No Arabic abstract
Searching for small objects in large images is a task that is both challenging for current deep learning systems and important in numerous real-world applications, such as remote sensing and medical imaging. Thorough scanning of very large images is computationally expensive, particularly at resolutions sufficient to capture small objects. The smaller an object of interest, the more likely it is to be obscured by clutter or otherwise deemed insignificant. We examine these issues in the context of two complementary problems: closed-set object detection and open-set target search. First, we present a method for predicting pixel-level objectness from a low resolution gist image, which we then use to select regions for performing object detection locally at high resolution. This approach has the benefit of not being fixed to a predetermined grid, thereby requiring fewer costly high-resolution glimpses than existing methods. Second, we propose a novel strategy for open-set visual search that seeks to find all instances of a target class which may be previously unseen and is defined by a single image. We interpret both detection problems through a probabilistic, Bayesian lens, whereby the objectness maps produced by our method serve as priors in a maximum-a-posteriori approach to the detection step. We evaluate the end-to-end performance of both the combination of our patch selection strategy with this target search approach and the combination of our patch selection strategy with standard object detection methods. Both elements of our approach are seen to significantly outperform baseline strategies.
We present a novel counterfactual framework for both Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) and Open-Set Recognition (OSR), whose common challenge is generalizing to the unseen-classes by only training on the seen-classes. Our idea stems from the observation that the generated samples for unseen-classes are often out of the true distribution, which causes severe recognition rate imbalance between the seen-class (high) and unseen-class (low). We show that the key reason is that the generation is not Counterfactual Faithful, and thus we propose a faithful one, whose generation is from the sample-specific counterfactual question: What would the sample look like, if we set its class attribute to a certain class, while keeping its sample attribute unchanged? Thanks to the faithfulness, we can apply the Consistency Rule to perform unseen/seen binary classification, by asking: Would its counterfactual still look like itself? If ``yes, the sample is from a certain class, and ``no otherwise. Through extensive experiments on ZSL and OSR, we demonstrate that our framework effectively mitigates the seen/unseen imbalance and hence significantly improves the overall performance. Note that this framework is orthogonal to existing methods, thus, it can serve as a new baseline to evaluate how ZSL/OSR models generalize. Codes are available at https://github.com/yue-zhongqi/gcm-cf.
We introduce the task of open-vocabulary visual instance search (OVIS). Given an arbitrary textual search query, Open-vocabulary Visual Instance Search (OVIS) aims to return a ranked list of visual instances, i.e., image patches, that satisfies the search intent from an image database. The term open vocabulary means that there are neither restrictions to the visual instance to be searched nor restrictions to the word that can be used to compose the textual search query. We propose to address such a search challenge via visual-semantic aligned representation learning (ViSA). ViSA leverages massive image-caption pairs as weak image-level (not instance-level) supervision to learn a rich cross-modal semantic space where the representations of visual instances (not images) and those of textual queries are aligned, thus allowing us to measure the similarities between any visual instance and an arbitrary textual query. To evaluate the performance of ViSA, we build two datasets named OVIS40 and OVIS1600 and also introduce a pipeline for error analysis. Through extensive experiments on the two datasets, we demonstrate ViSAs ability to search for visual instances in images not available during training given a wide range of textual queries including those composed of uncommon words. Experimental results show that ViSA achieves an mAP@50 of 21.9% on OVIS40 under the most challenging setting and achieves an mAP@6 of 14.9% on OVIS1600 dataset.
Visual recognition tasks are often limited to dealing with a small subset of classes simply because the labels for the remaining classes are unavailable. We are interested in identifying novel concepts in a dataset through representation learning based on the examples in both labeled and unlabeled classes, and extending the horizon of recognition to both known and novel classes. To address this challenging task, we propose a combinatorial learning approach, which naturally clusters the examples in unseen classes using the compositional knowledge given by multiple supervised meta-classifiers on heterogeneous label spaces. We also introduce a metric learning strategy to estimate pairwise pseudo-labels for improving representations of unlabeled examples, which preserves semantic relations across known and novel classes effectively. The proposed algorithm discovers novel concepts via a joint optimization of enhancing the discrimitiveness of unseen classes as well as learning the representations of known classes generalizable to novel ones. Our extensive experiments demonstrate remarkable performance gains by the proposed approach in multiple image retrieval and novel class discovery benchmarks.
In audio-visual navigation, an agent intelligently travels through a complex, unmapped 3D environment using both sights and sounds to find a sound source (e.g., a phone ringing in another room). Existing models learn to act at a fixed granularity of agent motion and rely on simple recurrent aggregations of the audio observations. We introduce a reinforcement learning approach to audio-visual navigation with two key novel elements: 1) waypoints that are dynamically set and learned end-to-end within the navigation policy, and 2) an acoustic memory that provides a structured, spatially grounded record of what the agent has heard as it moves. Both new ideas capitalize on the synergy of audio and visual data for revealing the geometry of an unmapped space. We demonstrate our approach on two challenging datasets of real-world 3D scenes, Replica and Matterport3D. Our model improves the state of the art by a substantial margin, and our experiments reveal that learning the links between sights, sounds, and space is essential for audio-visual navigation. Project: http://vision.cs.utexas.edu/projects/audio_visual_waypoints.
We tackle the problem of visual search under resource constraints. Existing systems use the same embedding model to compute representations (embeddings) for the query and gallery images. Such systems inherently face a hard accuracy-efficiency trade-off: the embedding model needs to be large enough to ensure high accuracy, yet small enough to enable query-embedding computation on resource-constrained platforms. This trade-off could be mitigated if gallery embeddings are generated from a large model and query embeddings are extracted using a compact model. The key to building such a system is to ensure representation compatibility between the query and gallery models. In this paper, we address two forms of compatibility: One enforced by modifying the parameters of each model that computes the embeddings. The other by modifying the architectures that compute the embeddings, leading to compatibility-aware neural architecture search (CMP-NAS). We test CMP-NAS on challenging retrieval tasks for fashion images (DeepFashion2), and face images (IJB-C). Compared to ordinary (homogeneous) visual search using the largest embedding model (paragon), CMP-NAS achieves 80-fold and 23-fold cost reduction while maintaining accuracy within 0.3% and 1.6% of the paragon on DeepFashion2 and IJB-C respectively.