Variational Structured Attention Networks for Deep Visual Representation Learning
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；INRIA（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；University of Trento（特伦托大学）；Fondazione Bruno Kessler（布鲁诺·凯斯勒基金会）
Guanglei Yang, Paolo Rota, Xavier Alameda-Pineda, Dan Xu, Mingli Ding, Elisa Ricci
备注：
Accepted at IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP)
Convolutional neural networks have enabled major progresses in addressing pixel-level prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation, depth estimation, surface normal prediction and so on, benefiting from their powerful capabilities in visual representation learning. Typically, state of the art models integrate attention mechanisms for improved deep feature representations. Recently, some works have demonstrated the significance of learning and combining both spatial- and channelwise attentions for deep feature refinement. In this paper, weaim at effectively boosting previous approaches and propose a unified deep framework to jointly learn both spatial attention maps and channel attention vectors in a principled manner so as to structure the resulting attention tensors and model interactions between these two types of attentions. Specifically, we integrate the estimation and the interaction of the attentions within a probabilistic representation learning framework, leading to VarIational STructured Attention networks (VISTA-Net). We implement the inference rules within the neural network, thus allowing for end-to-end learning of the probabilistic and the CNN frontend parameters. As demonstrated by our extensive empirical evaluation on six large-scale datasets for dense visual prediction, VISTA-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art in multiple continuous and discrete prediction tasks, thus confirming the benefit of the proposed approach in joint structured spatial-channel attention estimation for deep representation learning. The code is available at https://github.com/ygjwd12345/VISTA-Net.
We present a structured graph variational autoencoder for generating the layout of indoor 3D scenes. Given the room type (e.g., living room or library) and the room layout (e.g., room elements such as floor and walls), our architecture generates a collection of objects (e.g., furniture items such as sofa, table and chairs) that is consistent with the room type and layout. This is a challenging problem because the generated scene should satisfy multiple constrains, e.g., each object must lie inside the room and two objects cannot occupy the same volume. To address these challenges, we propose a…
McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；MILA (Québec Artificial Intelligence Institute)（MILA（魁北克人工智能研究所））；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；The Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）
We propose a hierarchically structured variational inference model for accurately disentangling observable evidence of disease (e.g. brain lesions or atrophy) from subject-specific anatomy in brain MRIs. With flexible, partially autoregressive priors, our model (1) addresses the subtle and fine-grained dependencies that typically exist between anatomical and pathological generating factors of an MRI to ensure the clinical validity of generated samples; (2) preserves and disentangles finer pathological details pertaining to a patient's disease state. Additionally, we experiment with an alternat…
Visual Question Answering (VQA) attracts much attention from both industry and academia. As a multi-modality task, it is challenging since it requires not only visual and textual understanding, but also the ability to align cross-modality representations. Previous approaches extensively employ entity-level alignments, such as the correlations between the visual regions and their semantic labels, or the interactions across question words and object features. These attempts aim to improve the cross-modality representations, while ignoring their internal relations. Instead, we propose to apply st…
The University of Western Australia（西澳大利亚大学）；Murdoch University（莫道克大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；University of California, Santa Cruz（加州大学圣克鲁兹分校）
Temporal grounding in videos aims to localize one target video segment that semantically corresponds to a given query sentence. Thanks to the semantic diversity of natural language descriptions, temporal grounding allows activity grounding beyond pre-defined classes and has received increasing attention in recent years. The semantic diversity is rooted in the principle of compositionality in linguistics, where novel semantics can be systematically described by combining known words in novel ways (compositional generalization). However, current temporal grounding datasets do not specifically te…
Deep Attentional Structured Representation Learning for Visual Recognition
EPFL（洛桑联邦理工学院）
结构化表示，如Bags of Words，VLAD和Fisher Vectors，已被证明在处理复杂的视觉识别任务方面非常有效。因此，它们最近已被纳入深度架构中。然而，虽然有效，但由此产生的深度结构化表示学习策略通常会从整个图像中聚合局部特征，忽略了这样一个事实，即在复杂的识别任务中，某些区域提供比其他区域更多的区分信息。在本文中，我们引入了一个注意结构化的表示学习框架，它在聚合过程中引入了图像特定的注意力机制。我们的框架学习以端到端的方式联合预测图像类标签和注意力地图，并且除了目标标签之外没有任何其他监督。正如我们的实验所证明的那样，这始终优于注意力较少的结构化表示学习，并在标准场景识别和细粒度分类基准上产生最先进的结果。
From Attenuation to Attention: Variational Information Flow Manipulation for Fine-Grained Visual Perception
Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ICT/CAS)（智能信息处理重点实验室，计算技术研究所，中国科学院（ICT/CAS））；State Key Laboratory of AI Safety, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ICT/CAS)（人工智能安全国家重点实验室，计算技术研究所，中国科学院（ICT/CAS））；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China（中国科学院大学，北京，中国）
University of Alabama at Birmingham（阿拉巴马大学伯明翰分校）；Tulane University（杜兰大学）；Brown University（布朗大学）；Oak Ridge National Laboratory（橡树岭国家实验室）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, SOKENDAI（综合研究大学院大学）；National Institute of Informatics（国立信息学研究所）
We propose an end-to-end network for image generation from given structured-text that consists of the visual-relation layout module and the pyramid of GANs, namely stacking-GANs. Our visual-relation layout module uses relations among entities in the structured-text in two ways: comprehensive usage and individual usage. We comprehensively use all available relations together to localize initial bounding-boxes of all the entities. We also use individual relation separately to predict from the initial bounding-boxes relation-units for all the relations in the input text. We then unify all the rel…
AeroRAG: Structured Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented LLM for Fine-Grained Aerial Visual Reasoning
Research Center for Space Computing System, Zhejiang Lab, Hangzhou（杭州浙大实验室空间计算系统研究中心）；Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hangzhou（中国科学院大学杭州高等研究院）；School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Zhengzhou University（郑州大学计算机科学与工程学院）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学计算机科学与技术学院）
Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence（博世人工智能中心）；CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security（CISPA亥姆霍兹信息安全中心）
Prediction of future states of the environment and interacting agents is a key competence required for autonomous agents to operate successfully in the real world. Prior work for structured sequence prediction based on latent variable models imposes a uni-modal standard Gaussian prior on the latent variables. This induces a strong model bias which makes it challenging to fully capture the multi-modality of the distribution of the future states. In this work, we introduce Conditional Flow Variational Autoencoders (CF-VAE) using our novel conditional normalizing flow based prior to capture compl…
QUvA Lab, University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学QUvA实验室）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
This paper studies visual search using structured queries. The structure is in the form of a 2D composition that encodes the position and the category of the objects. The transformation of the position and the category of the objects leads to a continuous-valued relationship between visual compositions, which carries highly beneficial information, although not leveraged by previous techniques. To that end, in this work, our goal is to leverage these continuous relationships by using the notion of symmetry in equivariance. Our model output is trained to change symmetrically with respect to the …
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur（印度理工学院坎普尔分校）；NVIDIA（英伟达）；University of Bath（巴斯大学）
Understanding the relationship between the auditory and visual signals is crucial for many different applications ranging from computer-generated imagery (CGI) and video editing automation to assisting people with hearing or visual impairments. However, this is challenging since the distribution of both audio and visual modality is inherently multimodal. Therefore, most of the existing methods ignore the multimodal aspect and assume that there only exists a deterministic one-to-one mapping between the two modalities. It can lead to low-quality predictions as the model collapses to optimizing t…
Modular Diffusion Models for Structured Visual Recognition
Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学计算机科学系）；Vector Institute for AI（向量人工智能研究所）；CompVis, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich（慕尼黑路德维希·马克西米利安大学计算机视觉实验室）；Munich Center for Machine Learning（慕尼黑机器学习中心）；CIFAR AI Chair（CIFAR人工智能教席）
Temporal Evidence Routing with Structured Visual Evidence for TimeLogicQA
Southeast University（东南大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Independent Researcher（独立研究员）；Opus AI Research（Opus AI研究院）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications（重庆邮电大学）
Visual Emotion Analysis (VEA) has attracted increasing attention recently with the prevalence of sharing images on social networks. Since human emotions are ambiguous and subjective, it is more reasonable to address VEA in a label distribution learning (LDL) paradigm rather than a single-label classification task. Different from other LDL tasks, there exist intrinsic relationships between emotions and unique characteristics within them, as demonstrated in psychological theories. Inspired by this, we propose a well-grounded circular-structured representation to utilize the prior knowledge for v…
University of Glasgow（格拉斯哥大学）；TAL Education Group（好未来教育集团）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
The current state-of-the-art image-sentence retrieval methods implicitly align the visual-textual fragments, like regions in images and words in sentences, and adopt attention modules to highlight the relevance of cross-modal semantic correspondences. However, the retrieval performance remains unsatisfactory due to a lack of consistent representation in both semantics and structural spaces. In this work, we propose to address the above issue from two aspects: (i) constructing intrinsic structure (along with relations) among the fragments of respective modalities, e.g., "dog $\to$ play $\to$ ba…
Video anomalies detection is the intersection of anomaly detection and visual intelligence. It has commercial applications in surveillance, security, self-driving cars and crop monitoring. Videos can capture a variety of anomalies. Due to efforts needed to label training data, unsupervised approaches to train anomaly detection models for videos is more practical An autoencoder is a neural network that is trained to recreate its input using latent representation of input also called a bottleneck layer. Variational autoencoder uses distribution (mean and variance) as compared to latent vector as…
Recently, audio-visual speech enhancement has been tackled in the unsupervised settings based on variational auto-encoders (VAEs), where during training only clean data is used to train a generative model for speech, which at test time is combined with a noise model, e.g. nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF), whose parameters are learned without supervision. Consequently, the proposed model is agnostic to the noise type. When visual data are clean, audio-visual VAE-based architectures usually outperform the audio-only counterpart. The opposite happens when the visual data are corrupted by cl…
National Chiao Tung University（国立交通大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
As the intermediate-level representations bridging the two levels, structured representations of visual scenes, such as visual relationships between pairwise objects, have been shown to not only benefit compositional models in learning to reason along with the structures but provide higher interpretability for model decisions. Nevertheless, these representations receive much less attention than traditional recognition tasks, leaving numerous open challenges unsolved. In the thesis, we study how machines can describe the content of the individual image or video with visual relationships as the …
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are a popular class of deep generative models with many variants and a wide range of applications. Improvements upon the standard VAE mostly focus on the modelling of the posterior distribution over the latent space and the properties of the neural network decoder. In contrast, improving the model for the observational distribution is rarely considered and typically defaults to a pixel-wise independent categorical or normal distribution. In image synthesis, sampling from such distributions produces spatially-incoherent results with uncorrelated pixel noise, resu…
Towards Generalizable Deepfake Detection via Forgery-aware Audio-Visual Adaptation: A Variational Bayesian Approach
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Department of New Networks, Pengcheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室网络部）；School of Cyber Science and Technology, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学网络安全科学与技术学院）；School of Computer Science and Cyber Engineering, Guangzhou University（广州大学计算机科学与网络工程学院）；School of Cyberspace Science, Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学网络空间科学学院）
Illinois Institute of Technology（伊利诺伊理工学院）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Cisco（思科）
People can easily imagine the potential sound while seeing an event. This natural synchronization between audio and visual signals reveals their intrinsic correlations. To this end, we propose to learn the audio-visual correlations from the perspective of cross-modal generation in a self-supervised manner, the learned correlations can be then readily applied in multiple downstream tasks such as the audio-visual cross-modal localization and retrieval. We introduce a novel Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) framework that consists of Multiple encoders and a Shared decoder (MS-VAE) with an additional …
Multi-modal word semantics aims to enhance embeddings with perceptual input, assuming that human meaning representation is grounded in sensory experience. Most research focuses on evaluation involving direct visual input, however, visual grounding can contribute to linguistic applications as well. Another motivation for this paper is the growing need for more interpretable models and for evaluating model efficiency regarding size and performance. This work explores the impact of visual information for semantics when the evaluation involves no direct visual input, specifically semantic similari…
We propose a novel approach to improve a visual-semantic embedding model by incorporating concept representations captured from an external structured knowledge base. We investigate its performance on image classification under both standard and zero-shot settings. We propose two novel evaluation frameworks to analyse classification errors with respect to the class hierarchy indicated by the knowledge base. The approach is tested using the ILSVRC 2012 image dataset and a WordNet knowledge base. With respect to both standard and zero-shot image classification, our approach shows superior perfor…
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Priberam Labs（Priberam实验室）；Institute of Systems and Robotics（系统与机器人研究所）；LUMLIS (Lisbon ELLIS Unit)（LUMLIS（里斯本ELLIS单元））；Unbabel（Unbabel公司）
Visual attention mechanisms are widely used in multimodal tasks, as visual question answering (VQA). One drawback of softmax-based attention mechanisms is that they assign some probability mass to all image regions, regardless of their adjacency structure and of their relevance to the text. In this paper, to better link the image structure with the text, we replace the traditional softmax attention mechanism with two alternative sparsity-promoting transformations: sparsemax, which is able to select only the relevant regions (assigning zero weight to the rest), and a newly proposed Total-Variat…
Humans are highly efficient learners, with the ability to grasp the meaning of a new concept from just a few examples. Unlike popular computer vision systems, humans can flexibly leverage the compositional structure of the visual world, understanding new concepts as combinations of existing concepts. In the current paper, we study how people learn different types of visual compositions, using abstract visual forms with rich relational structure. We find that people can make meaningful compositional generalizations from just a few examples in a variety of scenarios, and we develop a Bayesian pr…
Boosting Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering with Structured Context Reasoning
School of Computer Science, Guangdong University of Technology（广东工业大学计算机学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Shenzhen University（深圳大学人工智能学院）；Graduate School of Advanced Science and Engineering, Hiroshima University（广岛大学先进科学与工程研究生院）
