Given a natural language query, a phrase grounding system aims to localize mentioned objects in an image. In weakly supervised scenario, mapping between image regions (i.e., proposals) and language is not available in the training set. Previous methods address this deficiency by training a grounding system via learning to reconstruct language information contained in input queries from predicted proposals. However, the optimization is solely guided by the reconstruction loss from the language modality, and ignores rich visual information contained in proposals and useful cues from external knowledge. In this paper, we explore the consistency contained in both visual and language modalities, and leverage complementary external knowledge to facilitate weakly supervised grounding. We propose a novel Knowledge Aided Consistency Network (KAC Net) which is optimized by reconstructing input query and proposal's information. To leverage complementary knowledge contained in the visual features, we introduce a Knowledge Based Pooling (KBP) gate to focus on query-related proposals. Experiments show that KAC Net provides a significant improvement on two popular datasets.
is a method aims at learning a model without heavy manual labeling work. It is widely used in different computer vision tasks. Crandall @cite_33 leverage the class labeling to learn a part-based spatial model without detailed annotation of object location and spatial relationship. Maxime @cite_18 propose to learn the interaction between human and objects purely from action labeling for still images. Recently, Prest @cite_6 apply a deep convolutional neural network and its score maps to address object localization with image level class labels. For phrase grounding task, Rohrbach @cite_0 propose to adopt an attention model which is optimized by learning to reconstruct query's information, and avoids human labeling for object locations for each query in the training set. Based on this, Xiao @cite_38 leverage a continuous attention map and explore detailed structural reconstruction of language modality. Inspired by the success of weakly supervised learning, we propose to apply another visual consistency to further boost performance.
@cite_38 @cite_18 @cite_33 @cite_6 @cite_0
2963042258 1994488211 1552060966 2129947832 2247513039
Given a natural language query, a phrase grounding system aims to localize mentioned objects in an image. In weakly supevised scenario, mapping between image regions (i.e., proposals) and language is not available in the training set. Previous methods address this deficiency by training a grounding system via learning to reconstruct language information contained in input queries from predicted proposals. However, the optimization is solely guided by the reconstruction loss from the language modality, and ignores rich visual information contained in proposals and useful cues from external knowledge. In this paper, we explore the consistency contained in both visual and language modalities, and leverage complementary external knowledge to facilitate weakly supervised grounding. We propose a novel Knowledge Aided Consistency Network (KAC Net) which is optimized by reconstructing input query and proposal's information. To leverage complementary knowledge contained in the visual features, we introduce a Knowledge Based Pooling (KBP) gate to focus on query-related proposals. Experiments show that KAC Net provides a significant improvement on two popular datasets. Object localization is an important computer vision problem with a variety of applications. The lack of large scale object-level annotations and the relative abundance of image-level labels makes a compelling case for weak supervision in the object localization task. Deep Convolutional Neural Networks are a class of state-of-the-art methods for the related problem of object recognition. In this paper, we describe a novel object localization algorithm which uses classification networks trained on only image labels. This weakly supervised method leverages local spatial and semantic patterns captured in the convolutional layers of classification networks. We propose an efficient beam search based approach to detect and localize multiple objects in images. The proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art in standard object localization data-sets with a 8 point increase in mAP scores. In recent years, the performance of object detection has advanced significantly with the evolution of deep convolutional neural networks. However, the state-of-the-art object detection methods still rely on accurate bounding box annotations that require extensive human labeling. Object detection without bounding box annotations, that is, weakly supervised detection methods, are still lagging far behind. As weakly supervised detection only uses image level labels and does not require the ground truth of bounding box location and label of each object in an image, it is generally very difficult to distill knowledge of the actual appearances of objects. Inspired by curriculum learning, this paper proposes an easy-to-hard knowledge transfer scheme that incorporates easy web images to provide prior knowledge of object appearance as a good starting point. While exploiting large-scale free web imagery, we introduce a sophisticated labor-free method to construct a web dataset with good diversity in object appearance. After that, semantic relevance and distribution relevance are introduced and utilized in the proposed curriculum training scheme. Our end-to-end learning with the constructed web data achieves remarkable improvement across most object classes, especially for the classes that are often considered hard in other works. Object localization is an important computer vision problem with a variety of applications. The lack of large scale object-level annotations and the relative abundance of image-level labels makes a compelling case for weak supervision in the object localization task. Deep Convolutional Neural Networks are a class of state-of-the-art methods for the related problem of object recognition. In this paper, we describe a novel object localization algorithm which uses classification networks trained on only image labels. This weakly supervised method leverages local spatial and semantic patterns captured in the convolutional layers of classification networks. We propose an efficient beam search based approach to detect and localize multiple objects in images. The proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art in standard object localization data-sets. Recent advances of deep learning have achieved remarkable performances in various challenging computer vision tasks. Especially in object localization, deep convolutional neural networks outperform traditional approaches based on extraction of data task-driven features instead of hand-crafted features. Although location information of region-of-interests (ROIs) gives good prior for object localization, it requires heavy annotation efforts from human resources. Thus a weakly supervised framework for object localization is introduced. The term "weakly" means that this framework only uses image-level labeled datasets to train a network. With the help of transfer learning which adopts weight parameters of a pre-trained network, the weakly supervised learning framework for object localization performs well because the pre-trained network already has well-trained class-specific features. However, those approaches cannot be used for some applications which do not have pre-trained networks or well-localized large scale images. Medical image analysis is a representative among those applications because it is impossible to obtain such pre-trained networks. In this work, we present a "fully" weakly supervised framework for object localization ("semi"-weakly is the counterpart which uses pre-trained filters for weakly supervised localization) named as self-transfer learning (STL). It jointly optimizes both classification and localization networks simultaneously. By controlling a supervision level of the localization network, STL helps the localization network focus on correct ROIs without any types of priors. We evaluate the proposed STL framework using two medical image datasets, chest X-rays and mammograms, and achieve signiticantly better localization performance compared to previous weakly supervised approaches. Successful methods for visual object recognition typically rely on training datasets containing lots of richly annotated images. Detailed image annotation, e.g. by object bounding boxes, however, is both expensive and often subjective. We describe a weakly supervised convolutional neural network (CNN) for object classification that relies only on image-level labels, yet can learn from cluttered scenes containing multiple objects. We quantify its object classification and object location prediction performance on the Pascal VOC 2012 (20 object classes) and the much larger Microsoft COCO (80 object classes) datasets. We find that the network (i) outputs accurate image-level labels, (ii) predicts approximate locations (but not extents) of objects, and (iii) performs comparably to its fully-supervised counterparts using object bounding box annotation for training. This paper introduces WILDCAT, a deep learning method which jointly aims at aligning image regions for gaining spatial invariance and learning strongly localized features. Our model is trained using only global image labels and is devoted to three main visual recognition tasks: image classification, weakly supervised object localization and semantic segmentation. WILDCAT extends state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Networks at three main levels: the use of Fully Convolutional Networks for maintaining spatial resolution, the explicit design in the network of local features related to different class modalities, and a new way to pool these features to provide a global image prediction required for weakly supervised training. Extensive experiments show that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Visual attention plays a central role in natural and artificial systems to control perceptual resources. The classic artificial visual attention systems uses salient features of the image obtained from the information given by predefined filters. Recently, deep neural networks have been developed for recognizing thousands of objects and autonomously generate visual characteristics optimized by training with large data sets. Besides being used for object recognition, these features have been very successful in other visual problems such as object segmentation, tracking and recently, visual attention. In this work we propose a biologically inspired object classification and localization framework that combines Deep Convolutional Neural Networks with foveal vision. First, a feed-forward pass is performed to obtain the predicted class labels. Next, we get the object location proposals by applying a segmentation mask on the saliency map calculated through a top-down backward pass. The main contribution of our work lies in the evaluation of the performances obtained with different non-uniform resolutions. We were able to establish a relationship between performance and the different levels of information preserved by each of the sensing configurations. The results demonstrate that we do not need to store and transmit all the information present on high-resolution images since, beyond a certain amount of preserved information, the performance in the classification and localization task saturates. We aim to model the top-down attention of a convolutional neural network (CNN) classifier for generating task-specific attention maps. Inspired by a top-down human visual attention model, we propose a new backpropagation scheme, called Excitation Backprop, to pass along top-down signals downwards in the network hierarchy via a probabilistic Winner-Take-All process. Furthermore, we introduce the concept of contrastive attention to make the top-down attention maps more discriminative. We show a theoretic connection between the proposed contrastive attention formulation and the Class Activation Map computation. Efficient implementation of Excitation Backprop for common neural network layers is also presented. In experiments, we visualize the evidence of a model’s classification decision by computing the proposed top-down attention maps. For quantitative evaluation, we report the accuracy of our method in weakly supervised localization tasks on the MS COCO, PASCAL VOC07 and ImageNet datasets. The usefulness of our method is further validated in the text-to-region association task. On the Flickr30k Entities dataset, we achieve promising performance in phrase localization by leveraging the top-down attention of a CNN model that has been trained on weakly labeled web images. Finally, we demonstrate applications of our method in model interpretation and data annotation assistance for facial expression analysis and medical imaging tasks. Training deep learning based video classifiers for action recognition requires a large amount of labeled videos. The labeling process is labor-intensive and time-consuming. On the other hand, large amount of weakly-labeled images are uploaded to the Internet by users everyday. To harness the rich and highly diverse set of Web images, a scalable approach is to crawl these images to train deep learning based classifier, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). However, due to the domain shift problem, the performance of Web images trained deep classifiers tend to degrade when directly deployed to videos. One way to address this problem is to fine-tune the trained models on videos, but sufficient amount of annotated videos are still required. In this work, we propose a novel approach to transfer knowledge from image domain to video domain. The proposed method can adapt to the target domain (i.e. video data) with limited amount of training data. Our method maps the video frames into a low-dimensional feature space using the class-discriminative spatial attention map for CNNs. We design a novel Siamese EnergyNet structure to learn energy functions on the attention maps by jointly optimizing two loss functions, such that the attention map corresponding to a ground truth concept would have higher energy. We conduct extensive experiments on two challenging video recognition datasets (i.e. TVHI and UCF101), and demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed method. We aim to model the top-down attention of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) classifier for generating task-specific attention maps. Inspired by a top-down human visual attention model, we propose a new backpropagation scheme, called Excitation Backprop, to pass along top-down signals downwards in the network hierarchy via a probabilistic Winner-Take-All process. Furthermore, we introduce the concept of contrastive attention to make the top-down attention maps more discriminative. In experiments, we demonstrate the accuracy and generalizability of our method in weakly supervised localization tasks on the MS COCO, PASCAL VOC07 and ImageNet datasets. The usefulness of our method is further validated in the text-to-region association task. On the Flickr30k Entities dataset, we achieve promising performance in phrase localization by leveraging the top-down attention of a CNN model that has been trained on weakly labeled web images. Action classification in still images is an important task in computer vision. It is challenging as the appearances of ac- tions may vary depending on their context (e.g. associated objects). Manually labeling of context information would be time consuming and difficult to scale up. To address this challenge, we propose a method to automatically discover and cluster action concepts, and learn their classifiers from weakly supervised image-sentence corpora. It obtains candidate action concepts by extracting verb-object pairs from sentences and verifies their visualness with the associated images. Candidate action concepts are then clustered by using a multi-modal representation with image embeddings from deep convolutional networks and text embeddings from word2vec. More than one hundred human action concept classifiers are learned from the Flickr 30k dataset with no additional human effort and promising classification results are obtained. We further apply the AdaBoost algorithm to automatically select and combine relevant action concepts given an action query. Promising results have been shown on the PASCAL VOC 2012 action classification benchmark, which has zero overlap with Flickr30k. We introduce a weakly supervised approach for learning human actions modeled as interactions between humans and objects. Our approach is human-centric: We first localize a human in the image and then determine the object relevant for the action and its spatial relation with the human. The model is learned automatically from a set of still images annotated only with the action label. Our approach relies on a human detector to initialize the model learning. For robustness to various degrees of visibility, we build a detector that learns to combine a set of existing part detectors. Starting from humans detected in a set of images depicting the action, our approach determines the action object and its spatial relation to the human. Its final output is a probabilistic model of the human-object interaction, i.e., the spatial relation between the human and the object. We present an extensive experimental evaluation on the sports action data set from [1], the PASCAL Action 2010 data set [2], and a new human-object interaction data set. Multi-label image classification is a fundamental but challenging task in computer vision. Great progress has been achieved by exploiting semantic relations between labels in recent years. However, conventional approaches are unable to model the underlying spatial relations between labels in multi-label images, because spatial annotations of the labels are generally not provided. In this paper, we propose a unified deep neural network that exploits both semantic and spatial relations between labels with only image-level supervisions. Given a multi-label image, our proposed Spatial Regularization Network (SRN) generates attention maps for all labels and captures the underlying relations between them via learnable convolutions. By aggregating the regularized classification results with original results by a ResNet-101 network, the classification performance can be consistently improved. The whole deep neural network is trained end-to-end with only image-level annotations, thus requires no additional efforts on image annotations. Extensive evaluations on 3 public datasets with different types of labels show that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-arts and has strong generalization capability. Analysis of the learned SRN model demonstrates that it can effectively capture both semantic and spatial relations of labels for improving classification performance. Many state-of-the-art approaches for object recognition reduce the problem to a 0-1 classification task. This allows one to leverage sophisticated machine learning techniques for training classifiers from labeled examples. However, these models are typically trained independently for each class using positive and negative examples cropped from images. At test-time, various post-processing heuristics such as non-maxima suppression (NMS) are required to reconcile multiple detections within and between different classes for each image. Though crucial to good performance on benchmarks, this post-processing is usually defined heuristically. We introduce a unified model for multi-class object recognition that casts the problem as a structured prediction task. Rather than predicting a binary label for each image window independently, our model simultaneously predicts a structured labeling of the entire image (Fig. 1). Our model learns statistics that capture the spatial arrangements of various object classes in real images, both in terms of which arrangements to suppress through NMS and which arrangements to favor through spatial co-occurrence statistics. We formulate parameter estimation in our model as a max-margin learning problem. Given training images with ground-truth object locations, we show how to formulate learning as a convex optimization problem. We employ the cutting plane algorithm of (Mach. Learn. 2009) to efficiently learn a model from thousands of training images. We show state-of-the-art results on the PASCAL VOC benchmark that indicate the benefits of learning a global model encapsulating the spatial layout of multiple object classes (a preliminary version of this work appeared in ICCV 2009, , IEEE international conference on computer vision, 2009). In this paper, we propose the Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Network (SAGAN) which allows attention-driven, long-range dependency modeling for image generation tasks. Traditional convolutional GANs generate high-resolution details as a function of only spatially local points in lower-resolution feature maps. In SAGAN, details can be generated using cues from all feature locations. Moreover, the discriminator can check that highly detailed features in distant portions of the image are consistent with each other. Furthermore, recent work has shown that generator conditioning affects GAN performance. Leveraging this insight, we apply spectral normalization to the GAN generator and find that this improves training dynamics. The proposed SAGAN achieves the state-of-the-art results, boosting the best published Inception score from 36.8 to 52.52 and reducing Frechet Inception distance from 27.62 to 18.65 on the challenging ImageNet dataset. Visualization of the attention layers shows that the generator leverages neighborhoods that correspond to object shapes rather than local regions of fixed shape. Most current image categorization methods require large collections of manually annotated training examples to learn accurate visual recognition models. The time-consuming human labeling effort effectively limits these approaches to recognition problems involving a small number of different object classes. In order to address this shortcoming, in recent years several authors have proposed to learn object classifiers from weakly-labeled Internet images, such as photos retrieved by keyword-based image search engines. While this strategy eliminates the need for human supervision, the recognition accuracies of these methods are considerably lower than those obtained with fully-supervised approaches, because of the noisy nature of the labels associated to Web data. In this paper we investigate and compare methods that learn image classifiers by combining very few manually annotated examples (e.g., 1-10 images per class) and a large number of weakly-labeled Web photos retrieved using keyword-based image search. We cast this as a domain adaptation problem: given a few strongly-labeled examples in a target domain (the manually annotated examples) and many source domain examples (the weakly-labeled Web photos), learn classifiers yielding small generalization error on the target domain. Our experiments demonstrate that, for the same number of strongly-labeled examples, our domain adaptation approach produces significant recognition rate improvements over the best published results (e.g., 65 better when using 5 labeled training examples per class) and that our classifiers are one order of magnitude faster to learn and to evaluate than the best competing method, despite our use of large weakly-labeled data sets. We consider the task of weakly supervised one-shot detection. In this task, we attempt to perform a detection task over a set of unseen classes, when training only using weak binary labels that indicate the existence of a class instance in a given example. The model is conditioned on a single exemplar of an unseen class and a target example that may or may not contain an instance of the same class as the exemplar. A similarity map is computed by using a Siamese neural network to map the exemplar and regions of the target example to a latent representation space and then computing cosine similarity scores between representations. An attention mechanism weights different regions in the target example, and enables learning of the one-shot detection task using the weaker labels alone. The model can be applied to detection tasks from different domains, including computer vision object detection. We evaluate our attention Siamese networks on a one-shot detection task from the audio domain, where it detects audio keywords in spoken utterances. Our model considerably outperforms a baseline approach and yields a 42.6 average precision for detection across 10 unseen classes. Moreover, architectural developments from computer vision object detection models such as a region proposal network can be incorporated into the model architecture, and results show that performance is expected to improve by doing so. Deep neural networks have advanced many computer vision tasks, because of their compelling capacities to learn from large amount of labeled data. However, their performances are not fully exploited in semantic image segmentation as the scale of training set is limited, where perpixel labelmaps are expensive to obtain. To reduce labeling efforts, a natural solution is to collect additional images from Internet that are associated with image-level tags. Unlike existing works that treated labelmaps and tags as independent supervisions, we present a novel learning setting, namely dual image segmentation (DIS), which consists of two complementary learning problems that are jointly solved. One predicts labelmaps and tags from images, and the other reconstructs the images using the predicted labelmaps. DIS has three appealing properties. 1) Given an image with tags only, its labelmap can be inferred by leveraging the images and tags as constraints. The estimated labelmaps that capture accurate object classes and boundaries are used as ground truths in training to boost performance. 2) DIS is able to clean tags that have noises. 3) DIS significantly reduces the number of perpixel annotations in training, while still achieves state-ofthe- art performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of DIS, which outperforms an existing bestperforming baseline by 12.6 on Pascal VOC 2012 test set, without any post-processing such as CRF MRF smoothing. We propose augmenting deep neural networks with an attention mechanism for the visual object detection task. As perceiving a scene, humans have the capability of multiple fixation points, each attended to scene content at different locations and scales. However, such a mechanism is missing in the current state-of-the-art visual object detection methods. Inspired by the human vision system, we propose a novel deep network architecture that imitates this attention mechanism. As detecting objects in an image, the network adaptively places a sequence of glimpses of different shapes at different locations in the image. Evidences of the presence of an object and its location are extracted from these glimpses, which are then fused for estimating the object class and bounding box coordinates. Due to lacks of ground truth annotations of the visual attention mechanism, we train our network using a reinforcement learning algorithm with policy gradients. Experiment results on standard object detection benchmarks show that the proposed network consistently outperforms the baseline networks that does not model the attention mechanism.