Leveraging physical knowledge described by partial differential equations (PDEs) is an appealing way to improve unsupervised video prediction methods. Since physics is too restrictive for describing the full visual content of generic videos, we introduce PhyDNet, a two-branch deep architecture, which explicitly disentangles PDE dynamics from unknown complementary information. A second contribution is to propose a new recurrent physical cell (PhyCell), inspired from data assimilation techniques, for performing PDE-constrained prediction in latent space. Extensive experiments conducted on four various datasets show the ability of PhyDNet to outperform state-of-the-art methods. Ablation studies also highlight the important gain brought out by both disentanglement and PDE-constrained prediction. Finally, we show that PhyDNet presents interesting features for dealing with missing data and long-term forecasting.
Stony Brook University（石溪大学）；CentraleSupélec（高等电力学院）；INRIA（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；Therapanacea；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）
In this work we introduce Deforming Autoencoders, a generative model for images that disentangles shape from appearance in an unsupervised manner. As in the deformable template paradigm, shape is represented as a deformation between a canonical coordinate system (`template') and an observed image, while appearance is modeled in `canonical', template, coordinates, thus discarding variability due to deformations. We introduce novel techniques that allow this approach to be deployed in the setting of autoencoders and show that this method can be used for unsupervised group-wise image alignment. W…
Large intra-class variation is the result of changes in multiple object characteristics. Images, however, only show the superposition of different variable factors such as appearance or shape. Therefore, learning to disentangle and represent these different characteristics poses a great challenge, especially in the unsupervised case. Moreover, large object articulation calls for a flexible part-based model. We present an unsupervised approach for disentangling appearance and shape by learning parts consistently over all instances of a category. Our model for learning an object representation i…
We study the problem of unsupervised discovery and segmentation of object parts, which, as an intermediate local representation, are capable of finding intrinsic object structure and providing more explainable recognition results. Recent unsupervised methods have greatly relaxed the dependency on annotated data which are costly to obtain, but still rely on additional information such as object segmentation mask or saliency map. To remove such a dependency and further improve the part segmentation performance, we develop a novel approach by disentangling the appearance and shape representations…
In this paper, we present DRANet, a network architecture that disentangles image representations and transfers the visual attributes in a latent space for unsupervised cross-domain adaptation. Unlike the existing domain adaptation methods that learn associated features sharing a domain, DRANet preserves the distinctiveness of each domain's characteristics. Our model encodes individual representations of content (scene structure) and style (artistic appearance) from both source and target images. Then, it adapts the domain by incorporating the transferred style factor into the content factor al…
Exploring the potential of GANs for unsupervised disentanglement learning, this paper proposes a novel GAN-based disentanglement framework with One-Hot Sampling and Orthogonal Regularization (OOGAN). While previous works mostly attempt to tackle disentanglement learning through VAE and seek to implicitly minimize the Total Correlation (TC) objective with various sorts of approximation methods, we show that GANs have a natural advantage in disentangling with an alternating latent variable (noise) sampling method that is straightforward and robust. Furthermore, we provide a brand-new perspective…
Pengcheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；University of Nottingham（诺丁汉大学）
Facial attributes in StyleGAN generated images are entangled in the latent space which makes it very difficult to independently control a specific attribute without affecting the others. Supervised attribute editing requires annotated training data which is difficult to obtain and limits the editable attributes to those with labels. Therefore, unsupervised attribute editing in an disentangled latent space is key to performing neat and versatile semantic face editing. In this paper, we present a new technique termed Structure-Texture Independent Architecture with Weight Decomposition and Orthog…
Heidelberg Collaboratory for Image Processing（海德堡图像处理合作实验室）；Heidelberg University（海德堡大学）
Deep generative models come with the promise to learn an explainable representation for visual objects that allows image sampling, synthesis, and selective modification. The main challenge is to learn to properly model the independent latent characteristics of an object, especially its appearance and pose. We present a novel approach that learns disentangled representations of these characteristics and explains them individually. Training requires only pairs of images depicting the same object appearance, but no pose annotations. We propose an additional classifier that estimates the minimal a…
University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）；Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University（西交利物浦大学）；Duke Kunshan University（昆山杜克大学）
We consider unsupervised cell nuclei segmentation in this paper. Exploiting the recently-proposed unpaired image-to-image translation between cell nuclei images and randomly synthetic masks, existing approaches, e.g., CycleGAN, have achieved encouraging results. However, these methods usually take a two-stage pipeline and fail to learn end-to-end in cell nuclei images. More seriously, they could lead to the lossy transformation problem, i.e., the content inconsistency between the original images and the corresponding segmentation output. To address these limitations, we propose a novel end-to-…
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
Various deep learning models have been developed to segment anatomical structures from medical images, but they typically have poor performance when tested on another target domain with different data distribution. Recently, unsupervised domain adaptation methods have been proposed to alleviate this so-called domain shift issue, but most of them are designed for scenarios with relatively small domain shifts and are likely to fail when encountering a large domain gap. In this paper, we propose DCDA, a novel cross-modality unsupervised domain adaptation framework for tasks with large domain shif…
It is challenging to disentangle an object into two orthogonal spaces of content and style since each can influence the visual observation differently and unpredictably. It is rare for one to have access to a large number of data to help separate the influences. In this paper, we present a novel framework to learn this disentangled representation in a completely unsupervised manner. We address this problem in a two-branch Autoencoder framework. For the structural content branch, we project the latent factor into a soft structured point tensor and constrain it with losses derived from prior kno…
In this work we present an adversarial training algorithm that exploits correlations in video to learn --without supervision-- an image generator model with a disentangled latent space. The proposed methodology requires only a few modifications to the standard algorithm of Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) and involves training with sets of frames taken from short videos. We train our model over two datasets of face-centered videos which present different people speaking or moving the head: VidTIMIT and YouTube Faces datasets. We found that our proposal allows us to split the generator lat…
We propose an unsupervised variational model for disentangling video into independent factors, i.e. each factor's future can be predicted from its past without considering the others. We show that our approach often learns factors which are interpretable as objects in a scene.
Clemson University（克莱姆森大学）；City University of New York（纽约市立大学）
Conventional self-supervised monocular depth prediction methods are based on a static environment assumption, which leads to accuracy degradation in dynamic scenes due to the mismatch and occlusion problems introduced by object motions. Existing dynamic-object-focused methods only partially solved the mismatch problem at the training loss level. In this paper, we accordingly propose a novel multi-frame monocular depth prediction method to solve these problems at both the prediction and supervision loss levels. Our method, called DynamicDepth, is a new framework trained via a self-supervised cy…
The use of well-disentangled representations offers many advantages for downstream tasks, e.g. an increased sample efficiency, or better interpretability. However, the quality of disentangled interpretations is often highly dependent on the choice of dataset-specific hyperparameters, in particular the regularization strength. To address this issue, we introduce DAVA, a novel training procedure for variational auto-encoders. DAVA completely alleviates the problem of hyperparameter selection. We compare DAVA to models with optimal hyperparameters. Without any hyperparameter tuning, DAVA is compe…
Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Network Based Intelligent Computing（山东省网络智能计算重点实验室）；University of Jinan（济南大学）；Jinan, 250022, China（济南市，250022，中国）
Disentanglement is a highly desirable property of representation due to its similarity with human's understanding and reasoning. This improves interpretability, enables the performance of down-stream tasks, and enables controllable generative models. However, this domain is challenged by the abstract notion and incomplete theories to support unsupervised disentanglement learning. We demonstrate the data itself, such as the orientation of images, plays a crucial role in disentanglement and instead of the factors, and the disentangled representations align the latent variables with the action se…
IIIT Delhi（德里印度理工学院）；Bioinformatics Institute, A*STAR（A*STAR生物信息研究所）；Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）
We introduce MGP-VAE (Multi-disentangled-features Gaussian Processes Variational AutoEncoder), a variational autoencoder which uses Gaussian processes (GP) to model the latent space for the unsupervised learning of disentangled representations in video sequences. We improve upon previous work by establishing a framework by which multiple features, static or dynamic, can be disentangled. Specifically we use fractional Brownian motions (fBM) and Brownian bridges (BB) to enforce an inter-frame correlation structure in each independent channel, and show that varying this structure enables one to c…
Xiamen University（厦门大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Huawei Cloud & AI（华为云与AI）
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to address the domain-shift problem between a labeled source domain and an unlabeled target domain. Many efforts have been made to address the mismatch between the distributions of training and testing data, but unfortunately, they ignore the task-oriented information across domains and are inflexible to perform well in complicated open-set scenarios. Many efforts have been made to eliminate the mismatch between the distributions of training and testing data by learning domain-invariant representations. However, the learned representations are usually …
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
We address the unsupervised open domain recognition (UODR) problem, where categories in labeled source domain S is only a subset of those in unlabeled target domain T. The task is to correctly classify all samples in T including known and unknown categories. UODR is challenging due to the domain discrepancy, which becomes even harder to bridge when a large number of unknown categories exist in T. Moreover, the classification rules propagated by graph CNN (GCN) may be distracted by unknown categories and lack generalization capability. To measure the domain discrepancy for asymmetric label spac…
We study the problem of building models that disentangle independent factors of variation. Such models could be used to encode features that can efficiently be used for classification and to transfer attributes between different images in image synthesis. As data we use a weakly labeled training set. Our weak labels indicate what single factor has changed between two data samples, although the relative value of the change is unknown. This labeling is of particular interest as it may be readily available without annotation costs. To make use of weak labels we introduce an autoencoder model and …
CASIA（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Huawei Technology Co., Ltd.（华为技术有限公司）
The cross-sensor gap is one of the challenges that have aroused much research interests in Heterogeneous Face Recognition (HFR). Although recent methods have attempted to fill the gap with deep generative networks, most of them suffer from the inevitable misalignment between different face modalities. Instead of imaging sensors, the misalignment primarily results from facial geometric variations that are independent of the spectrum. Rather than building a monolithic but complex structure, this paper proposes a Pose Aligned Cross-spectral Hallucination (PACH) approach to disentangle the indepen…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Barcelona Supercomputing Center（巴塞罗那超级计算中心）；Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚理工大学）；Microsoft（微软）
This paper introduces an unsupervised framework to extract semantically rich features for video representation. Inspired by how the human visual system groups objects based on motion cues, we propose a deep convolutional neural network that disentangles motion, foreground and background information. The proposed architecture consists of a 3D convolutional feature encoder for blocks of 16 frames, which is trained for reconstruction tasks over the first and last frames of the sequence. A preliminary supervised experiment was conducted to verify the feasibility of proposed method by training the …
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
Current face recognition systems robustly recognize identities across a wide variety of imaging conditions. In these systems recognition is performed via classification into known identities obtained from supervised identity annotations. There are two problems with this current paradigm: (1) current systems are unable to benefit from unlabelled data which may be available in large quantities; and (2) current systems equate successful recognition with labelling a given input image. Humans, on the other hand, regularly perform identification of individuals completely unsupervised, recognising th…
We study the problem of unsupervised physical object discovery. While existing frameworks aim to decompose scenes into 2D segments based off each object's appearance, we explore how physics, especially object interactions, facilitates disentangling of 3D geometry and position of objects from video, in an unsupervised manner. Drawing inspiration from developmental psychology, our Physical Object Discovery Network (POD-Net) uses both multi-scale pixel cues and physical motion cues to accurately segment observable and partially occluded objects of varying sizes, and infer properties of those obje…
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory（劳伦斯利弗莫尔国家实验室）
There are many forms of feature information present in video data. Principle among them are object identity information which is largely static across multiple video frames, and object pose and style information which continuously transforms from frame to frame. Most existing models confound these two types of representation by mapping them to a shared feature space. In this paper we propose a probabilistic approach for learning separable representations of object identity and pose information using unsupervised video data. Our approach leverages a deep generative model with a factored prior d…
For the semantic segmentation of images, state-of-the-art deep neural networks (DNNs) achieve high segmentation accuracy if that task is restricted to a closed set of classes. However, as of now DNNs have limited ability to operate in an open world, where they are tasked to identify pixels belonging to unknown objects and eventually to learn novel classes, incrementally. Humans have the capability to say: I don't know what that is, but I've already seen something like that. Therefore, it is desirable to perform such an incremental learning task in an unsupervised fashion. We introduce a method…
The classification of high-dimensional data defined on graphs is particularly difficult when the graph geometry is unknown. We introduce a Haar scattering transform on graphs, which computes invariant signal descriptors. It is implemented with a deep cascade of additions, subtractions and absolute values, which iteratively compute orthogonal Haar wavelet transforms. Multiscale neighborhoods of unknown graphs are estimated by minimizing an average total variation, with a pair matching algorithm of polynomial complexity. Supervised classification with dimension reduction is tested on data bases …
We propose a novel unsupervised generative model that learns to disentangle object identity from other low-level aspects in class-imbalanced data. We first investigate the issues surrounding the assumptions about uniformity made by InfoGAN, and demonstrate its ineffectiveness to properly disentangle object identity in imbalanced data. Our key idea is to make the discovery of the discrete latent factor of variation invariant to identity-preserving transformations in real images, and use that as a signal to learn the appropriate latent distribution representing object identity. Experiments on bo…
We consider unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), where labeled data from a source domain (e.g., photographs) and unlabeled data from a target domain (e.g., sketches) are used to learn a classifier for the target domain. Conventional UDA methods (e.g., domain adversarial training) learn domain-invariant features to improve generalization to the target domain. In this paper, we show that contrastive pre-training, which learns features on unlabeled source and target data and then fine-tunes on labeled source data, is competitive with strong UDA methods. However, we find that contrastive pre-trai…
CloDS: Visual-Only Unsupervised Cloth Dynamics Learning in Unknown Conditions
Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China（中国人民大学北京校区人工智能学院）；School of Engineering Science, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学工程科学学院）
A crucial step in single particle analysis (SPA) of cryogenic electron microscopy (Cryo-EM), 2D classification and alignment takes a collection of noisy particle images to infer orientations and group similar images together. Averaging these aligned and clustered noisy images produces a set of clean images, ready for further analysis such as 3D reconstruction. Fourier-Bessel steerable principal component analysis (FBsPCA) enables an efficient, adaptable, low-rank rotation operator. We extend the FBsPCA to additionally handle translations. In this extended FBsPCA representation, we use a probab…
Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）；Stony Brook University（石溪大学）
Several factors contribute to the appearance of an object in a visual scene, including pose, illumination, and deformation, among others. Each factor accounts for a source of variability in the data, while the multiplicative interactions of these factors emulate the entangled variability, giving rise to the rich structure of visual object appearance. Disentangling such unobserved factors from visual data is a challenging task, especially when the data have been captured in uncontrolled recording conditions (also referred to as "in-the-wild") and label information is not available. In this pape…
We present a novel method for simultaneous learning of depth, egomotion, object motion, and camera intrinsics from monocular videos, using only consistency across neighboring video frames as supervision signal. Similarly to prior work, our method learns by applying differentiable warping to frames and comparing the result to adjacent ones, but it provides several improvements: We address occlusions geometrically and differentiably, directly using the depth maps as predicted during training. We introduce randomized layer normalization, a novel powerful regularizer, and we account for object mot…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Apple（苹果公司）
Generative adversarial networks (GANs), trained on a large-scale image dataset, can be a good approximator of the natural image manifold. GAN-inversion, using a pre-trained generator as a deep generative prior, is a promising tool for image restoration under corruptions. However, the performance of GAN-inversion can be limited by a lack of robustness to unknown gross corruptions, i.e., the restored image might easily deviate from the ground truth. In this paper, we propose a Robust GAN-inversion (RGI) method with a provable robustness guarantee to achieve image restoration under unknown \texti…
Multi-task SAR Image Processing via GAN-based Unsupervised Manipulation
School of Electronic Engineering, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学电子工程学院）；Kunshan Innovation Institute of Xidian University（西安电子科技大学昆山创新研究院）；University of Montenegro（黑山大学）
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；USC Institute for Creative Technologies（南加州大学创意技术研究所）；Snap Inc.（阅后即焚公司）
Disentangling data into interpretable and independent factors is critical for controllable generation tasks. With the availability of labeled data, supervision can help enforce the separation of specific factors as expected. However, it is often expensive or even impossible to label every single factor to achieve fully-supervised disentanglement. In this paper, we adopt a general setting where all factors that are hard to label or identify are encapsulated as a single unknown factor. Under this setting, we propose a flexible weakly-supervised multi-factor disentanglement framework DisUnknown, …
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）；Samsung AI Centre Toronto（三星多伦多人工智能中心）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Understanding dynamics from visual observations is a challenging problem that requires disentangling individual objects from the scene and learning their interactions. While recent object-centric models can successfully decompose a scene into objects, modeling their dynamics effectively still remains a challenge. We address this problem by introducing SlotFormer -- a Transformer-based autoregressive model operating on learned object-centric representations. Given a video clip, our approach reasons over object features to model spatio-temporal relationships and predicts accurate future object s…
