In this work we propose a structured prediction technique that combines the
virtues of Gaussian Conditional Random Fields (G-CRF) with Deep Learning: (a)
our structured prediction task has a unique global optimum that is obtained
exactly from the solution of a linear system (b) the gradients of our model
parameters are analytically computed using closed form expressions, in contrast
to the memory-demanding contemporary deep structured prediction approaches that
rely on back-propagation-through-time, (c) our pairwise terms do not have to be
simple hand-crafted expressions, as in the line of works building on the
DenseCRF, but can rather be `discovered' from data through deep architectures,
and (d) out system can trained in an end-to-end manner. Building on standard
tools from numerical analysis we develop very efficient algorithms for
inference and learning, as well as a customized technique adapted to the
semantic segmentation task. This efficiency allows us to explore more
sophisticated architectures for structured prediction in deep learning: we
introduce multi-resolution architectures to couple information across scales in
a joint optimization framework, yielding systematic improvements. We
demonstrate the utility of our approach on the challenging VOC PASCAL 2012
image segmentation benchmark, showing substantial improvements over strong
baselines. We make all of our code and experiments available at
{https://github.com/siddharthachandra/gcrf}Comment: Our code is available at https://github.com/siddharthachandra/gcr