This paper presents a novel yet intuitive approach to unsupervised feature learning. Inspired by the human visual system, we explore whether low-level motion-based grouping cues can be used to learn an effective visual representation. Specifically, we use unsupervised motion-based segmentation on videos to obtain segments, which we use as 'pseudo ground truth' to train a convolutional network to segment objects from a single frame. Given the extensive evidence that motion plays a key role in the development of the human visual system, we hope that this straightforward approach to unsupervised learning will be more effective than cleverly designed 'pretext' tasks studied in the literature. Indeed, our extensive experiments show that this is the case. When used for transfer learning on object detection, our representation significantly outperforms previous unsupervised approaches across multiple settings, especially when training data for the target task is scarce.
Classical unsupervised representation learning approaches, such as autoencoders @cite_39 @cite_7 and denoising autoencoders @cite_59 , attempt to learn feature representations from which the original image can be decoded with a low error. An alternative to reconstruction-based objectives is to train generative models of images using generative adversarial networks @cite_18 . These models can be extended to produce good feature representations by training jointly with image encoders @cite_37 @cite_11 . However, to generate realistic images, these models must pay significant attention to low-level details while potentially ignoring higher-level semantics.
@cite_18 @cite_37 @cite_7 @cite_39 @cite_59 @cite_11
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Previous work has shown that the difficulties in learning deep generative or discriminative models can be overcome by an initial unsupervised learning step that maps inputs to useful intermediate representations. We introduce and motivate a new training principle for unsupervised learning of a representation based on the idea of making the learned representations robust to partial corruption of the input pattern. This approach can be used to train autoencoders, and these denoising autoencoders can be stacked to initialize deep architectures. The algorithm can be motivated from a manifold learning and information theoretic perspective or from a generative model perspective. Comparative experiments clearly show the surprising advantage of corrupting the input of autoencoders on a pattern classification benchmark suite. We present a method for transferring neural representations from label-rich source domains to unlabeled target domains. Recent adversarial methods proposed for this task learn to align features across domains by fooling a special domain critic network. However, a drawback of this approach is that the critic simply labels the generated features as in-domain or not, without considering the boundaries between classes. This can lead to ambiguous features being generated near class boundaries, reducing target classification accuracy. We propose a novel approach, Adversarial Dropout Regularization (ADR), to encourage the generator to output more discriminative features for the target domain. Our key idea is to replace the critic with one that detects non-discriminative features, using dropout on the classifier network. The generator then learns to avoid these areas of the feature space and thus creates better features. We apply our ADR approach to the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation for image classification and semantic segmentation tasks, and demonstrate significant improvement over the state of the art. We also show that our approach can be used to train Generative Adversarial Networks for semi-supervised learning. We present a method for transferring neural representations from label-rich source domains to unlabeled target domains. Recent adversarial methods proposed for this task learn to align features across domains by fooling a special domain critic network. However, a drawback of this approach is that the critic simply labels the generated features as in-domain or not, without considering the boundaries between classes. This can lead to ambiguous features being generated near class boundaries, reducing target classification accuracy. We propose a novel approach, Adversarial Dropout Regularization (ADR), to encourage the generator to output more discriminative features for the target domain. Our key idea is to replace the critic with one that detects non-discriminative features, using dropout on the classifier network. The generator then learns to avoid these areas of the feature space and thus creates better features. We apply our ADR approach to the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation for image classification and semantic segmentation tasks, and demonstrate significant improvement over the state of the art. We also show that our approach can be used to train Generative Adversarial Networks for semi-supervised learning. In this work we propose a novel model-based deep convolutional autoencoder that addresses the highly challenging problem of reconstructing a 3D human face from a single in-the-wild color image. To this end, we combine a convolutional encoder network with an expert-designed generative model that serves as decoder. The core innovation is the differentiable parametric decoder that encapsulates image formation analytically based on a generative model. Our decoder takes as input a code vector with exactly defined semantic meaning that encodes detailed face pose, shape, expression, skin reflectance and scene illumination. Due to this new way of combining CNN-based with model-based face reconstruction, the CNN-based encoder learns to extract semantically meaningful parameters from a single monocular input image. For the first time, a CNN encoder and an expert-designed generative model can be trained end-to-end in an unsupervised manner, which renders training on very large (unlabeled) real world data feasible. The obtained reconstructions compare favorably to current state-of-the-art approaches in terms of quality and richness of representation.