Large-Scale Unsupervised Object Discovery

Existing approaches to unsupervised object discovery (UOD) do not scale up to large datasets without approximations which compromise their performance. We propose a novel formulation of UOD as a ranking problem, amenable to the arsenal of distributed methods available for eigenvalue problems and link analysis. Extensive experiments with COCO and OpenImages demonstrate that, in the single-object discovery setting where a single prominent object is sought in each image, the proposed LOD (Large-scale Object Discovery) approach is on par with, or better than the state of the art for medium-scale datasets (up to 120K images), and over 37% better than the only other algorithms capable of scaling up to 1.7M images. In the multi-object discovery setting where multiple objects are sought in each image, the proposed LOD is over 14% better in average precision (AP) than all other methods for datasets ranging from 20K to 1.7M images.

Learning to Infer Semantic Parameters for 3D Shape Editing

Many applications in 3D shape design and augmentation require the ability to make specific edits to an objects semantic parameters (e.g., the pose of a persons arm or the length of an airplanes wing) while preserving as much existing details as possible. We propose to learn a deep network that infers the semantic parameters of an input shape and then allows the user to manipulate those parameters. The network is trained jointly on shapes from an auxiliary synthetic template and unlabeled realistic models, ensuring robustness to shape variability while relieving the need to label realistic exemplars. At testing time, edits within the parameter space drive deformations to be applied to the original shape, which provides semantically-meaningful manipulation while preserving the details. This is in contrast to prior methods that either use autoencoders with a limited latent-space dimensionality, failing to preserve arbitrary detail, or drive deformations with purely-geometric controls, such as cages, losing the ability to update local part regions. Experiments with datasets of chairs, airplanes, and human bodies demonstrate that our method produces more natural edits than prior work.

Using Human Psychophysics to Evaluate Generalization in Scene Text Recognition Models

Scene text recognition models have advanced greatly in recent years. Inspired by human reading we characterize two important scene text recognition models by measuring their domains i.e. the range of stimulus images that they can read. The domain specifies the ability of readers to generalize to different word lengths, fonts, and amounts of occlusion. These metrics identify strengths and weaknesses of existing models. Relative to the attention-based (Attn) model, we discover that the connectionist temporal classification (CTC) model is more robust to noise and occlusion, and better at generalizing to different word lengths. Further, we show that in both models, adding noise to training images yields better generalization to occlusion. These results demonstrate the value of testing models till they break, complementing the traditional data science focus on optimizing performance.