The College of Computing had a substantial presence at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2017 (CVPR 2017) conference in Honolulu, Hawaii.

A total of eight faculty and students co-authored nine papers that were accepted and presented at the main conference.

From the School of Interactive Computing (IC), Associate Professor James Hays contributed to two papers, one each with graduate students Patsorn Sangkloy (Ph.D. CS) and Samarth Brahmbhatt (Ph.D. Robotics), Associate Professor Dhruv Batra contributed to four, including one with advisee Abhishek Das (Ph.D. CS), and Assistant Professor Devi Parikh contributed to five.

Associate Professor Le Song and his advisee Weiyang Liu (Ph.D. CS) from the School of Computational Science and Engineering also presented a paper at the conference.

At least 13 alumni also attended the conference, two of whom – Gabe Brostow (Ph.D. CS, ’03) and Alireza Fathi (Ph.D. CS, ’13) – contributed to accepted papers.

Overall, the College of Computing had nine main conference publications, seven invited workshop talks and demonstrations, two workshops organized, and four workshop publications. School of IC Professor Jim Rehg was also a program chair for the conference.

CVPR 2017 was held from July 21-26 at the Hawaii Convention Center and is the premier annual computer vision event, comprising the main conference and several co-located workshops and short courses.

The nine papers that current Georgia Tech faculty and students contributed to are listed with links and abstracts below:

• Scribbler: Controlling Deep Image Synthesis with Sketch and Color (Patsorn Sangkloy, Jingwan Lu, Chen Fang, Fisher Yu, James Hays)

ABSTRACT: Several recent works have used deep convolutional networks to generate realistic imagery. These methods sidestep the traditional computer graphics rendering pipeline and instead generate imagery at the pixel level by learning from large collections of photos (e.g. faces or bedrooms). However, these methods are of limited utility because it is difficult for a user to control what the network produces. In this paper, we propose a deep adversarial image synthesis architecture that is conditioned on sketched boundaries and sparse color strokes to generate realistic cars, bedrooms, or faces. We demonstrate a sketch based image synthesis system which allows users to scribble over the sketch to indicate preferred color for objects. Our network can then generate convincing images that satisfy both the color and the sketch constraints of user. The network is feed-forward which allows users to see the effect of their edits in real time. We compare to recent work on sketch to image synthesis and show that our approach generates more realistic, diverse, and controllable outputs. The architecture is also effective at user-guided colorization of grayscale images.

• DeepNav: Learning to Navigate Large Cities (Samarth Brahmbhatt, James Hays)

ABSTRACT: We present DeepNav, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based algorithm for navigating large cities using locally visible street-view images. The DeepNav agent learns to reach its destination quickly by making the correct navigation decisions at intersections. We collect a large-scale dataset of street-view images organized in a graph where nodes are connected by roads. This dataset contains 10 city graphs and more than 1 million street-view images. We propose 3 supervised learning approaches for the navigation task and show how A* search in the city graph can be used to generate supervision for the learning. Our annotation process is fully automated using publicly available mapping services and requires no human input. We evaluate the proposed DeepNav models on 4 held-out cities for navigating to 5 different types of destinations. Our algorithms outperform previous work that uses hand-crafted features and Support Vector Regression (SVR).

• Bidirectional Beam Search: Forward-Backward Inference in Neural Sequence Models for Fill-in-the-Blank Image Captioning (Qing Sun, Stefan Lee, Dhruv Batra)

ABSTRACT: We develop the first approximate inference algorithm for 1-Best (and M-Best) decoding in bidirectional neural sequence models by extending Beam Search (BS) to reason about both forward and backward time dependencies. Beam Search (BS) is a widely used approximate inference algorithm for decoding sequences from unidirectional neural sequence models. Interestingly, approximate inference in bidirectional models remains an open problem, despite their significant advantage in modeling information from both the past and future. To enable the use of bidirectional models, we present Bidirectional Beam Search (BiBS), an efficient algorithm for approximate bidirectional inference. To evaluate our method and as an interesting problem in its own right, we introduce a novel Fill-in-the-Blank Image Captioning task which requires reasoning about both past and future sentence structure to reconstruct sensible image descriptions. We use this task as well as the Visual Madlibs dataset to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, consistently outperforming all baseline methods.

• Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering (Yash Goyal, Tejas Khot, Douglas Summers-Stay, Dhruv Batra, Devi Parikh)

ABSTRACT: Problems at the intersection of vision and language are of significant importance both as challenging research questions and for the rich set of applications they enable. However, inherent structure in our world and bias in our language tend to be a simpler signal for learning than visual modalities, resulting in models that ignore visual information, leading to an inflated sense of their capability. We propose to counter these language priors for the task of Visual Question Answering (VQA) and make vision (the V in VQA) matter! Specifically, we balance the popular VQA dataset [3] by collecting complementary images such that every question in our balanced dataset is associated with not just a single image, but rather a pair of similar images that result in two different answers to the question. Our dataset is by construction more balanced than the original VQA dataset and has approximately twice the number of image-question pairs. Our complete balanced dataset is publicly available at http://visualqa.org/ as part of the 2nd iteration of the Visual Question Answering Dataset and Challenge (VQA v2.0). We further benchmark a number of state-of-art VQA models on our balanced dataset. All models perform significantly worse on our balanced dataset, suggesting that these models have indeed learned to exploit language priors. This finding provides the first concrete empirical evidence for what seems to be a qualitative sense among practitioners. Finally, our data collection protocol for identifying complementary images enables us to develop a novel interpretable model, which in addition to providing an answer to the given (image, question) pair, also provides a counterexample based explanation. Specifically, it identifies an image that is similar to the original image, but it believes has a different answer to the same question. This can help in building trust for machines among their users.

• Counting Everyday Objects in Everyday Scenes (Prithvijit Chattopadhyay, Ramakrishna Vedantam, Ramprasaath R. Selvaraju, Dhruv Batra, Devi Parikh)

ABSTRACT: We are interested in counting the number of instances of object classes in natural, everyday images. Previous counting approaches tackle the problem in restricted domains such as counting pedestrians in surveillance videos. Counts can also be estimated from outputs of other vision tasks like object detection. In this work, we build dedicated models for counting designed to tackle the large variance in counts, appearances, and scales of objects found in natural scenes. Our approach is inspired by the phenomenon of subitizing – the ability of humans to make quick assessments of counts given a perceptual signal, for small count values. Given a natural scene, we employ a divide and conquer strategy while incorporating context across the scene to adapt the subitizing idea to counting. Our approach offers consistent improvements over numerous baseline approaches for counting on the PASCAL VOC 2007 and COCO datasets. Subsequently, we study how counting can be used to improve object detection. We then show a proof of concept application of our counting methods to the task of Visual Question Answering, by studying the ‘how many?’ questions in the VQA and COCO-QA datasets.

• Knowing When to Look: Adaptive Attention via A Visual Sentinel for Image Captioning (Jiasen Lu, Caiming Xiong, Devi Parikh, Richard Socher)

ABSTRACT: Attention-based neural encoder-decoder frameworks have been widely adopted for image captioning. Most methods force visual attention to be active for every generated word. However, the decoder likely requires little to no visual information from the image to predict non-visual words such as “the” and “of”. Other words that may seem visual can often be predicted reliably just from the language model e.g., “sign” after “behind a red stop” or “phone” following “talking on a cell”. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive attention model with a visual sentinel. At each time step, our model decides whether to attend to the image (and if so, to which regions) or to the visual sentinel. The model decides whether to attend to the image and where, in order to extract meaningful information for sequential word generation. We test our method on the COCO image captioning 2015 challenge dataset and Flickr30K. Our approach sets the new state-of-the-art by a significant margin.

• Visual Dialog (Abhishek Das, Satwik Kottur, Khushi Gupta, Avi Singh, Deshraj Yadav, José M.F. Moura, Devi Parikh, Dhruv Batra)

ABSTRACT: We introduce the task of Visual Dialog, which requires an AI agent to hold a meaningful dialog with humans in natural, conversational language about visual content. Specifically, given an image, a dialog history, and a question about the image, the agent has to ground the question in image, infer context from history, and answer the question accurately. Visual Dialog is disentangled enough from a specific downstream task so as to serve as a general test of machine intelligence, while being grounded in vision enough to allow objective evaluation of individual responses and benchmark progress. We develop a novel two-person chat data collection protocol to curate a large-scale Visual Dialog dataset (VisDial). VisDial contains 1 dialog (10 question-answer pairs) on ∼140k images from the COCO dataset, with a total of ∼1.4M dialog question-answer pairs. We introduce a family of neural encoder-decoder models for Visual Dialog with 3 encoders (Late Fusion, Hierarchical Recurrent Encoder and Memory Network) and 2 decoders (generative and discriminative), which outperform a number of sophisticated baselines. We propose a retrieval-based evaluation protocol for Visual Dialog where the AI agent is asked to sort a set of candidate answers and evaluated on metrics such as mean-reciprocal-rank of human response. We quantify gap between machine and human performance on the Visual Dialog task via human studies. Our dataset, code, and trained models will be released publicly at visualdialog.org. Putting it all together, we demonstrate the first ‘visual chatbot’!

• Context-aware Captions from Context-agnostic Supervision (Ramakrishna Vedantam, Samy Bengio, Kevin Murphy, Devi Parikh, Gal Chechik)

ABSTRACT: We introduce an inference technique to produce discriminative context-aware image captions (captions that describe differences between images or visual concepts) using only generic context-agnostic training data (captions that describe a concept or an image in isolation). For example, given images and captions of “Siamese cat” and “tiger cat”, we generate language that describes the “Siamese cat” in a way that distinguishes it from “tiger cat”. Our key novelty is that we show how to do joint inference over a language model that is context-agnostic and a listener which distinguishes closely-related concepts. We first apply our technique to a justification task, namely to describe why an image contains a particular fine-grained category as opposed to another closely-related category of the CUB- 200-2011 dataset. We then study discriminative image captioning to generate language that uniquely refers to one of two semantically-similar images in the COCO dataset. Evaluations with discriminative ground truth for justification and human studies for discriminative image captioning reveal that our approach outperforms baseline generative and speaker-listener approaches for discrimination.

• SphereFace: Deep Hypersphere Embedding for Face Recognition (Weiyang Liu, Yandong Wen, Zhiding Yu, Ming Li, Bhiksha Raj, Le Song)

ABSTRACT: This paper addresses deep face recognition (FR) problem under open-set protocol, where ideal face features are expected to have smaller maximal intra-class distance than minimal inter-class distance under a suitably chosen metric space. However, few existing algorithms can effectively achieve this criterion. To this end, we propose the angular softmax (A-Softmax) loss that enables convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to learn angularly discriminative features. Geometrically, A-Softmax loss can be viewed as imposing discriminative constraints on a hypersphere manifold, which intrinsically matches the prior that faces also lie on a manifold. Moreover, the size of angular margin can be quantitatively adjusted by a parameter m. We further derive specific m to approximate the ideal feature criterion. Extensive analysis and experiments on Labeled Face in the Wild (LFW), YouTube Faces (YTF) and MegaFace Challenge 1 show the superiority of A-Softmax loss in FR tasks.