September 8, 2018

Facebook Research at ECCV 2018

By: Meta Research

Computer vision experts are gathering in Munich, Germany this weekend for the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) to present the latest advances in the fields. Research from Facebook will be presented in oral paper and poster sessions. Facebook researchers and engineers will also be organizing and participating in workshops throughout the week.

Facebook research being presented at ECCV 2018

Choose Your Neuron: Incorporating Domain Knowledge through Neuron Importance
Ramprasaath R. Selvaraju, Prithvijit Chattopadhyay, Mohamed Elhoseiny, Tilak Sharma, Dhruv Batra, Devi Parikh and Stefan Lee

Individual neurons in convolutional neural networks supervised for image-level classification tasks have been shown to implicitly learn semantically meaningful concepts ranging from simple textures and shapes to whole or partial objects – forming a “dictionary” of concepts acquired through the learning process. In this work we introduce a simple, efficient zero-shot learning approach based on this observation. Our approach, which we call Neuron Importance-Aware Weight Transfer (NIWT), learns to map domain knowledge about novel “unseen” classes onto this dictionary of learned concepts and then optimizes for network parameters that can effectively combine these concepts – essentially learning classifiers by discovering and composing learned semantic concepts in deep networks. Our approach shows improvements over previous approaches on the CUBirds and AWA2 generalized zero-shot learning benchmarks. We demonstrate our approach on a diverse set of semantic inputs as external domain knowledge including attributes and natural language captions. Moreover by learning inverse mappings, NIWT can provide visual and textual explanations for the predictions made by the newly learned classifiers and provide neuron names. Our code is available at https://github.com/ramprs/neuron-importance-zsl.

ConvNets and ImageNet Beyond Accuracy: Understanding Mistakes and Uncovering Biases
Pierre Stock and Moustapha Cisse

ConvNets and ImageNet have driven the recent success of deep learning for image classification. However, the marked slowdown in performance improvement combined with the lack of robustness of neural networks to adversarial examples and their tendency to exhibit undesirable biases question the reliability of these methods. This work investigates these questions from the perspective of the end-user by using human subject studies and explanations. The contribution of this study is threefold. We first experimentally demonstrate that the accuracy and robustness of ConvNets measured on ImageNet are vastly underestimated. Next, we show that explanations can mitigate the impact of misclassified adversarial examples from the perspective of the end-user. We finally introduce a novel tool for uncovering the undesirable biases learned by a model. These contributions also show that explanations are a valuable tool both for improving our understanding of ConvNets’ predictions and for designing more reliable models.

DDRNet: Depth Map Denoising and Refinement for Consumer Depth Cameras Using Cascaded CNNs
Shi Yan, Chenglei Wu, Lizhen Wang, Feng Xu, Liang An, Kaiwen Guo and Yebin Liu

Consumer depth sensors are more and more popular and come to our daily lives marked by its recent integration in the latest iPhone X. However, they still suffer from heavy noises which dramatically limit their applications. Although plenty of progresses have been made to reduce the noises and boost geometric details, due to the inherent illness and the real-time requirement, the problem is still far from been solved. We propose a cascaded Depth Denoising and Refinement Network (DDRNet) to tackle this problem by leveraging the multi-frame fused geometry and the accompanying high quality color image through a joint training strategy. The classic rendering equation is delicately exploited in our network in an unsupervised manner. Experimental results indicate that our network achieves real-time denoising and refinement on various categories of static and dynamic scenes. Thanks to the well decoupling of the low and high frequency information in the cascaded network, we achieve superior performance over the state-of-the-art techniques.

Deep Clustering for Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features
Mathilde Caron, Piotr Bojanowski, Armand Joulin and Matthijs Douze

Clustering is a class of unsupervised learning methods that has been extensively applied and studied in computer vision. Little work has been done to adapt it to the end-to-end training of visual features on large scale datasets. In this work, we present DeepCluster, a clustering method that jointly learns the parameters of a neural network and the cluster assignments of the resulting features. DeepCluster iteratively groups the features with a standard clustering algorithm, k-means, and uses the subsequent assignments as supervision to update the weights of the network. We apply DeepCluster to the unsupervised training of convolutional neural networks on large datasets like ImageNet and YFCC100M. The resulting model outperforms the current state of the art by a significant margin on all the standard benchmarks.

DeepWrinkles: Accurate and Realistic Clothing Modeling
Zorah Lahner, Daniel Cremers and Tony Tung

We present a novel method to generate accurate and realistic clothing deformation from real data capture. Previous methods for realistic cloth modeling mainly rely on intensive computation of physics-based simulation (with numerous heuristic parameters), while models reconstructed from visual observations typically suffer from lack of geometric details. Here, we propose an original framework consisting of two modules that work jointly to represent global shape deformation as well as surface details with high fidelity. Global shape deformations are recovered from a subspace model learned from 3D data of clothed people in motion, while high frequency details are added to normal maps created using a conditional Generative Adversarial Network whose architecture is designed to enforce realism and temporal consistency. This leads to unprecedented high-quality rendering of clothing deformation sequences, where fine wrinkles from (real) high resolution observations can be recovered. In addition, as the model is learned independently from body shape and pose, the framework is suitable for applications that require retargeting (e.g., body animation). Our experiments show original high quality results with a flexible model. We claim an entirely data-driven approach to realistic cloth wrinkle generation is possible.

Exploring the Limits of Supervised Pretraining
Dhruv Mahajan, Ross Girshick, Vignesh Ramanathan, Kaiming He, Manohar Paluri, Yixuan Li, Ashwin Bharambe and Laurens van der Maaten

State-of-the-art visual perception models for a wide range of tasks rely on supervised pretraining. ImageNet classification is the de facto pretraining task for these models. Yet, ImageNet is now nearly ten years old and is by modern standards “small”. Even so, relatively little is known about the behavior of pretraining with datasets that are multiple orders of magnitude larger. The reasons are obvious: such datasets are difficult to collect and annotate. In this paper, we present a unique study of transfer learning with large convolutional networks trained to predict hashtags on billions of social media images. Our experiments demonstrate that training for large-scale hashtag prediction leads to excellent results. We show improvements on several image classification and object detection tasks, and report the highest ImageNet-1k single-crop, top-1 accuracy to date: 85.4% (97.6% top-5). We also perform extensive experiments that provide novel empirical data on the relationship between large-scale pretraining and transfer learning performance.

Multi-fiber Networks for Video Recognition
Yunpeng Chen, Yannis Kalantidis, Jianshu Li, Shuicheng Yan and Jiashi Feng

In this paper, we aim to reduce the computational cost of spatio-temporal deep neural networks, making them run as fast as their 2D counterparts while preserving state-of-the-art accuracy on video recognition benchmarks. To this end, we present the novel Multi-Fiber architecture that slices a complex neural network into an ensemble of lightweight networks or fibers that run through the network. To facilitate information flow between fibers we further incorporate multiplexer modules and end up with an architecture that reduces the computational cost of 3D networks by an order of magnitude, while increasing recognition performance at the same time. Extensive experimental results show that our multi-fiber architecture significantly boosts the efficiency of existing convolution networks for both image and video recognition tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance on UCF-101, HMDB-51 and Kinetics datasets. Our proposed model requires over 9× and 13× less computations than the I3D [1] and R(2+1)D [2] models, respectively, yet providing higher accuracy.

Graph RCNN for Scene Graph Generation
Jianwei Yang, Jiasen Lu, Stefan Lee, Dhruv Batra and Devi Parikh

We propose a novel scene graph generation model called Graph R-CNN, that is both effective and efficient at detecting objects and their relations in images. Our model contains a Relation Proposal Network (RePN) that efficiently deals with the quadratic number of potential relations between objects in an image. We also propose an attentional Graph Convolutional Network (aGCN) that effectively captures contextual information between objects and relations. Finally, we introduce a new evaluation metric that is more holistic and realistic than existing metrics. We report state-of-the-art performance on scene graph generation as evaluated using both existing and our proposed metrics.

Group Normalization
Yuxin Wu and Kaiming He

Batch Normalization (BN) is a milestone technique in the development of deep learning, enabling various networks to train. However, normalizing along the batch dimension introduces problems — BN’s error increases rapidly when the batch size becomes smaller, caused by inaccurate batch statistics estimation. This limits BN’s usage for training larger models and transferring features to computer vision tasks including detection, segmentation, and video, which require small batches constrained by memory consumption. In this paper, we present Group Normalization (GN) as a simple alternative to BN. GN divides the channels into groups and computes within each group the mean and variance for normalization. GN’s computation is independent of batch sizes, and its accuracy is stable in a wide range of batch sizes. On ResNet-50 trained in ImageNet, GN has 10.6% lower error than its BN counterpart when using a batch size of 2; when using typical batch sizes, GN is comparably good with BN and outperforms other normalization variants. Moreover, GN can be naturally transferred from pre-training to fine-tuning. GN can outperform its BN-based counterparts for object detection and segmentation in COCO, and for video classification in Kinetics, showing that GN can effectively replace the powerful BN in a variety of tasks. GN can be easily implemented by a few lines of code.

NAM: Non-Adversarial Unsupervised Domain Mapping
Yedid Hoshen and Lior Wolf

Several methods were recently proposed for the task of translating images between domains without prior knowledge in the form of correspondences. The existing methods apply adversarial learning to ensure that the distribution of the mapped source domain is indistinguishable from the target domain, which suffers from known stability issues. In addition, most methods rely heavily on “cycle” relationships between the domains, which enforce a one-to-one mapping. In this work, we introduce an alternative method: Non-Adversarial Mapping (NAM), which separates the task of target domain generative modeling from the crossdomain mapping task. NAM relies on a pre-trained generative model of the target domain, and aligns each source image with an image synthesized from the target domain, while jointly optimizing the domain mapping function. It has several key advantages: higher quality and resolution image translations, simpler and more stable training and reusable target models. Extensive experiments are presented validating the advantages of our method.

Memory Aware Synapses: Learning what (not) to forget
Rahaf Aljundi, Francesca Babiloni, Mohamed Elhoseiny, Marcus Rohrbach and Tinne Tuytelaars

Humans can learn in a continuous manner. Old rarely utilized knowledge can be overwritten by new incoming information while important, frequently used knowledge is prevented from being erased. In artificial learning systems, lifelong learning so far has focused mainly on accumulating knowledge over tasks and overcoming catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we argue that, given the limited model capacity and the unlimited new information to be learned, knowledge has to be preserved or erased selectively. Inspired by neuroplasticity, we propose a novel approach for lifelong learning, coined Memory Aware Synapses (MAS). It computes the importance of the parameters of a neural network in an unsupervised and online manner. Given a new sample which is fed to the network, MAS accumulates an importance measure for each parameter of the network, based on how sensitive the predicted output function is to a change in this parameter. When learning a new task, changes to important parameters can then be penalized, effectively preventing important knowledge related to previous tasks from being overwritten. Further, we show an interesting connection between a local version of our method and Hebb’s rule, which is a model for the learning process in the brain. We test our method on a sequence of object recognition tasks and on the challenging problem of learning an embedding for predicting <subject, predicate, object> triplets. We show state-of-the-art performance and, for the first time, the ability to adapt the importance of the parameters based on unlabeled data towards what the network needs (not) to forget, which may vary depending on test conditions.

Object Level Visual Reasoning in Videos
Fabien Baradel, Natalia Neverova, Christian Wolf, Julien Mille and Greg Mori

Human activity recognition is typically addressed by training models to detect key concepts like global and local motion, features related to object classes present in the scene, as well as features related to the global context. The next open challenges in activity recognition require a level of understanding that pushes beyond this, requiring fine distinctions and a detailed comprehension of the interactions between actors and objects in a scene. We propose a model capable of learning to reason about semantically meaningful spatio-temporal interactions in videos. Key to our approach is the choice of performing this reasoning on an object level through the integration of state of the art object instance segmentation networks. This allows the model to learn detailed spatial interactions that exist at a semantic, object-interaction relevant level. We evaluated our method on three standard datasets: the TwentyBN Something-Something dataset, the VLOG dataset and the EPIC Kitchens dataset, and achieve state of the art results on both. Finally, we also show visualizations of the interactions learned by the model, which illustrate object classes and their interactions corresponding to different activity classes.

Predicting Future Instance Segmentation by Forecasting Convolutional Features
Pauline Luc, Camille Couprie, Yann LeCun, Jakob Verbeek

Anticipating future events is an important prerequisite towards intelligent behavior. Video forecasting has been studied as a proxy task towards this goal. Recent work has shown that to predict semantic segmentation of future frames, forecasting at the semantic level is more effective than forecasting RGB frames and then segmenting these. In this paper we consider the more challenging problem of future instance segmentation, which additionally segments out individual objects. To deal with a varying number of output labels per image, we develop a predictive model in the space of fixed-sized convolutional features of the Mask R-CNN instance segmentation model. We apply the “detection head” of Mask R-CNN on the predicted features to produce the instance segmentation of future frames. Experiments show that this approach significantly improves over strong baselines based on optical flow and repurposed instance segmentation architectures.

Recycle-GAN: Unsupervised Video Retargeting
Aayush Bansal, Shugao Ma, Deva Ramanan, Yaser Sheikh

We introduce a data-driven approach for unsupervised video retargeting that translates content from one domain to another while preserving the style native to a domain, i.e., if contents of John Oliver’s speech were to be transferred to Stephen Colbert, then the generated content/speech should be in Stephen Colbert’s style. Our approach combines both spatial and temporal information along with adversarial losses for content translation and style preservation. In this work, we first study the advantages of using spatiotemporal constraints over spatial constraints for effective retargeting. We then demonstrate the proposed approach for the problems where information in both space and time matters such as face-to-face translation, flower-to-flower, wind and cloud synthesis, sunrise and sunset.

Dense Pose Transfer
Natalia Neverova, Rıza Alp Guler and Iasonas Kokkinos

In this work we integrate ideas from surface-based modeling with neural synthesis: we propose a combination of surface-based pose estimation and deep generative models that allows us to perform accurate pose transfer, i.e. synthesize a new image of a person based on a single image of that person and the image of a pose donor. We use a dense pose estimation system that maps pixels from both images to a common surface-based coordinate system, allowing the two images to be brought in correspondence with each other. We inpaint and refine the source image intensities in the surface coordinate system, prior to warping them onto the target pose. These predictions are fused with those of a convolutional predictive module through a neural synthesis module allowing for training the whole pipeline jointly end-to-end, optimizing a combination of adversarial and perceptual losses. We show that dense pose estimation is a substantially more powerful conditioning input than landmark-, or mask-based alternatives, and report systematic improvements over state of the art generators on DeepFashion and MVC datasets.

Value-aware Quantization for Training and Inference of Neural Networks
Eunhyeok Park, Sungjoo Yoo and Peter Vajda

We propose a novel value-aware quantization which applies aggressively reduced precision to the majority of data while separately handling a small amount of large values in high precision, which reduces total quantization errors under very low precision. We present new techniques to apply the proposed quantization to training and inference. The experiments show that our method with 3-bit activations (with 2% of large ones) can give the same training accuracy as full-precision one while offering significant (41.6% and 53.7%) reductions in the memory cost of activations in ResNet-152 and Inception-v3 compared with the state-of-the-art method. Our experiments also show that deep networks such as Inception-v3, ResNet-101 and DenseNet-121 can be quantized for inference with 4-bit weights and activations (with 1% 16-bit data) within 1% top-1 accuracy drop.

Visual Coreference Resolution in Visual Dialog using Neural Module Networks
Satwik Kottur, Jose M. F. Moura, Devi Parikh, Dhruv Batra and Marcus Rohrbach

Visual dialog [11, 41] entails answering a series of questions grounded in an image, using dialog history as context. In addition to the challenges found in visual question answering (VQA) [6], which can be seen as one-round dialog, visual dialog encompasses several more. We focus on one such problem called visual coreference resolution that involves determining which words, typically noun phrases and pronouns, co-refer to the same entity/object instance in an image. This is crucial, especially for pronouns (‘it’), as the dialog agent must first link it to a previous coreference (‘boat’), and only then can rely on the visual grounding of the coreference ‘boat’ to reason about the pronoun ‘it’. Prior work models visual coreference resolution either (a) implicitly via a memory network over history, or (b) at a coarse level for the entire question; and not explicitly at a phrase level of granularity. In this work, we propose a neural module network architecture for visual dialog by introducing two novel modules – Refer and Exclude – that perform explicit, grounded, coreference resolution at a finer word level. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on MNIST Dialog [38], a visually simple yet coreference-wise complex dataset, by achieving near perfect accuracy, and VisDial [11], a large and challenging visual dialog dataset on real images where our model performs competitively, but is more interpretable, grounded, and consistent qualitatively. Our code is publicly available.

Other activities at ECCV 2018

The 2nd Workshop on YouTube-8M Large-Scale Video Understanding
Manohar Paluri, speaker

The 11th Perceptual Organization in Computer Vision (POCV) Workshop on Action, Perception and Organization
Jitendra Malik, Abhinav Gupta and Iasonas Kokkinos, speakers

360° Perception and Interaction Workshop
Shannon Chen, speaker

Anticipating Human Behavior workshop
Abhinav Gupta, speaker

Paper: Joint Future Semantic and Instance Segmentation Prediction
Camille Couprie, Pauline Luc and Jakob Verbeek

Paper: Predicting Future Instance Segmentation by Forecasting Convolutional Features
Pauline Luc, Camille Couprie, Yann LeCun and Jakob Verbeek

First International Workshop On Autonomous Navigation in Unconstrained Environments
Jitendra Malik, speaker

First Workshop on Computer Vision for Fashion, Art and Design
Paper: DesIGN: Design Inspiration from Generative Networks
Othman Sbai, Mohamed Elhoseiny, Antoine Bordes, Yann LeCun and Camille Couprie

Geometry Meets Deep Learning workshop
Iasonas Kokkinos, speaker

PoseTrack Challenge: Articulated People Tracking in the Wild (workshop)
Iasonas Kokkinos, speaker

The Third International Workshop on Egocentric Perception, Interaction and Computing
Abhinav Gupta, speaker

The Third International Workshop on Video Segmentation
Iasonas Kokkinos, organizer

Tutorial on Visual Recognition and Beyond
Georgia Gkioxari, Ross Girshick, Kaiming He, Piotr Dollar, Christoph Feichtenhofer and Natalia Neverova, speakers

Visual Learning and Embodied Agents in Simulation Environment workshop
Jitendra Malik, Dhruv Batra and Abhinav Gupta, speakers
Manolis Savva, organizer

VizWiz Grand Challenge: Answering Visual Questions from Blind People
Devi Parikh, speaker

What is Optical Flow for? workshop
Jitendra Malik and Richard Szeliski, speakers
Laura Sevilla-Lara, organizer

Women in Computer Vision (WiCV) workshop
Ilke Demir, committee
Camille Couprie, mentor

Workshop on Shortcomings in Vision and Language
Dhruv Batra, organizer