9 research outputs found
Regularizing Deep Networks by Modeling and Predicting Label Structure
We construct custom regularization functions for use in supervised training
of deep neural networks. Our technique is applicable when the ground-truth
labels themselves exhibit internal structure; we derive a regularizer by
learning an autoencoder over the set of annotations. Training thereby becomes a
two-phase procedure. The first phase models labels with an autoencoder. The
second phase trains the actual network of interest by attaching an auxiliary
branch that must predict output via a hidden layer of the autoencoder. After
training, we discard this auxiliary branch.
We experiment in the context of semantic segmentation, demonstrating this
regularization strategy leads to consistent accuracy boosts over baselines,
both when training from scratch, or in combination with ImageNet pretraining.
Gains are also consistent over different choices of convolutional network
architecture. As our regularizer is discarded after training, our method has
zero cost at test time; the performance improvements are essentially free. We
are simply able to learn better network weights by building an abstract model
of the label space, and then training the network to understand this
abstraction alongside the original task.Comment: to appear at CVPR 201
Self-Supervised Relative Depth Learning for Urban Scene Understanding
As an agent moves through the world, the apparent motion of scene elements is
(usually) inversely proportional to their depth. It is natural for a learning
agent to associate image patterns with the magnitude of their displacement over
time: as the agent moves, faraway mountains don't move much; nearby trees move
a lot. This natural relationship between the appearance of objects and their
motion is a rich source of information about the world. In this work, we start
by training a deep network, using fully automatic supervision, to predict
relative scene depth from single images. The relative depth training images are
automatically derived from simple videos of cars moving through a scene, using
recent motion segmentation techniques, and no human-provided labels. This proxy
task of predicting relative depth from a single image induces features in the
network that result in large improvements in a set of downstream tasks
including semantic segmentation, joint road segmentation and car detection, and
monocular (absolute) depth estimation, over a network trained from scratch. The
improvement on the semantic segmentation task is greater than those produced by
any other automatically supervised methods. Moreover, for monocular depth
estimation, our unsupervised pre-training method even outperforms supervised
pre-training with ImageNet. In addition, we demonstrate benefits from learning
to predict (unsupervised) relative depth in the specific videos associated with
various downstream tasks. We adapt to the specific scenes in those tasks in an
unsupervised manner to improve performance. In summary, for semantic
segmentation, we present state-of-the-art results among methods that do not use
supervised pre-training, and we even exceed the performance of supervised
ImageNet pre-trained models for monocular depth estimation, achieving results
that are comparable with state-of-the-art methods
Time-Contrastive Networks: Self-Supervised Learning from Video
We propose a self-supervised approach for learning representations and
robotic behaviors entirely from unlabeled videos recorded from multiple
viewpoints, and study how this representation can be used in two robotic
imitation settings: imitating object interactions from videos of humans, and
imitating human poses. Imitation of human behavior requires a
viewpoint-invariant representation that captures the relationships between
end-effectors (hands or robot grippers) and the environment, object attributes,
and body pose. We train our representations using a metric learning loss, where
multiple simultaneous viewpoints of the same observation are attracted in the
embedding space, while being repelled from temporal neighbors which are often
visually similar but functionally different. In other words, the model
simultaneously learns to recognize what is common between different-looking
images, and what is different between similar-looking images. This signal
causes our model to discover attributes that do not change across viewpoint,
but do change across time, while ignoring nuisance variables such as
occlusions, motion blur, lighting and background. We demonstrate that this
representation can be used by a robot to directly mimic human poses without an
explicit correspondence, and that it can be used as a reward function within a
reinforcement learning algorithm. While representations are learned from an
unlabeled collection of task-related videos, robot behaviors such as pouring
are learned by watching a single 3rd-person demonstration by a human. Reward
functions obtained by following the human demonstrations under the learned
representation enable efficient reinforcement learning that is practical for
real-world robotic systems. Video results, open-source code and dataset are
available at https://sermanet.github.io/imitat
Going Deeper into Action Recognition: A Survey
Understanding human actions in visual data is tied to advances in
complementary research areas including object recognition, human dynamics,
domain adaptation and semantic segmentation. Over the last decade, human action
analysis evolved from earlier schemes that are often limited to controlled
environments to nowadays advanced solutions that can learn from millions of
videos and apply to almost all daily activities. Given the broad range of
applications from video surveillance to human-computer interaction, scientific
milestones in action recognition are achieved more rapidly, eventually leading
to the demise of what used to be good in a short time. This motivated us to
provide a comprehensive review of the notable steps taken towards recognizing
human actions. To this end, we start our discussion with the pioneering methods
that use handcrafted representations, and then, navigate into the realm of deep
learning based approaches. We aim to remain objective throughout this survey,
touching upon encouraging improvements as well as inevitable fallbacks, in the
hope of raising fresh questions and motivating new research directions for the
reader
Discovery of Visual Semantics by Unsupervised and Self-Supervised Representation Learning
The success of deep learning in computer vision is rooted in the ability of
deep networks to scale up model complexity as demanded by challenging visual
tasks. As complexity is increased, so is the need for large amounts of labeled
data to train the model. This is associated with a costly human annotation
effort. To address this concern, with the long-term goal of leveraging the
abundance of cheap unlabeled data, we explore methods of unsupervised
"pre-training." In particular, we propose to use self-supervised automatic
image colorization.
We show that traditional methods for unsupervised learning, such as
layer-wise clustering or autoencoders, remain inferior to supervised
pre-training. In search for an alternative, we develop a fully automatic image
colorization method. Our method sets a new state-of-the-art in revitalizing old
black-and-white photography, without requiring human effort or expertise.
Additionally, it gives us a method for self-supervised representation learning.
In order for the model to appropriately re-color a grayscale object, it must
first be able to identify it. This ability, learned entirely self-supervised,
can be used to improve other visual tasks, such as classification and semantic
segmentation. As a future direction for self-supervision, we investigate if
multiple proxy tasks can be combined to improve generalization. This turns out
to be a challenging open problem. We hope that our contributions to this
endeavor will provide a foundation for future efforts in making
self-supervision compete with supervised pre-training.Comment: Ph.D. thesi