Stability and Expressiveness of Deep Generative Models

In den letzten Jahren hat Deep Learning sowohl das maschinelle Lernen als auch die maschinelle Bildverarbeitung revolutioniert. Viele klassische Computer Vision-Aufgaben, wie z.B. die Objekterkennung und semantische Segmentierung, die traditionell sehr anspruchsvoll waren, können nun mit Hilfe von überwachten Deep Learning-Techniken gelöst werden. Überwachtes Lernen ist ein mächtiges Werkzeug, wenn annotierte Daten verfügbar sind und die betrachtete Aufgabe eine eindeutige Lösung hat. Diese Bedingungen sind allerdings nicht immer erfüllt. Ein vielversprechender Ansatz ist in diesem Fall die generative Modellierung. Im Gegensatz zu rein diskriminativen Modellen können generative Modelle mit Unsicherheiten umgehen und leistungsfähige Modelle lernen, auch wenn keine annotierten Trainingsdaten verfügbar sind. Obwohl aktuelle Ansätze zur generativen Modellierung vielversprechende Ergebnisse erzielen, beeinträchtigen zwei Aspekte ihre Expressivität: (i) Einige der erfolgreichsten Ansätze zur Modellierung von Bilddaten werden nicht mehr mit Hilfe von Optimierungsalgorithmen trainiert, sondern mit Algorithmen, deren Dynamik bisher nicht gut verstanden wurde. (ii) Generative Modelle sind oft durch den Speicherbedarf der Ausgaberepräsentation begrenzt. In dieser Arbeit gehen wir auf beide Probleme ein: Im ersten Teil der Arbeit stellen wir eine Theorie vor, die es erlaubt, die Trainingsdynamik von Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), einem der vielversprechendsten Ansätze zur generativen Modellierung, besser zu verstehen. Wir nähern uns dieser Problemstellung, indem wir minimale Beispielprobleme des GAN-Trainings vorstellen, die analytisch verstanden werden können. Anschließend erhöhen wir schrittweise die Komplexität dieser Beispiele. Dadurch gewinnen wir neue Einblicke in die Trainingsdynamik von GANs und leiten neue Regularisierer her, die auch für allgemeine GANs sehr gut funktionieren. Insbesondere ermöglichen unsere neuen Regularisierer erstmals, ein GAN mit einer Auflösung von einem Megapixel zu trainieren, ohne dass wir die Auflösung der Trainingsverteilung schrittweise erhöhen müssen. Im zweiten Teil dieser Arbeit betrachten wir Ausgaberepräsentationen für generative Modelle in 3D und für 3D-Rekonstruktionstechniken. Durch die Einführung von impliziten Repräsentationen sind wir in der Lage, viele Techniken, die in 2D funktionieren, auf den 3D-Bereich auszudehnen ohne ihre Expressivität einzuschränken.In recent years, deep learning has revolutionized both machine learning and computer vision. Many classical computer vision tasks (e.g. object detection and semantic segmentation), which traditionally were very challenging, can now be solved using supervised deep learning techniques. While supervised learning is a powerful tool when labeled data is available and the task under consideration has a well-defined output, these conditions are not always satisfied. One promising approach in this case is given by generative modeling. In contrast to purely discriminative models, generative models can deal with uncertainty and learn powerful models even when labeled training data is not available. However, while current approaches to generative modeling achieve promising results, they suffer from two aspects that limit their expressiveness: (i) some of the most successful approaches to modeling image data are no longer trained using optimization algorithms, but instead employ algorithms whose dynamics are not well understood and (ii) generative models are often limited by the memory requirements of the output representation. We address both problems in this thesis: in the first part we introduce a theory which enables us to better understand the training dynamics of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), one of the most promising approaches to generative modeling. We tackle this problem by introducing minimal example problems of GAN training which can be understood analytically. Subsequently, we gradually increase the complexity of these examples. By doing so, we gain new insights into the training dynamics of GANs and derive new regularizers that also work well for general GANs. Our new regularizers enable us - for the first time - to train a GAN at one megapixel resolution without having to gradually increase the resolution of the training distribution. In the second part of this thesis we consider output representations in 3D for generative models and 3D reconstruction techniques. By introducing implicit representations to deep learning, we are able to extend many techniques that work in 2D to the 3D domain without sacrificing their expressiveness

Augmented Reality Meets Computer Vision : Efficient Data Generation for Urban Driving Scenes

The success of deep learning in computer vision is based on availability of large annotated datasets. To lower the need for hand labeled images, virtually rendered 3D worlds have recently gained popularity. Creating realistic 3D content is challenging on its own and requires significant human effort. In this work, we propose an alternative paradigm which combines real and synthetic data for learning semantic instance segmentation and object detection models. Exploiting the fact that not all aspects of the scene are equally important for this task, we propose to augment real-world imagery with virtual objects of the target category. Capturing real-world images at large scale is easy and cheap, and directly provides real background appearances without the need for creating complex 3D models of the environment. We present an efficient procedure to augment real images with virtual objects. This allows us to create realistic composite images which exhibit both realistic background appearance and a large number of complex object arrangements. In contrast to modeling complete 3D environments, our augmentation approach requires only a few user interactions in combination with 3D shapes of the target object. Through extensive experimentation, we conclude the right set of parameters to produce augmented data which can maximally enhance the performance of instance segmentation models. Further, we demonstrate the utility of our approach on training standard deep models for semantic instance segmentation and object detection of cars in outdoor driving scenes. We test the models trained on our augmented data on the KITTI 2015 dataset, which we have annotated with pixel-accurate ground truth, and on Cityscapes dataset. Our experiments demonstrate that models trained on augmented imagery generalize better than those trained on synthetic data or models trained on limited amount of annotated real data

Which Training Methods for GANs do actually Converge?

Recent work has shown local convergence of GAN training for absolutely continuous data and generator distributions. In this paper, we show that the requirement of absolute continuity is necessary: we describe a simple yet prototypical counterexample showing that in the more realistic case of distributions that are not absolutely continuous, unregularized GAN training is not always convergent. Furthermore, we discuss regularization strategies that were recently proposed to stabilize GAN training. Our analysis shows that GAN training with instance noise or zero-centered gradient penalties converges. On the other hand, we show that Wasserstein-GANs and WGAN-GP with a finite number of discriminator updates per generator update do not always converge to the equilibrium point. We discuss these results, leading us to a new explanation for the stability problems of GAN training. Based on our analysis, we extend our convergence results to more general GANs and prove local convergence for simplified gradient penalties even if the generator and data distribution lie on lower dimensional manifolds. We find these penalties to work well in practice and use them to learn high-resolution generative image models for a variety of datasets with little hyperparameter tuning.Comment: conferenc

Learning Neural Light Transport

In recent years, deep generative models have gained significance due to their ability to synthesize natural-looking images with applications ranging from virtual reality to data augmentation for training computer vision models. While existing models are able to faithfully learn the image distribution of the training set, they often lack controllability as they operate in 2D pixel space and do not model the physical image formation process. In this work, we investigate the importance of 3D reasoning for photorealistic rendering. We present an approach for learning light transport in static and dynamic 3D scenes using a neural network with the goal of predicting photorealistic images. In contrast to existing approaches that operate in the 2D image domain, our approach reasons in both 3D and 2D space, thus enabling global illumination effects and manipulation of 3D scene geometry. Experimentally, we find that our model is able to produce photorealistic renderings of static and dynamic scenes. Moreover, it compares favorably to baselines which combine path tracing and image denoising at the same computational budget.Comment: 31 pages, 17 figure

Towards Unsupervised Learning of Generative Models for 3D Controllable Image Synthesis

In recent years, Generative Adversarial Networks have achieved impressive results in photorealistic image synthesis. This progress nurtures hopes that one day the classical rendering pipeline can be replaced by efficient models that are learned directly from images. However, current image synthesis models operate in the 2D domain where disentangling 3D properties such as camera viewpoint or object pose is challenging. Furthermore, they lack an interpretable and controllable representation. Our key hypothesis is that the image generation process should be modeled in 3D space as the physical world surrounding us is intrinsically three-dimensional. We define the new task of 3D controllable image synthesis and propose an approach for solving it by reasoning both in 3D space and in the 2D image domain. We demonstrate that our model is able to disentangle latent 3D factors of simple multi-object scenes in an unsupervised fashion from raw images. Compared to pure 2D baselines, it allows for synthesizing scenes that are consistent wrt. changes in viewpoint or object pose. We further evaluate various 3D representations in terms of their usefulness for this challenging task.Comment: CVPR 202

Differentiable Volumetric Rendering: Learning Implicit 3D Representations without 3D Supervision

Learning-based 3D reconstruction methods have shown impressive results. However, most methods require 3D supervision which is often hard to obtain for real-world datasets. Recently, several works have proposed differentiable rendering techniques to train reconstruction models from RGB images. Unfortunately, these approaches are currently restricted to voxel- and mesh-based representations, suffering from discretization or low resolution. In this work, we propose a differentiable rendering formulation for implicit shape and texture representations. Implicit representations have recently gained popularity as they represent shape and texture continuously. Our key insight is that depth gradients can be derived analytically using the concept of implicit differentiation. This allows us to learn implicit shape and texture representations directly from RGB images. We experimentally show that our single-view reconstructions rival those learned with full 3D supervision. Moreover, we find that our method can be used for multi-view 3D reconstruction, directly resulting in watertight meshes