5,115 research outputs found
Spatio-Temporal Image Boundary Extrapolation
Boundary prediction in images as well as video has been a very active topic
of research and organizing visual information into boundaries and segments is
believed to be a corner stone of visual perception. While prior work has
focused on predicting boundaries for observed frames, our work aims at
predicting boundaries of future unobserved frames. This requires our model to
learn about the fate of boundaries and extrapolate motion patterns. We
experiment on established real-world video segmentation dataset, which provides
a testbed for this new task. We show for the first time spatio-temporal
boundary extrapolation in this challenging scenario. Furthermore, we show
long-term prediction of boundaries in situations where the motion is governed
by the laws of physics. We successfully predict boundaries in a billiard
scenario without any assumptions of a strong parametric model or any object
notion. We argue that our model has with minimalistic model assumptions derived
a notion of 'intuitive physics' that can be applied to novel scenes
SCAN: Learning Hierarchical Compositional Visual Concepts
The seemingly infinite diversity of the natural world arises from a
relatively small set of coherent rules, such as the laws of physics or
chemistry. We conjecture that these rules give rise to regularities that can be
discovered through primarily unsupervised experiences and represented as
abstract concepts. If such representations are compositional and hierarchical,
they can be recombined into an exponentially large set of new concepts. This
paper describes SCAN (Symbol-Concept Association Network), a new framework for
learning such abstractions in the visual domain. SCAN learns concepts through
fast symbol association, grounding them in disentangled visual primitives that
are discovered in an unsupervised manner. Unlike state of the art multimodal
generative model baselines, our approach requires very few pairings between
symbols and images and makes no assumptions about the form of symbol
representations. Once trained, SCAN is capable of multimodal bi-directional
inference, generating a diverse set of image samples from symbolic descriptions
and vice versa. It also allows for traversal and manipulation of the implicit
hierarchy of visual concepts through symbolic instructions and learnt logical
recombination operations. Such manipulations enable SCAN to break away from its
training data distribution and imagine novel visual concepts through
symbolically instructed recombination of previously learnt concepts
Data Driven Discovery in Astrophysics
We review some aspects of the current state of data-intensive astronomy, its
methods, and some outstanding data analysis challenges. Astronomy is at the
forefront of "big data" science, with exponentially growing data volumes and
data rates, and an ever-increasing complexity, now entering the Petascale
regime. Telescopes and observatories from both ground and space, covering a
full range of wavelengths, feed the data via processing pipelines into
dedicated archives, where they can be accessed for scientific analysis. Most of
the large archives are connected through the Virtual Observatory framework,
that provides interoperability standards and services, and effectively
constitutes a global data grid of astronomy. Making discoveries in this
overabundance of data requires applications of novel, machine learning tools.
We describe some of the recent examples of such applications.Comment: Keynote talk in the proceedings of ESA-ESRIN Conference: Big Data
from Space 2014, Frascati, Italy, November 12-14, 2014, 8 pages, 2 figure
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