the underlying processes are thought to be quite
complex. Despite this, the most widely used perceptual metrics today, such as
PSNR and SSIM, are simple, shallow functions, and fail to account for many
nuances of human perception. Recently, the deep learning community has found
that features of the VGG network trained on ImageNet classification has been
remarkably useful as a training loss for image synthesis. But how perceptual
are these so-called "perceptual losses"? What elements are critical for their
success? To answer these questions, we introduce a new dataset of human
perceptual similarity judgments. We systematically evaluate deep features
across different architectures and tasks and compare them with classic metrics.
We find that deep features outperform all previous metrics by large margins on
our dataset. More surprisingly, this result is not restricted to
ImageNet-trained VGG features, but holds across different deep architectures
and levels of supervision (supervised, self-supervised, or even unsupervised).
Our results suggest that perceptual similarity is an emergent property shared
across deep visual representations.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2018; Code and data available at
https://www.github.com/richzhang/PerceptualSimilarit
Social Fingerprinting: detection of spambot groups through DNA-inspired behavioral modeling
Spambot detection in online social networks is a long-lasting challenge
involving the study and design of detection techniques capable of efficiently
identifying ever-evolving spammers. Recently, a new wave of social spambots has
emerged, with advanced human-like characteristics that allow them to go
undetected even by current state-of-the-art algorithms. In this paper, we show
that efficient spambots detection can be achieved via an in-depth analysis of
their collective behaviors exploiting the digital DNA technique for modeling
the behaviors of social network users. Inspired by its biological counterpart,
in the digital DNA representation the behavioral lifetime of a digital account
is encoded in a sequence of characters. Then, we define a similarity measure
for such digital DNA sequences. We build upon digital DNA and the similarity
between groups of users to characterize both genuine accounts and spambots.
Leveraging such characterization, we design the Social Fingerprinting
technique, which is able to discriminate among spambots and genuine accounts in
both a supervised and an unsupervised fashion. We finally evaluate the
effectiveness of Social Fingerprinting and we compare it with three
state-of-the-art detection algorithms. Among the peculiarities of our approach
is the possibility to apply off-the-shelf DNA analysis techniques to study
online users behaviors and to efficiently rely on a limited number of
lightweight account characteristics
Mostly-Unsupervised Statistical Segmentation of Japanese Kanji Sequences
Given the lack of word delimiters in written Japanese, word segmentation is
generally considered a crucial first step in processing Japanese texts. Typical
Japanese segmentation algorithms rely either on a lexicon and syntactic
analysis or on pre-segmented data; but these are labor-intensive, and the
lexico-syntactic techniques are vulnerable to the unknown word problem. In
contrast, we introduce a novel, more robust statistical method utilizing
unsegmented training data. Despite its simplicity, the algorithm yields
performance on long kanji sequences comparable to and sometimes surpassing that
of state-of-the-art morphological analyzers over a variety of error metrics.
The algorithm also outperforms another mostly-unsupervised statistical
algorithm previously proposed for Chinese.
Additionally, we present a two-level annotation scheme for Japanese to
incorporate multiple segmentation granularities, and introduce two novel
evaluation metrics, both based on the notion of a compatible bracket, that can
account for multiple granularities simultaneously.Comment: 22 pages. To appear in Natural Language Engineerin
Color Constancy Convolutional Autoencoder
In this paper, we study the importance of pre-training for the generalization
capability in the color constancy problem. We propose two novel approaches
based on convolutional autoencoders: an unsupervised pre-training algorithm
using a fine-tuned encoder and a semi-supervised pre-training algorithm using a
novel composite-loss function. This enables us to solve the data scarcity
problem and achieve competitive, to the state-of-the-art, results while
requiring much fewer parameters on ColorChecker RECommended dataset. We further
study the over-fitting phenomenon on the recently introduced version of
INTEL-TUT Dataset for Camera Invariant Color Constancy Research, which has both
field and non-field scenes acquired by three different camera models.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, 3 table
Unsupervised Deep Single-Image Intrinsic Decomposition using Illumination-Varying Image Sequences
Machine learning based Single Image Intrinsic Decomposition (SIID) methods
decompose a captured scene into its albedo and shading images by using the
knowledge of a large set of known and realistic ground truth decompositions.
Collecting and annotating such a dataset is an approach that cannot scale to
sufficient variety and realism. We free ourselves from this limitation by
training on unannotated images.
Our method leverages the observation that two images of the same scene but
with different lighting provide useful information on their intrinsic
properties: by definition, albedo is invariant to lighting conditions, and
cross-combining the estimated albedo of a first image with the estimated
shading of a second one should lead back to the second one's input image. We
transcribe this relationship into a siamese training scheme for a deep
convolutional neural network that decomposes a single image into albedo and
shading. The siamese setting allows us to introduce a new loss function
including such cross-combinations, and to train solely on (time-lapse) images,
discarding the need for any ground truth annotations.
As a result, our method has the good properties of i) taking advantage of the
time-varying information of image sequences in the (pre-computed) training
step, ii) not requiring ground truth data to train on, and iii) being able to
decompose single images of unseen scenes at runtime. To demonstrate and
evaluate our work, we additionally propose a new rendered dataset containing
illumination-varying scenes and a set of quantitative metrics to evaluate SIID
algorithms. Despite its unsupervised nature, our results compete with state of
the art methods, including supervised and non data-driven methods.Comment: To appear in Pacific Graphics 201
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