Learning visual representations with self-supervised learning has become popular in computer vision. The idea is to design auxiliary tasks where labels are free to obtain. Most of these tasks end up providing data to learn specific kinds of invariance useful for recognition. In this paper, we propose to exploit different self-supervised approaches to learn representations invariant to (i) inter-instance variations (two objects in the same class should have similar features) and (ii) intra-instance variations (viewpoint, pose, deformations, illumination, etc). Instead of combining two approaches with multi-task learning, we argue to organize and reason the data with multiple variations. Specifically, we propose to generate a graph with millions of objects mined from hundreds of thousands of videos. The objects are connected by two types of edges which correspond to two types of invariance: "different instances but a similar viewpoint and category" and "different viewpoints of the same instance". By applying simple transitivity on the graph with these edges, we can obtain pairs of images exhibiting richer visual invariance. We use this data to train a Triplet-Siamese network with VGG16 as the base architecture and apply the learned representations to different recognition tasks. For object detection, we achieve 63.2 mAP on PASCAL VOC 2007 using Fast R-CNN (compare to 67.3 with ImageNet pre-training). For the challenging COCO dataset, our method is surprisingly close (23.5 ) to the ImageNet-supervised counterpart (24.4 ) using the Faster R-CNN framework. We also show that our network can perform significantly better than the ImageNet network in the surface normal estimation task.
Our work is also closely related to mid-level patch clustering @cite_51 @cite_32 @cite_22 and unsupervised discovery of semantic classes @cite_37 @cite_46 as we attempt to find reliable clusters in our affinity graph. In addition, the ranking function used in this paper is related to deep metric learning with Siamese architectures @cite_29 @cite_7 @cite_48 @cite_62 @cite_50 .
@cite_37 @cite_62 @cite_22 @cite_7 @cite_48 @cite_29 @cite_32 @cite_50 @cite_46 @cite_51
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Observing that Semantic features learned in an image classification task and Appearance features learned in a similarity matching task complement each other, we build a twofold Siamese network, named SA-Siam, for real-time object tracking. SA-Siam is composed of a semantic branch and an appearance branch. Each branch is a similarity-learning Siamese network. An important design choice in SA-Siam is to separately train the two branches to keep the heterogeneity of the two types of features. In addition, we propose a channel attention mechanism for the semantic branch. Channel-wise weights are computed according to the channel activations around the target position. While the inherited architecture from SiamFC SiamFC allows our tracker to operate beyond real-time, the twofold design and the attention mechanism significantly improve the tracking performance. The proposed SA-Siam outperforms all other real-time trackers by a large margin on OTB-2013 50 100 benchmarks. Observing that Semantic features learned in an image classification task and Appearance features learned in a similarity matching task complement each other, we build a twofold Siamese network, named SA-Siam, for real-time object tracking. SA-Siam is composed of a semantic branch and an appearance branch. Each branch is a similaritylearning Siamese network. An important design choice in SA-Siam is to separately train the two branches to keep the heterogeneity of the two types of features. In addition, we propose a channel attention mechanism for the semantic branch. Channel-wise weights are computed according to the channel activations around the target position. While the inherited architecture from SiamFC [3] allows our tracker to operate beyond real-time, the twofold design and the attention mechanism significantly improve the tracking performance. The proposed SA-Siam outperforms all other real-time trackers by a large margin on OTB-2013 50 100 benchmarks. We introduce an approach to learn discriminative visual representations while exploiting external semantic knowledge about object category relationships. Given a hierarchical taxonomy that captures semantic similarity between the objects, we learn a corresponding tree of metrics (ToM). In this tree, we have one metric for each non-leaf node of the object hierarchy, and each metric is responsible for discriminating among its immediate subcategory children. Specifically, a Mahalanobis metric learned for a given node must satisfy the appropriate (dis)similarity constraints generated only among its subtree members' training instances. To further exploit the semantics, we introduce a novel regularizer coupling the metrics that prefers a sparse disjoint set of features to be selected for each metric relative to its ancestor (supercategory) nodes' metrics. Intuitively, this reflects that visual cues most useful to distinguish the generic classes (e.g., feline vs. canine) should be different than those cues most useful to distinguish their component fine-grained classes (e.g., Persian cat vs. Siamese cat). We validate our approach with multiple image datasets using the WordNet taxonomy, show its advantages over alternative metric learning approaches, and analyze the meaning of attribute features selected by our algorithm. Metric learning aims at finding a distance that approximates a task-specific notion of semantic similarity. Typically, a Mahalanobis distance is learned from pairs of data labeled as being semantically similar or not. In this paper, we learn such metrics in a weakly supervised setting where "bags" of instances are labeled with "bags" of labels. We formulate the problem as a multiple instance learning (MIL) problem over pairs of bags. If two bags share at least one label, we label the pair positive, and negative otherwise. We propose to learn a metric using those labeled pairs of bags, leading to MildML, for multiple instance logistic discriminant metric learning. MildML iterates between updates of the metric and selection of putative positive pairs of examples from positive pairs of bags. To evaluate our approach, we introduce a large and challenging data set, Labeled Yahoo! News, which we have manually annotated and contains 31147 detected faces of 5873 different people in 20071 images. We group the faces detected in an image into a bag, and group the names detected in the caption into a corresponding set of labels. When the labels come from manual annotation, we find that MildML using the bag-level annotation performs as well as fully supervised metric learning using instance-level annotation. We also consider performance in the case of automatically extracted labels for the bags, where some of the bag labels do not correspond to any example in the bag. In this case MildML works substantially better than relying on noisy instance-level annotations derived from the bag-level annotation by resolving face-name associations in images with their captions. This paper introduces a novel method to perform transfer learning across domains and tasks, formulating it as a problem of learning to cluster. The key insight is that, in addition to features, we can transfer similarity information and this is sufficient to learn a similarity function and clustering network to perform both domain adaptation and cross-task transfer learning. We begin by reducing categorical information to pairwise constraints, which only considers whether two instances belong to the same class or not. This similarity is category-agnostic and can be learned from data in the source domain using a similarity network. We then present two novel approaches for performing transfer learning using this similarity function. First, for unsupervised domain adaptation, we design a new loss function to regularize classification with a constrained clustering loss, hence learning a clustering network with the transferred similarity metric generating the training inputs. Second, for cross-task learning (i.e., unsupervised clustering with unseen categories), we propose a framework to reconstruct and estimate the number of semantic clusters, again using the clustering network. Since the similarity network is noisy, the key is to use a robust clustering algorithm, and we show that our formulation is more robust than the alternative constrained and unconstrained clustering approaches. Using this method, we first show state of the art results for the challenging cross-task problem, applied on Omniglot and ImageNet. Our results show that we can reconstruct semantic clusters with high accuracy. We then evaluate the performance of cross-domain transfer using images from the Office-31 and SVHN-MNIST tasks and present top accuracy on both datasets. Our approach doesn't explicitly deal with domain discrepancy. If we combine with a domain adaptation loss, it shows further improvement. We introduce a method that enables scalable image search for learned metrics. Given pairwise similarity and dissimilarity constraints between some images, we learn a Mahalanobis distance function that captures the imagespsila underlying relationships well. To allow sub-linear time similarity search under the learned metric, we show how to encode the learned metric parameterization into randomized locality-sensitive hash functions. We further formulate an indirect solution that enables metric learning and hashing for vector spaces whose high dimensionality make it infeasible to learn an explicit weighting over the feature dimensions. We demonstrate the approach applied to a variety of image datasets. Our learned metrics improve accuracy relative to commonly-used metric baselines, while our hashing construction enables efficient indexing with learned distances and very large databases. Abstract We propose a novel approach to solving the approximate k-nearest neighbor search problem in metric spaces. The search structure is based on a navigable small world graph with vertices corresponding to the stored elements, edges to links between them, and a variation of greedy algorithm for searching. The navigable small world is created simply by keeping old Delaunay graph approximation links produced at the start of construction. The approach is very universal, defined in terms of arbitrary metric spaces and at the same time it is very simple. The algorithm handles insertions in the same way as queries: by finding approximate neighbors for the inserted element and connecting it to them. Both search and insertion can be done in parallel requiring only local information from the structure. The structure can be made distributed. The accuracy of the probabilistic k-nearest neighbor queries can be adjusted without rebuilding the structure. The performed simulation for data in the Euclidean spaces shows that the structure built using the proposed algorithm has small world navigation properties with log 2 ( n ) insertion and search complexity at fixed accuracy, and performs well at high dimensionality. Simulation on a CoPHiR dataset revealed its high efficiency in case of large datasets (more than an order of magnitude less metric computations at fixed recall) compared to permutation indexes. Only 0.03 of the 10 million 208-dimensional vector dataset is needed to be evaluated to achieve 0.999 recall (virtually exact search). For recall 0.93 processing speed 2800 queries s can be achieved on a dual Intel X5675 Xenon server node with Java implementation. This paper presents an unsupervised method for assembling semantic knowledge from a part-of-speech tagged corpus using graph algorithms. The graph model is built by linking pairs of words which participate in particular syntactic relationships. We focus on the symmetric relationship between pairs of nouns which occur together in lists. An incremental cluster-building algorithm using this part of the graph achieves 82 accuracy at a lexical acquisition task, evaluated against WordNet classes. The model naturally realises domain and corpus specific ambiguities as distinct components in the graph surrounding an ambiguous word. The nearestor near-neighbor query problems arise in a large variety of database applications, usually in the context of similarity searching. Of late, there has been increasing interest in building search index structures for performing similarity search over high-dimensional data, e.g., image databases, document collections, time-series databases, and genome databases. Unfortunately, all known techniques for solving this problem fall prey to the of dimensionality." That is, the data structures scale poorly with data dimensionality; in fact, if the number of dimensions exceeds 10 to 20, searching in k-d trees and related structures involves the inspection of a large fraction of the database, thereby doing no better than brute-force linear search. It has been suggested that since the selection of features and the choice of a distance metric in typical applications is rather heuristic, determining an approximate nearest neighbor should su ce for most practical purposes. In this paper, we examine a novel scheme for approximate similarity search based on hashing. The basic idea is to hash the points Supported by NAVY N00014-96-1-1221 grant and NSF Grant IIS-9811904. Supported by Stanford Graduate Fellowship and NSF NYI Award CCR-9357849. Supported by ARO MURI Grant DAAH04-96-1-0007, NSF Grant IIS-9811904, and NSF Young Investigator Award CCR9357849, with matching funds from IBM, Mitsubishi, Schlumberger Foundation, Shell Foundation, and Xerox Corporation. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the VLDB copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Very Large Data Base Endowment. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and or special permission from the Endowment. Proceedings of the 25th VLDB Conference, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1999. from the database so as to ensure that the probability of collision is much higher for objects that are close to each other than for those that are far apart. We provide experimental evidence that our method gives signi cant improvement in running time over other methods for searching in highdimensional spaces based on hierarchical tree decomposition. Experimental results also indicate that our scheme scales well even for a relatively large number of dimensions (more than 50). Given a set @math of @math strings of total length @math , our task is to report the "most relevant"strings for a given query pattern @math . This involves somewhat more advanced query functionality than the usual pattern matching, as some notion of "most relevant" is involved. In information retrieval literature, this task is best achieved by using inverted indexes. However, inverted indexes work only for some predefined set of patterns. In the pattern matching community, the most popular pattern-matching data structures are suffix trees and suffix arrays. However, a typical suffix tree search involves going through all the occurrences of the pattern over the entire string collection, which might be a lot more than the required relevant documents. The first formal framework to study such kind of retrieval problems was given by [Muthukrishnan, 2002]. He considered two metrics for relevance: frequency and proximity. He took a threshold-based approach on these metrics and gave data structures taking @math words of space. We study this problem in a slightly different framework of reporting the top @math most relevant documents (in sorted order) under similar and more general relevance metrics. Our framework gives linear space data structure with optimal query times for arbitrary score functions. As a corollary, it improves the space utilization for the problems in [Muthukrishnan, 2002] while maintaining optimal query performance. We also develop compressed variants of these data structures for several specific relevance metrics.