Robustness and Generalization via Generative Adversarial Training

While deep neural networks have achieved remarkable success in various computer vision tasks, they often fail to generalize to new domains and subtle variations of input images. Several defenses have been proposed to improve the robustness against these variations. However, current defenses can only withstand the specific attack used in training, and the models often remain vulnerable to other input variations. Moreover, these methods often degrade performance of the model on clean images and do not generalize to out-of-domain samples. In this paper we present Generative Adversarial Training, an approach to simultaneously improve the models generalization to the test set and out-of-domain samples as well as its robustness to unseen adversarial attacks. Instead of altering a low-level pre-defined aspect of images, we generate a spectrum of low-level, mid-level and high-level changes using generative models with a disentangled latent space. Adversarial training with these examples enable the model to withstand a wide range of attacks by observing a variety of input alterations during training. We show that our approach not only improves performance of the model on clean images and out-of-domain samples but also makes it robust against unforeseen attacks and outperforms prior work. We validate effectiveness of our method by demonstrating results on various tasks such as classification, segmentation and object detection.

Augmentation-Interpolative AutoEncoders for Unsupervised Few-Shot Image Generation

We aim to build image generation models that generalize to new domains from few examples. To this end, we first investigate the generalization properties of classic image generators, and discover that autoencoders generalize extremely well to new domains, even when trained on highly constrained data. We leverage this insight to produce a robust, unsupervised few-shot image generation algorithm, and introduce a novel training procedure based on recovering an image from data augmentations. Our Augmentation-Interpolative AutoEncoders synthesize realistic images of novel objects from only a few reference images, and outperform both prior interpolative models and supervised few-shot image generators. Our procedure is simple and lightweight, generalizes broadly, and requires no category labels or other supervision during training.

Self-supervised Learning of Point Clouds via Orientation Estimation

Point clouds provide a compact and efficient representation of 3D shapes. While deep neural networks have achieved impressive results on point cloud learning tasks, they require massive amounts of manually labeled data, which can be costly and time-consuming to collect. In this paper, we leverage 3D self-supervision for learning downstream tasks on point clouds with fewer labels. A point cloud can be rotated in infinitely many ways, which provides a rich label-free source for self-supervision. We consider the auxiliary task of predicting rotations that in turn leads to useful features for other tasks such as shape classification and 3D keypoint prediction. Using experiments on ShapeNet and ModelNet, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art. Moreover, features learned by our model are complementary to other self-supervised methods and combining them leads to further performance improvement.

Coupling Explicit and Implicit Surface Representations for Generative 3D Modeling

We propose a novel neural architecture for representing 3D surfaces, which harnesses two complementary shape representations: (i) an explicit representation via an atlas, i.e., embeddings of 2D domains into 3D; (ii) an implicit-function representation, i.e., a scalar function over the 3D volume, with its levels denoting surfaces. We make these two representations synergistic by introducing novel consistency losses that ensure that the surface created from the atlas aligns with the level-set of the implicit function. Our hybrid architecture outputs results which are superior to the output of the two equivalent single-representation networks, yielding smoother explicit surfaces with more accurate normals, and a more accurate implicit occupancy function. Additionally, our surface reconstruction step can directly leverage the explicit atlas-based representation. This process is computationally efficient, and can be directly used by differentiable rasterizers, enabling training our hybrid representation with image-based losses.

Fine-grained Synthesis of Unrestricted Adversarial Examples

We propose a novel approach for generating unrestricted adversarial examples by manipulating fine-grained aspects of image generation. Unlike existing unrestricted attacks that typically hand-craft geometric transformations, we learn stylistic and stochastic modifications leveraging state-of-the-art generative models. This allows us to manipulate an image in a controlled, fine-grained manner without being bounded by a norm threshold. Our approach can be used for targeted and non-targeted unrestricted attacks on classification, semantic segmentation and object detection models. Our attacks can bypass certified defenses, yet our adversarial images look indistinguishable from natural images as verified by human evaluation. Moreover, we demonstrate that adversarial training with our examples improves performance of the model on clean images without requiring any modifications to the architecture. We perform experiments on LSUN, CelebA-HQ and COCO-Stuff as high resolution datasets to validate efficacy of our proposed approach.

Neural Puppet: Generative Layered Cartoon Characters

We propose a learning based method for generating new animations of a cartoon character given a few example images. Our method is designed to learn from a traditionally animated sequence, where each frame is drawn by an artist, and thus the input images lack any common structure, correspondences, or labels. We express pose changes as a deformation of a layered 2.5D template mesh, and devise a novel architecture that learns to predict mesh deformations matching the template to a target image. This enables us to extract a common low-dimensional structure from a diverse set of character poses. We combine recent advances in differentiable rendering as well as mesh-aware models to successfully align common template even if only a few character images are available during training. In addition to coarse poses, character appearance also varies due to shading, out-of-plane motions, and artistic effects. We capture these subtle changes by applying an image translation network to refine the mesh rendering, providing an end-to-end model to generate new animations of a character with high visual quality. We demonstrate that our generative model can be used to synthesize in-between frames and to create data-driven deformation. Our template fitting procedure outperforms state-of-the-art generic techniques for detecting image correspondences.

Deep Fundamental Matrix Estimation without Correspondences

Estimating fundamental matrices is a classic problem in computer vision. Traditional methods rely heavily on the correctness of estimated key-point correspondences, which can be noisy and unreliable. As a result, it is difficult for these methods to handle image pairs with large occlusion or significantly different camera poses. In this paper, we propose novel neural network architectures to estimate fundamental matrices in an end-to-end manner without relying on point correspondences. New modules and layers are introduced in order to preserve mathematical properties of the fundamental matrix as a homogeneous rank-2 matrix with seven degrees of freedom. We analyze performance of the proposed models using various metrics on the KITTI dataset, and show that they achieve competitive performance with traditional methods without the need for extracting correspondences.

Analytical Studies of Fragmented-Spectrum Multi-Level OFDM-CDMA Technique in Cognitive Radio Networks

In this paper, we present a multi-user resource allocation framework using fragmented-spectrum synchronous OFDM-CDMA modulation over a frequency-selective fading channel. In particular, given pre-existing communications in the spectrum where the system is operating, a channel sensing and estimation method is used to obtain information of subcarrier availability. Given this information, some real-valued multi-level orthogonal codes, which are orthogonal codes with values of ${pm1,pm2,pm3,pm4, ... }$, are provided for emerging new users, i.e., cognitive radio users. Additionally, we have obtained a closed form expression for bit error rate of cognitive radio receivers in terms of detection probability of primary users, CR users sensing time and CR users signal to noise ratio. Moreover, simulation results obtained in this paper indicate the precision with which the analytical results have been obtained in modeling the aforementioned system.