This paper presents a cost-sensitive active Question-Answering (QA) framework for learning a nine-layer And-Or graph (AOG) from web images. The AOG explicitly represents object categories, poses viewpoints, parts, and detailed structures within the parts in a compositional hierarchy. The QA framework is designed to minimize an overall risk, which trades off the loss and query costs. The loss is defined for nodes in all layers of the AOG, including the generative loss (measuring the likelihood of the images) and the discriminative loss (measuring the fitness to human answers). The cost comprises both the human labor of answering questions and the computational cost of model learning. The cost-sensitive QA framework iteratively selects different storylines of questions to update different nodes in the AOG. Experiments showed that our method required much less human supervision (e.g., labeling parts on 3--10 training objects for each category) and achieved better performance than baseline methods.
Recently, there has been a growing interest in modeling high-level knowledge beyond object detection. @cite_46 @cite_52 mined models for different categories subcategories from web images. @cite_55 constructed a hierarchical taxonomic relationship between categories. @cite_6 @cite_34 @cite_7 @cite_32 formulated the relationships between natural language and visual concepts. @cite_2 further built a Turing test system. @cite_25 modeled the contextual knowledge between objects. Knowledge in these studies was mainly defined upon object-level models ( the affordance and context). In contrast, we explore deep structures within objects. The deep hierarchy of parts provides a more informative understanding of object statuses.
@cite_7 @cite_55 @cite_52 @cite_6 @cite_32 @cite_2 @cite_46 @cite_34 @cite_25
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Understanding the visual relationship between two objects involves identifying the subject, the object, and a predicate relating them. We leverage the strong correlations between the predicate and the hsubj; obji pair (both semantically and spatially) to predict predicates conditioned on the subjects and the objects. Modeling the three entities jointly more accurately reflects their relationships compared to modeling them independently, but it complicates learning since the semantic space of visual relationships is huge and training data is limited, especially for longtail relationships that have few instances. To overcome this, we use knowledge of linguistic statistics to regularize visual model learning. We obtain linguistic knowledge by mining from both training annotations (internal knowledge) and publicly available text, e.g., Wikipedia (external knowledge), computing the conditional probability distribution of a predicate given a (subj, obj) pair. As we train the visual model, we distill this knowledge into the deep model to achieve better generalization. Our experimental results on the Visual Relationship Detection (VRD) and Visual Genome datasets suggest that with this linguistic knowledge distillation, our model outperforms the stateof- the-art methods significantly, especially when predicting unseen relationships (e.g., recall improved from 8.45 to 19.17 on VRD zero-shot testing set). Computers still struggle to understand the interdependency of objects in the scene as a whole, e.g., relations between objects or their attributes. Existing methods often ignore global context cues capturing the interactions among different object instances, and can only recognize a handful of types by exhaustively training individual detectors for all possible relationships. To capture such global interdependency, we propose a deep Variation-structured Re-inforcement Learning (VRL) framework to sequentially discover object relationships and attributes in the whole image. First, a directed semantic action graph is built using language priors to provide a rich and compact representation of semantic correlations between object categories, predicates, and attributes. Next, we use a variation-structured traversal over the action graph to construct a small, adaptive action set for each step based on the current state and historical actions. In particular, an ambiguity-aware object mining scheme is used to resolve semantic ambiguity among object categories that the object detector fails to distinguish. We then make sequential predictions using a deep RL framework, incorporating global context cues and semantic embeddings of previously extracted phrases in the state vector. Our experiments on the Visual Relationship Detection (VRD) dataset and the large-scale Visual Genome dataset validate the superiority of VRL, which can achieve significantly better detection results on datasets involving thousands of relationship and attribute types. We also demonstrate that VRL is able to predict unseen types embedded in our action graph by learning correlations on shared graph nodes. Reasoning about the relationships between object pairs in images is a crucial task for holistic scene understanding. Most of the existing works treat this task as a pure visual classification task: each type of relationship or phrase is classified as a relation category based on the extracted visual features. However, each kind of relationships has a wide variety of object combination and each pair of objects has diverse interactions. Obtaining sufficient training samples for all possible relationship categories is difficult and expensive. In this work, we propose a natural language guided framework to tackle this problem. We propose to use a generic bi-directional recurrent neural network to predict the semantic connection between the participating objects in the relationship from the aspect of natural language. The proposed simple method achieves the state-of-the-art on the Visual Relationship Detection (VRD) and Visual Genome datasets, especially when predicting unseen relationships (e.g. recall improved from 76.42 to 89.79 on VRD zero-shot testing set). The recent development of fast depth map fusion technique enables the realtime, detailed scene reconstruction using commodity depth camera, making the indoor scene understanding more possible than ever. To address the specific challenges in object analysis at subscene level, this work proposes a data-driven approach to modeling contextual information covering both intra-object part relations and inter-object object layouts. Our method combines the detection of individual objects and object groups within the same framework, enabling contextual analysis without knowing the objects in the scene a priori. The key idea is that while contextual information could benefit the detection of either individual objects or object groups, both can contribute to object extraction when objects are unknown.Our method starts with a robust segmentation and partitions a subscene into segments, each of which represents either an independent object or a part of some object. A set of classifiers are trained for both individual objects and object groups, using a database of 3D scene models. We employ the multiple kernel learning (MKL) to learn per-category optimized classifiers for objects and object groups. Finally, we perform a graph matching to extract objects using the classifiers, thus grouping the segments into either an object or an object group. The output is an object-level labeled segmentation of the input subscene. Experiments demonstrate that the unified contextual analysis framework achieves robust object detection and recognition over cluttered subscenes. Graphical abstractDisplay Omitted HighlightsTo address the specific challenges in object analysis at subscene level, this work proposes a data-driven approach to modeling contextual information covering both intra-object part relations and inter-object object layouts.our method combines the detection of individual objects and object groups within the same framework, enabling contextual analysis without knowing objects.The key idea is that while contextual information could benefit the detection of either individual objects or object groups, when object are unknown, both can contribute to object extraction.