SeGAN: Segmenting and Generating the Invisible

Objects often occlude each other in scenes; Inferring their appearance beyond their visible parts plays an important role in scene understanding, depth estimation, object interaction and manipulation. In this paper, we study the challenging problem of completing the appearance of occluded objects. Doing so requires knowing which pixels to paint (segmenting the invisible parts of objects) and what color to paint them (generating the invisible parts). Our proposed novel solution, SeGAN, jointly optimizes for both segmentation and generation of the invisible parts of objects. Our experimental results show that: (a) SeGAN can learn to generate the appearance of the occluded parts of objects; (b) SeGAN outperforms state-of-the-art segmentation baselines for the invisible parts of objects; (c) trained on synthetic photo realistic images, SeGAN can reliably segment natural images; (d) by reasoning about occluder occludee relations, our method can infer depth layering.Comment: Accepted to CVPR18 as spotligh

Newtonian Image Understanding: Unfolding the Dynamics of Objects in Static Images

In this paper, we study the challenging problem of predicting the dynamics of objects in static images. Given a query object in an image, our goal is to provide a physical understanding of the object in terms of the forces acting upon it and its long term motion as response to those forces. Direct and explicit estimation of the forces and the motion of objects from a single image is extremely challenging. We define intermediate physical abstractions called Newtonian scenarios and introduce Newtonian Neural Network ($N^3$) that learns to map a single image to a state in a Newtonian scenario. Our experimental evaluations show that our method can reliably predict dynamics of a query object from a single image. In addition, our approach can provide physical reasoning that supports the predicted dynamics in terms of velocity and force vectors. To spur research in this direction we compiled Visual Newtonian Dynamics (VIND) dataset that includes 6806 videos aligned with Newtonian scenarios represented using game engines, and 4516 still images with their ground truth dynamics

Interactron: Embodied Adaptive Object Detection

Over the years various methods have been proposed for the problem of object detection. Recently, we have witnessed great strides in this domain owing to the emergence of powerful deep neural networks. However, there are typically two main assumptions common among these approaches. First, the model is trained on a fixed training set and is evaluated on a pre-recorded test set. Second, the model is kept frozen after the training phase, so no further updates are performed after the training is finished. These two assumptions limit the applicability of these methods to real-world settings. In this paper, we propose Interactron, a method for adaptive object detection in an interactive setting, where the goal is to perform object detection in images observed by an embodied agent navigating in different environments. Our idea is to continue training during inference and adapt the model at test time without any explicit supervision via interacting with the environment. Our adaptive object detection model provides a 11.8 point improvement in AP (and 19.1 points in AP50) over DETR, a recent, high-performance object detector. Moreover, we show that our object detection model adapts to environments with completely different appearance characteristics, and its performance is on par with a model trained with full supervision for those environments. The code is available at: https://github.com/allenai/interactron .Comment: CVPR 202

Complexity of Representation and Inference in Compositional Models with Part Sharing

This paper performs a complexity analysis of a class of serial and parallel compositional models of multiple objects and shows that they enable efficient representation and rapid inference. Compositional models are generative and represent objects in a hierarchically distributed manner in terms of parts and subparts, which are constructed recursively by part-subpart compositions. Parts are represented more coarsely at higher level of the hierarchy, so that the upper levels give coarse summary descriptions (e.g., there is a horse in the image) while the lower levels represents the details (e.g., the positions of the legs of the horse). This hierarchically distributed representation obeys the executive summary principle, meaning that a high level executive only requires a coarse summary description and can, if necessary, get more details by consulting lower level executives. The parts and subparts are organized in terms of hierarchical dictionaries which enables part sharing between different objects allowing efficient representation of many objects. The first main contribution of this paper is to show that compositional models can be mapped onto a parallel visual architecture similar to that used by bio-inspired visual models such as deep convolutional networks but more explicit in terms of representation, hence enabling part detection as well as object detection, and suitable for complexity analysis. Inference algorithms can be run on this architecture to exploit the gains caused by part sharing and executive summary. Effectively, this compositional architecture enables us to perform exact inference simultaneously over a large class of generative models of objects.The second contribution is an analysis of the complexity of compositional models in terms of computation time (for serial computers) and numbers of nodes (e.g., ``neurons") for parallel computers. In particular, we compute the complexity gains by part sharing and executive summary and their dependence on how the dictionary scales with the level of the hierarchy. We explore three regimes of scaling behavior where the dictionary size (i) increases exponentially with the level of the hierarchy, (ii) is determined by an unsupervised compositional learning algorithm applied to real data, (iii) decreases exponentially with scale. This analysis shows that in some regimes the use of shared parts enables algorithms which can perform inference in time linear in the number of levels for an exponential number of objects. In other regimes part sharing has little advantage for serial computers but can enable linear processing on parallel computers.This work was supported by the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines (CBMM), funded by NSF STC award CCF - 1231216 and also by ARO 62250-CS

Human-Machine CRFs for Identifying Bottlenecks in Holistic Scene Understanding

Recent trends in image understanding have pushed for holistic scene understanding models that jointly reason about various tasks such as object detection, scene recognition, shape analysis, contextual reasoning, and local appearance based classifiers. In this work, we are interested in understanding the roles of these different tasks in improved scene understanding, in particular semantic segmentation, object detection and scene recognition. Towards this goal, we "plug-in" human subjects for each of the various components in a state-of-the-art conditional random field model. Comparisons among various hybrid human-machine CRFs give us indications of how much "head room" there is to improve scene understanding by focusing research efforts on various individual tasks

ENTL: Embodied Navigation Trajectory Learner

We propose Embodied Navigation Trajectory Learner (ENTL), a method for extracting long sequence representations for embodied navigation. Our approach unifies world modeling, localization and imitation learning into a single sequence prediction task. We train our model using vector-quantized predictions of future states conditioned on current states and actions. ENTL's generic architecture enables the sharing of the the spatio-temporal sequence encoder for multiple challenging embodied tasks. We achieve competitive performance on navigation tasks using significantly less data than strong baselines while performing auxiliary tasks such as localization and future frame prediction (a proxy for world modeling). A key property of our approach is that the model is pre-trained without any explicit reward signal, which makes the resulting model generalizable to multiple tasks and environments