Image search engines enable the retrieval of images relevant to a query image. In this work, we consider the setting where a query for similar images is derived from a collection of images. For visual search, the similarity measurements may be made along multiple axes, or views, such as style and color. We assume access to a set of feature extractors, each of which computes representations for a specific view. Our objective is to design a retrieval algorithm that effectively combines similarities computed over representations from multiple views. To this end, we propose a self-supervised learning method for extracting disentangled view-specific representations for images such that the inter-view overlap is minimized. We show how this allows us to compute the intent of a collection as a distribution over views. We show how effective retrieval can be performed by prioritizing candidate expansion images that match the intent of a query collection. Finally, we present a new querying mechanism for image search enabled by composing multiple collections and perform retrieval under this setting using the techniques presented in this paper.
USC Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering（南加州大学明谢电气与计算机工程系）；USC Information Sciences Institute（南加州大学信息科学研究所）；Visual Intelligence and Multimedia Analytics Laboratory（视觉智能与多媒体分析实验室）
Representation disentanglement is an important goal of representation learning that benefits various downstream tasks. To achieve this goal, many unsupervised learning representation disentanglement approaches have been developed. However, the training process without utilizing any supervision signal have been proved to be inadequate for disentanglement representation learning. Therefore, we propose a novel weakly-supervised training approach, named as SW-VAE, which incorporates pairs of input observations as supervision signals by using the generative factors of datasets. Furthermore, we intr…
Causal Disentanglement-Inspired Degradation Representation Learning for Full-Reference Image Quality Assessment
School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Southwest Jiaotong University（计算机与人工智能学院，西南交通大学）；School of Transportation and Logistics, Southwest Jiaotong University（交通运输与物流学院，西南交通大学）；School of Physics, Northeast Normal University（物理学院，东北师范大学）；School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics（计算机与人工智能学院，江西财经大学）；School of Information Management, Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics（信息管理学院，江西财经大学）
MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab（MIT-IBM沃森人工智能实验室）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）
Self-supervised learning in speech involves training a speech representation network on a large-scale unannotated speech corpus, and then applying the learned representations to downstream tasks. Since the majority of the downstream tasks of SSL learning in speech largely focus on the content information in speech, the most desirable speech representations should be able to disentangle unwanted variations, such as speaker variations, from the content. However, disentangling speakers is very challenging, because removing the speaker information could easily result in a loss of content as well, …
Disentangling the underlying feature attributes within an image with no prior supervision is a challenging task. Models that can disentangle attributes well provide greater interpretability and control. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised framework DisCont to disentangle multiple attributes by exploiting the structural inductive biases within images. Motivated by the recent surge in contrastive learning paradigms, our model bridges the gap between self-supervised contrastive learning algorithms and unsupervised disentanglement. We evaluate the efficacy of our approach, both qualitative…
Rice University（莱斯大学）；Nvidia（英伟达）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）
Disentanglement learning is crucial for obtaining disentangled representations and controllable generation. Current disentanglement methods face several inherent limitations: difficulty with high-resolution images, primarily focusing on learning disentangled representations, and non-identifiability due to the unsupervised setting. To alleviate these limitations, we design new architectures and loss functions based on StyleGAN (Karras et al., 2019), for semi-supervised high-resolution disentanglement learning. We create two complex high-resolution synthetic datasets for systematic testing. We i…
Variational decomposition autoencoding improves disentanglement of latent representations
Dept. of Biomedical Engineering, Khalifa University of Science and Technology（生物医学工程系，哈利法大学）；School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki（电气与计算机工程学院，亚里士多德大学）
NEC Labs America（NEC美国实验室）；Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）
We propose a sequential variational autoencoder to learn disentangled representations of sequential data (e.g., videos and audios) under self-supervision. Specifically, we exploit the benefits of some readily accessible supervisory signals from input data itself or some off-the-shelf functional models and accordingly design auxiliary tasks for our model to utilize these signals. With the supervision of the signals, our model can easily disentangle the representation of an input sequence into static factors and dynamic factors (i.e., time-invariant and time-varying parts). Comprehensive experim…
Enormous hand images with reliable annotations are collected through marker-based MoCap. Unfortunately, degradations caused by markers limit their application in hand appearance reconstruction. A clear appearance recovery insight is an image-to-image translation trained with unpaired data. However, most frameworks fail because there exists structure inconsistency from a degraded hand to a bare one. The core of our approach is to first disentangle the bare hand structure from those degraded images and then wrap the appearance to this structure with a dual adversarial discrimination (DAD) scheme…
3D Face Modeling via Weakly-supervised Disentanglement Network joint Identity-consistency Prior
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学人工智能研究院）；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
Human interpretation of the world encompasses the use of symbols to categorize sensory inputs and compose them in a hierarchical manner. One of the long-term objectives of Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence is to endow machines with the capacity of structuring and interpreting the world as we do. Towards this goal, recent methods have successfully been able to decompose and disentangle video sequences into their composing objects and dynamics, in a self-supervised fashion. However, there has been a scarce effort in giving interpretation to the dynamics of the scene. We propose a metho…
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Canon Medical Research Europe Ltd.（佳能医疗欧洲研究有限公司）；The Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）
Generalising deep models to new data from new centres (termed here domains) remains a challenge. This is largely attributed to shifts in data statistics (domain shifts) between source and unseen domains. Recently, gradient-based meta-learning approaches where the training data are split into meta-train and meta-test sets to simulate and handle the domain shifts during training have shown improved generalisation performance. However, the current fully supervised meta-learning approaches are not scalable for medical image segmentation, where large effort is required to create pixel-wise annotati…
NEC Labs America（NEC美国实验室）；National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University（阳明交通大学）
Self-supervised learning on point clouds has gained a lot of attention recently, since it addresses the label-efficiency and domain-gap problems on point cloud tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised framework to learn informative representations from partial point clouds. We leverage partial point clouds scanned by LiDAR that contain both content and pose attributes, and we show that disentangling such two factors from partial point clouds enhances feature representation learning. To this end, our framework consists of three main parts: 1) a completion network to capture holi…
DisFaceRep: Representation Disentanglement for Co-occurring Facial Components in Weakly Supervised Face Parsing
School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University（深圳大学计算机科学与软件工程学院）；School of AI and Advanced Computing, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University（西安交通大学利物浦大学人工智能与先进计算学院）；Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学电子与电气工程系）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学电子与计算机工程系）；Computer Vision Institute, School of Artificial Intelligence, Shenzhen University（深圳大学人工智能学院计算机视觉研究所）；Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing, Shenzhen University（广东省智能信息处理重点实验室，深圳大学）
Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）；University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
The key procedure of haze image translation through adversarial training lies in the disentanglement between the feature only involved in haze synthesis, i.e.style feature, and the feature representing the invariant semantic content, i.e. content feature. Previous methods separate content feature apart by utilizing it to classify haze image during the training process. However, in this paper we recognize the incompleteness of the content-style disentanglement in such technical routine. The flawed style feature entangled with content information inevitably leads the ill-rendering of the haze im…
University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）；University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）
Current deep neural network based approaches to computed tomography (CT) metal artifact reduction (MAR) are supervised methods which rely heavily on synthesized data for training. However, as synthesized data may not perfectly simulate the underlying physical mechanisms of CT imaging, the supervised methods often generalize poorly to clinical applications. To address this problem, we propose, to the best of our knowledge, the first unsupervised learning approach to MAR. Specifically, we introduce a novel artifact disentanglement network that enables different forms of generations and regulariz…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；UC San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Qualcomm, Inc.（高通公司）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
We propose an algorithm, guided variational autoencoder (Guided-VAE), that is able to learn a controllable generative model by performing latent representation disentanglement learning. The learning objective is achieved by providing signals to the latent encoding/embedding in VAE without changing its main backbone architecture, hence retaining the desirable properties of the VAE. We design an unsupervised strategy and a supervised strategy in Guided-VAE and observe enhanced modeling and controlling capability over the vanilla VAE. In the unsupervised strategy, we guide the VAE learning by int…
Decoupling Disease, Covariates, and Individual Variability: A Unified Disentanglement Framework for Medical Image Classification
Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine（上海交通大学医学院）；Ruijin Hospital（瑞金医院）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；Shandong Provincial Hospital Affiliated to Shandong First Medical University（山东第一医科大学附属省立医院）；Air Force Medical University（空军军医大学）
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；NVIDIA（英伟达）；UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；UC San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）
A video autoencoder is proposed for learning disentan- gled representations of 3D structure and camera pose from videos in a self-supervised manner. Relying on temporal continuity in videos, our work assumes that the 3D scene structure in nearby video frames remains static. Given a sequence of video frames as input, the video autoencoder extracts a disentangled representation of the scene includ- ing: (i) a temporally-consistent deep voxel feature to represent the 3D structure and (ii) a 3D trajectory of camera pose for each frame. These two representations will then be re-entangled for render…
TCS Research（塔塔咨询服务研究部）；Flytxt Mobile Solutions（Flytxt 移动解决方案公司）；Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology（印度空间科学技术研究所）
Several methods for discovering interpretable directions in the latent space of pre-trained GANs have been proposed. Latent semantics discovered by unsupervised methods are relatively less disentangled than supervised methods since they do not use pre-trained attribute classifiers. We propose Scale Ranking Estimator (SRE), which is trained using self-supervision. SRE enhances the disentanglement in directions obtained by existing unsupervised disentanglement techniques. These directions are updated to preserve the ordering of variation within each direction in latent space. Qualitative and qua…
University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）；University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Current deep neural network based approaches to computed tomography (CT) metal artifact reduction (MAR) are supervised methods that rely on synthesized metal artifacts for training. However, as synthesized data may not accurately simulate the underlying physical mechanisms of CT imaging, the supervised methods often generalize poorly to clinical applications. To address this problem, we propose, to the best of our knowledge, the first unsupervised learning approach to MAR. Specifically, we introduce a novel artifact disentanglement network that disentangles the metal artifacts from CT images i…
While recent person re-identification (ReID) methods achieve high accuracy in a supervised setting, their generalization to an unlabelled domain is still an open problem. In this paper, we introduce a novel unsupervised disentanglement generative adversarial network (UD-GAN) to address the domain adaptation issue of supervised person ReID. Our framework jointly trains a ReID network for discriminative features extraction in a source labelled domain using identity annotation, and adapts the ReID model to an unlabelled target domain by learning disentangled latent representations on the domain. …
Institute of Neuroinformatics, ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院神经信息学研究所）
Disentanglement is at the forefront of unsupervised learning, as disentangled representations of data improve generalization, interpretability, and performance in downstream tasks. Current unsupervised approaches remain inapplicable for real-world datasets since they are highly variable in their performance and fail to reach levels of disentanglement of (semi-)supervised approaches. We introduce population-based training (PBT) for improving consistency in training variational autoencoders (VAEs) and demonstrate the validity of this approach in a supervised setting (PBT-VAE). We then use Unsupe…
We present a method to improve the visual realism of low-quality, synthetic images, e.g. OpenGL renderings. Training an unpaired synthetic-to-real translation network in image space is severely under-constrained and produces visible artifacts. Instead, we propose a semi-supervised approach that operates on the disentangled shading and albedo layers of the image. Our two-stage pipeline first learns to predict accurate shading in a supervised fashion using physically-based renderings as targets, and further increases the realism of the textures and shading with an improved CycleGAN network. Exte…
Content and style (C-S) disentanglement intends to decompose the underlying explanatory factors of objects into two independent subspaces. From the unsupervised disentanglement perspective, we rethink content and style and propose a formulation for unsupervised C-S disentanglement based on our assumption that different factors are of different importance and popularity for image reconstruction, which serves as a data bias. The corresponding model inductive bias is introduced by our proposed C-S disentanglement Module (C-S DisMo), which assigns different and independent roles to content and sty…
We propose a way of learning disentangled content-style representation of image, allowing us to extrapolate images to any style as well as interpolate between any pair of styles. By augmenting data set in a supervised setting and imposing triplet loss, we ensure the separation of information encoded by content and style representation. We also make use of cycle-consistency loss to guarantee that images could be reconstructed faithfully by their representation.
We address the problem of discovering part segmentations of articulated objects without supervision. In contrast to keypoints, part segmentations provide information about part localizations on the level of individual pixels. Capturing both locations and semantics, they are an attractive target for supervised learning approaches. However, large annotation costs limit the scalability of supervised algorithms to other object categories than humans. Unsupervised approaches potentially allow to use much more data at a lower cost. Most existing unsupervised approaches focus on learning abstract rep…
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Rochester Institute of Technology（罗切斯特理工学院）
Due to the difficulties of obtaining multimodal paired images in clinical practice, recent studies propose to train brain tumor segmentation models with unpaired images and capture complementary information through modality translation. However, these models cannot fully exploit the complementary information from different modalities. In this work, we thus present a novel two-step (intra-modality and inter-modality) curriculum disentanglement learning framework to effectively utilize privileged semi-paired images, i.e. limited paired images that are only available in training, for brain tumor …
Learning disentangled representations is regarded as a fundamental task for improving the generalization, robustness, and interpretability of generative models. However, measuring disentanglement has been challenging and inconsistent, often dependent on an ad-hoc external model or specific to a certain dataset. To address this, we present a method for quantifying disentanglement that only uses the generative model, by measuring the topological similarity of conditional submanifolds in the learned representation. This method showcases both unsupervised and supervised variants. To illustrate the…
Images captured in the low-light condition suffer from low visibility and various imaging artifacts, e.g., real noise. Existing supervised enlightening algorithms require a large set of pixel-aligned training image pairs, which are hard to prepare in practice. Though weakly-supervised or unsupervised methods can alleviate such challenges without using paired training images, some real-world artifacts inevitably get falsely amplified because of the lack of corresponded supervision. In this paper, instead of using perfectly aligned images for training, we creatively employ the misaligned real-wo…
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca（卢卡高等研究院）；Canon Medical Research Europe Ltd.（佳能医疗欧洲研究有限公司）；The Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）
A recent spate of state-of-the-art semi- and un-supervised solutions disentangle and encode image "content" into a spatial tensor and image appearance or "style" into a vector, to achieve good performance in spatially equivariant tasks (e.g. image-to-image translation). To achieve this, they employ different model design, learning objective, and data biases. While considerable effort has been made to measure disentanglement in vector representations, and assess its impact on task performance, such analysis for (spatial) content - style disentanglement is lacking. In this paper, we conduct an e…
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）
There have been a fairly of research interests in exploring the disentanglement of appearance and shape from human images. Most existing endeavours pursuit this goal by either using training images with annotations or regulating the training process with external clues such as human skeleton, body segmentation or cloth patches etc. In this paper, we aim to address this challenge in a more unsupervised manner---we do not require any annotation nor any external task-specific clues. To this end, we formulate an encoder-decoder-like network to extract both the shape and appearance features from in…
School of Informatics（信息学院）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
Robotic manipulation tasks, such as wiping with a soft sponge, require control from multiple rich sensory modalities. Human-robot interaction, aimed at teaching robots, is difficult in this setting as there is potential for mismatch between human and machine comprehension of the rich data streams. We treat the task of interpretable learning from demonstration as an optimisation problem over a probabilistic generative model. To account for the high-dimensionality of the data, a high-capacity neural network is chosen to represent the model. The latent variables in this model are explicitly align…
Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, University of Utah（犹他大学科学计算与成像研究所）；Kahlert School of Computing, University of Utah（犹他大学卡勒特计算学院）；Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Utah（犹他大学生物医学工程系）；Nora Eccles Harrison Cardiovascular Research and Training Institute, University of Utah（犹他大学诺拉·埃克尔斯·哈里森心血管研究与培训研究所）；Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences, University of Utah（犹他大学放射学与影像科学系）；Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins（约翰霍普金斯大学生物医学工程系）；Division of Cardiology, University of Utah（犹他大学心脏病学系）
University of Campinas（坎皮纳斯大学）；University of Oslo（奥斯陆大学）
Independent components within low-dimensional representations are essential inputs in several downstream tasks, and provide explanations over the observed data. Video-based disentangled factors of variation provide low-dimensional representations that can be identified and used to feed task-specific models. We introduce MTC-VAE, a self-supervised motion-transfer VAE model to disentangle motion and content from videos. Unlike previous work on video content-motion disentanglement, we adopt a chunk-wise modeling approach and take advantage of the motion information contained in spatiotemporal nei…
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Johns Hopkins School of Medicine（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学医学院）；National Institute on Aging, National Institute of Health（美国国立卫生研究院国家老龄化研究所）
Disentangling anatomical and contrast information from medical images has gained attention recently, demonstrating benefits for various image analysis tasks. Current methods learn disentangled representations using either paired multi-modal images with the same underlying anatomy or auxiliary labels (e.g., manual delineations) to provide inductive bias for disentanglement. However, these requirements could significantly increase the time and cost in data collection and limit the applicability of these methods when such data are not available. Moreover, these methods generally do not guarantee …
Learning a disentangled, interpretable, and structured latent representation in 3D generative models of faces and bodies is still an open problem. The problem is particularly acute when control over identity features is required. In this paper, we propose an intuitive yet effective self-supervised approach to train a 3D shape variational autoencoder (VAE) which encourages a disentangled latent representation of identity features. Curating the mini-batch generation by swapping arbitrary features across different shapes allows to define a loss function leveraging known differences and similariti…
