To see is to sketch -- free-hand sketching naturally builds ties between human and machine vision. In this paper, we present a novel approach for translating an object photo to a sketch, mimicking the human sketching process. This is an extremely challenging task because the photo and sketch domains differ significantly. Furthermore, human sketches exhibit various levels of sophistication and abstraction even when depicting the same object instance in a reference photo. This means that even if photo-sketch pairs are available, they only provide weak supervision signal to learn a translation model. Compared with existing supervised approaches that solve the problem of D(E(photo)) -> sketch, where E( @math ) and D( @math ) denote encoder and decoder respectively, we take advantage of the inverse problem (e.g., D(E(sketch)) -> photo), and combine with the unsupervised learning tasks of within-domain reconstruction, all within a multi-task learning framework. Compared with existing unsupervised approaches based on cycle consistency (i.e., D(E(D(E(photo)))) -> photo), we introduce a shortcut consistency enforced at the encoder bottleneck (e.g., D(E(photo)) -> photo) to exploit the additional self-supervision. Both qualitative and quantitative results show that the proposed model is superior to a number of state-of-the-art alternatives. We also show that the synthetic sketches can be used to train a better fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval (FG-SBIR) model, effectively alleviating the problem of sketch data scarcity.
 Distinguishing subtle differences in attributes is valuable, yet learning to make visual comparisons remains non-trivial. Not only is the number of possible comparisons quadratic in the number of training images, but also access to images adequately spanning the space of fine-grained visual differences is limited. We propose to overcome the sparsity of supervision problem via synthetically generated images. Building on a state-of-the-art image generation engine, we sample pairs of training images exhibiting slight modifications of individual attributes. Augmenting real training image pairs with these examples, we then train attribute ranking models to predict the relative strength of an attribute in novel pairs of real images. Our results on datasets of faces and fashion images show the great promise of bootstrapping imperfect image generators to counteract sample sparsity for learning to rank. With recent progress in graphics, it has become more tractable to train models on synthetic images, potentially avoiding the need for expensive annotations. However, learning from synthetic images may not achieve the desired performance due to a gap between synthetic and real image distributions. To reduce this gap, we propose Simulated+Unsupervised (S+U) learning, where the task is to learn a model to improve the realism of a simulator's output using unlabeled real data, while preserving the annotation information from the simulator. We develop a method for S+U learning that uses an adversarial network similar to Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), but with synthetic images as inputs instead of random vectors. We make several key modifications to the standard GAN algorithm to preserve annotations, avoid artifacts, and stabilize training: (i) a 'self-regularization' term, (ii) a local adversarial loss, and (iii) updating the discriminator using a history of refined images. We show that this enables generation of highly realistic images, which we demonstrate both qualitatively and with a user study. We quantitatively evaluate the generated images by training models for gaze estimation and hand pose estimation. We show a significant improvement over using synthetic images, and achieve state-of-the-art results on the MPIIGaze dataset without any labeled real data. We present a novel method for real-time continuous pose recovery of markerless complex articulable objects from a single depth image. Our method consists of the following stages: a randomized decision forest classifier for image segmentation, a robust method for labeled dataset generation, a convolutional network for dense feature extraction, and finally an inverse kinematics stage for stable real-time pose recovery. As one possible application of this pipeline, we show state-of-the-art results for real-time puppeteering of a skinned hand-model. We address the task of articulated pose estimation from video sequences. We consider an interactive setting where the initial pose is annotated in the first frame. Our system synthesizes a large number of hypothetical scenes with different poses and camera positions by applying geometric deformations to the first frame. We use these synthetic images to generate a custom labeled training set for the video in question. This training data is then used to learn a regressor (for future frames) that predicts joint locations from image data. Notably, our training set is so accurate that nearest-neighbor (NN) matching on low-resolution pixel features works well. As such, we name our underlying representation “tiny synthetic videos”. We present quantitative results the Friends benchmark dataset that suggests our simple approach matches or exceed state-of-the-art.