No Arabic abstract
Structured-output learning is a challenging problem; particularly so because of the difficulty in obtaining large datasets of fully labelled instances for training. In this paper we try to overcome this difficulty by presenting a multi-utility learning framework for structured prediction that can learn from training instances with different forms of supervision. We propose a unified technique for inferring the loss functions most suitable for quantifying the consistency of solutions with the given weak annotation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on the challenging semantic image segmentation problem for which a wide variety of annotations can be used. For instance, the popular training datasets for semantic segmentation are composed of images with hard-to-generate full pixel labellings, as well as images with easy-to-obtain weak annotations, such as bounding boxes around objects, or image-level labels that specify which object categories are present in an image. Experimental evaluation shows that the use of annotation-specific loss functions dramatically improves segmentation accuracy compared to the baseline system where only one type of weak annotation is used.
Template 3D shapes are useful for many tasks in graphics and vision, including fitting observation data, analyzing shape collections, and transferring shape attributes. Because of the variety of geometry and topology of real-world shapes, previous methods generally use a library of hand-made templates. In this paper, we investigate learning a general shape template from data. To allow for widely varying geometry and topology, we choose an implicit surface representation based on composition of local shape elements. While long known to computer graphics, this representation has not yet been explored in the context of machine learning for vision. We show that structured implicit functions are suitable for learning and allow a network to smoothly and simultaneously fit multiple classes of shapes. The learned shape template supports applications such as shape exploration, correspondence, abstraction, interpolation, and semantic segmentation from an RGB image.
We consider a model-agnostic solution to the problem of Multi-Domain Learning (MDL) for multi-modal applications. Many existing MDL techniques are model-dependent solutions which explicitly require nontrivial architectural changes to construct domain-specific modules. Thus, properly applying these MDL techniques for new problems with well-established models, e.g. U-Net for semantic segmentation, may demand various low-level implementation efforts. In this paper, given emerging multi-modal data (e.g., various structural neuroimaging modalities), we aim to enable MDL purely algorithmically so that widely used neural networks can trivially achieve MDL in a model-independent manner. To this end, we consider a weighted loss function and extend it to an effective procedure by employing techniques from the recently active area of learning-to-learn (meta-learning). Specifically, we take inner-loop gradient steps to dynamically estimate posterior distributions over the hyperparameters of our loss function. Thus, our method is model-agnostic, requiring no additional model parameters and no network architecture changes; instead, only a few efficient algorithmic modifications are needed to improve performance in MDL. We demonstrate our solution to a fitting problem in medical imaging, specifically, in the automatic segmentation of white matter hyperintensity (WMH). We look at two neuroimaging modalities (T1-MR and FLAIR) with complementary information fitting for our problem.
Computational color constancy that requires esti- mation of illuminant colors of images is a fundamental yet active problem in computer vision, which can be formulated into a regression problem. To learn a robust regressor for color constancy, obtaining meaningful imagery features and capturing latent correlations across output variables play a vital role. In this work, we introduce a novel deep structured-output regression learning framework to achieve both goals simultaneously. By borrowing the power of deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) originally designed for visual recognition, the proposed framework can automatically discover strong features for white balancing over different illumination conditions and learn a multi-output regressor beyond underlying relationships between features and targets to find the complex interdependence of dif- ferent dimensions of target variables. Experiments on two public benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance in comparison with the state-of-the-art approaches.
Convolutional neural network-based approaches for semantic segmentation rely on supervision with pixel-level ground truth, but may not generalize well to unseen image domains. As the labeling process is tedious and labor intensive, developing algorithms that can adapt source ground truth labels to the target domain is of great interest. In this paper, we propose an adversarial learning method for domain adaptation in the context of semantic segmentation. Considering semantic segmentations as structured outputs that contain spatial similarities between the source and target domains, we adopt adversarial learning in the output space. To further enhance the adapted model, we construct a multi-level adversarial network to effectively perform output space domain adaptation at different feature levels. Extensive experiments and ablation study are conducted under various domain adaptation settings, including synthetic-to-real and cross-city scenarios. We show that the proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and visual quality.
While deep learning succeeds in a wide range of tasks, it highly depends on the massive collection of annotated data which is expensive and time-consuming. To lower the cost of data annotation, active learning has been proposed to interactively query an oracle to annotate a small proportion of informative samples in an unlabeled dataset. Inspired by the fact that the samples with higher loss are usually more informative to the model than the samples with lower loss, in this paper we present a novel deep active learning approach that queries the oracle for data annotation when the unlabeled sample is believed to incorporate high loss. The core of our approach is a measurement Temporal Output Discrepancy (TOD) that estimates the sample loss by evaluating the discrepancy of outputs given by models at different optimization steps. Our theoretical investigation shows that TOD lower-bounds the accumulated sample loss thus it can be used to select informative unlabeled samples. On basis of TOD, we further develop an effective unlabeled data sampling strategy as well as an unsupervised learning criterion that enhances model performance by incorporating the unlabeled data. Due to the simplicity of TOD, our active learning approach is efficient, flexible, and task-agnostic. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performances than the state-of-the-art active learning methods on image classification and semantic segmentation tasks.