Hierarchical Mixtures of Generators for Adversarial Learning

Alper Ahmetoğlu, Ethem Alpaydin

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Auto-TLDR; Hierarchical Mixture of Generative Adversarial Networks

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Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are deep neural networks that allow us to sample from an arbitrary probability distribution without explicitly estimating the distri- bution. There is a generator that takes a latent vector as input and transforms it into a valid sample from the distribution. There is also a discriminator that is trained to discriminate such fake samples from true samples of the distribution; at the same time, the generator is trained to generate fakes that the discriminator cannot tell apart from the true samples. Instead of learning a global generator, a recent approach involves training multiple generators each responsible from one part of the distribution. In this work, we review such approaches and propose the hierarchical mixture of generators, inspired from the hierarchical mixture of experts model, that learns a tree structure implementing a hierarchical clustering with soft splits in the decision nodes and local generators in the leaves. Since the generators are combined softly, the whole model is continuous and can be trained using gradient-based optimization, just like the original GAN model. Our experiments on five image data sets, namely, MNIST, FashionMNIST, UTZap50K, Oxford Flowers, and CelebA, show that our proposed model generates samples of high quality and diversity in terms of popular GAN evaluation metrics. The learned hierarchical structure also leads to knowledge extraction.

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Auto-TLDR; Large Dataset Generation from Faulty AC Machines using Deep Convolutional GAN

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Auto-TLDR; Posterior Consistency Module for Gaussian Mixture Model

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Auto-TLDR; Domain-agnostic GAN Evaluation with Siamese Neural Networks

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Auto-TLDR; A Binary Tree-structured Hierarchical Routing Mixture of Experts for Regression

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Auto-TLDR; IDA-GAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Imbalanced Data Augmentation

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Auto-TLDR; Attribute Transfer Inpainting Generative Adversarial Network

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Auto-TLDR; Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks for Phase Retrieval

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Auto-TLDR; Self-Supervised Autogenous Learning for Deep Neural Networks

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Auto-TLDR; Adaptive Graph Structure for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation

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Auto-TLDR; Semi-supervised Image Translation with Generative Adversarial Networks Using Paired and Unpaired Images

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Auto-TLDR; Exploring latent space of GANs by analyzing correlation between latent variables and semantic contents in generated images

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Auto-TLDR; GLICO: Generative Latent Implicit Conditional Optimization for Small Sample Learning

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Auto-TLDR; Adversarial Knowledge Distillation for Generative Adversarial Nets

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Auto-TLDR; Generative Adversarial Networks for Membership Inference Attacks

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Auto-TLDR; AFGAN: A Generative Adversarial Network for Attributes Aware Face Image Generation

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Auto-TLDR; Cascade Attention-Guided Residue GAN for Cross-modal Audio-Visual Learning

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Auto-TLDR; Multi-Task Learning and Semi-Supervised Learning for Multi-Stage Processes

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Auto-TLDR; Generative Adversarial Networks with Structural Constraint for controllability of latent space

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Auto-TLDR; Fluorescein Angiography from Fundus Images using Attention-based Generative Networks

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Fluorescein Angiography (FA) is a technique that employs the designated camera for Fundus photography incorporating excitation and barrier filters. FA also requires fluorescein dye that is injected intravenously, which might cause adverse effects ranging from nausea, vomiting to even fatal anaphylaxis. Currently, no other fast and non-invasive technique exists that can generate FA without coupling with Fundus photography. To eradicate the need for an invasive FA extraction procedure, we introduce an Attention-based Generative network that can synthesize Fluorescein Angiography from Fundus images. The proposed gan incorporates multiple attention based skip connections in generators and comprises novel residual blocks for both generators and discriminators. It utilizes reconstruction, feature-matching, and perceptual loss along with adversarial training to produces realistic Angiograms that is hard for experts to distinguish from real ones. Our experiments confirm that the proposed architecture surpasses recent state-of-the-art generative networks for fundus-to-angio translation task.

Semi-Supervised Generative Adversarial Networks with a Pair of Complementary Generators for Retinopathy Screening

Yingpeng Xie, Qiwei Wan, Hai Xie, En-Leng Tan, Yanwu Xu, Baiying Lei

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Auto-TLDR; Generative Adversarial Networks for Retinopathy Diagnosis via Fundus Images

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Several typical types of retinopathy are major causes of blindness. However, early detection of retinopathy is quite not easy since few symptoms are observable in the early stage, attributing to the development of non-mydriatic retinal camera. These camera produces high-resolution retinal fundus images provide the possibility of Computer-Aided-Diagnosis (CAD) via deep learning to assist diagnosing retinopathy. Deep learning algorithms usually rely on a great number of labelled images which are expensive and time-consuming to obtain in the medical imaging area. Moreover, the random distribution of various lesions which often vary greatly in size also brings significant challenges to learn discriminative information from high-resolution fundus image. In this paper, we present generative adversarial networks simultaneously equipped with "good" generator and "bad" generator (GBGANs) to make up for the incomplete data distribution provided by limited fundus images. To improve the generative feasibility of generator, we introduce into pre-trained feature extractor to acquire condensed feature for each fundus image in advance. Experimental results on integrated three public iChallenge datasets show that the proposed GBGANs could fully utilize the available fundus images to identify retinopathy with little label cost.

Data Augmentation Via Mixed Class Interpolation Using Cycle-Consistent Generative Adversarial Networks Applied to Cross-Domain Imagery

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Auto-TLDR; C2GMA: A Generative Domain Transfer Model for Non-visible Domain Classification

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Machine learning driven object detection and classification within non-visible imagery has an important role in many fields such as night vision, all-weather surveillance and aviation security. However, such applications often suffer due to the limited quantity and variety of non-visible spectral domain imagery, in contrast to the high data availability of visible-band imagery that readily enables contemporary deep learning driven detection and classification approaches. To address this problem, this paper proposes and evaluates a novel data augmentation approach that leverages the more readily available visible-band imagery via a generative domain transfer model. The model can synthesise large volumes of non-visible domain imagery by image-to-image (I2I) translation from the visible image domain. Furthermore, we show that the generation of interpolated mixed class (non-visible domain) image examples via our novel Conditional CycleGAN Mixup Augmentation (C2GMA) methodology can lead to a significant improvement in the quality of non-visible domain classification tasks that otherwise suffer due to limited data availability. Focusing on classification within the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) domain, our approach is evaluated on a variation of the Statoil/C-CORE Iceberg Classifier Challenge dataset and achieves 75.4% accuracy, demonstrating a significant improvement when compared against traditional data augmentation strategies (Rotation, Mixup, and MixCycleGAN).

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Auto-TLDR; Learning Generators for Cross-Domain Data under Low-Shot Learning

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We tackle a novel problem of learning generators for cross-domain data under a specific scenario of low-shot learning. Basically, given a source domain with sufficient amount of training data, we aim to transfer the knowledge of its generative process to another target domain, which not only has few data samples but also contains the domain shift with respect to the source domain. This problem has great potential in practical use and is different from the well-known image translation task, as the target-domain data can be generated without requiring any source-domain ones and the large data consumption for learning target-domain generator can be alleviated. Built upon a cross-domain dataset where (1) each of the low shots in the target domain has its correspondence in the source and (2) these two domains share the similar content information but different appearance, two approaches are proposed: a Latent-Disentanglement-Orientated model (LaDo) and a Generative-Hierarchy-Oriented (GenHo) model. Our LaDo and GenHo approaches address the problem from different perspectives, where the former relies on learning the disentangled representation composed of domain-invariant content features and domain-specific appearance ones; while the later decomposes the generative process of a generator into two parts for synthesizing the content and appearance sequentially. We perform extensive experiments under various settings of cross-domain data and show the efficacy of our models for generating target-domain data with the abundant content variance as in the source domain, which lead to the favourable performance in comparison to several baselines.

Combining GANs and AutoEncoders for Efficient Anomaly Detection

Fabio Carrara, Giuseppe Amato, Luca Brombin, Fabrizio Falchi, Claudio Gennaro

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Auto-TLDR; CBIGAN: Anomaly Detection in Images with Consistency Constrained BiGAN

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In this work, we propose CBiGAN --- a novel method for anomaly detection in images, where a consistency constraint is introduced as a regularization term in both the encoder and decoder of a BiGAN. Our model exhibits fairly good modeling power and reconstruction consistency capability. We evaluate the proposed method on MVTec AD --- a real-world benchmark for unsupervised anomaly detection on high-resolution images --- and compare against standard baselines and state-of-the-art approaches. Experiments show that the proposed method improves the performance of BiGAN formulations by a large margin and performs comparably to expensive state-of-the-art iterative methods while reducing the computational cost. We also observe that our model is particularly effective in texture-type anomaly detection, as it sets a new state of the art in this category. The code will be publicly released.

A Joint Representation Learning and Feature Modeling Approach for One-Class Recognition

Pramuditha Perera, Vishal Patel

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Auto-TLDR; Combining Generative Features and One-Class Classification for Effective One-class Recognition

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One-class recognition is traditionally approached either as a representation learning problem or a feature modelling problem. In this work, we argue that both of these approaches have their own limitations; and a more effective solution can be obtained by combining the two. The proposed approach is based on the combination of a generative framework and a one-class classification method. First, we learn generative features using the one-class data with a generative framework. We augment the learned features with the corresponding reconstruction errors to obtain augmented features. Then, we qualitatively identify a suitable feature distribution that reduces the redundancy in the chosen classifier space. Finally, we force the augmented features to take the form of this distribution using an adversarial framework. We test the effectiveness of the proposed method on three one-class classification tasks and obtain state-of-the-art results.

Mask-Based Style-Controlled Image Synthesis Using a Mask Style Encoder

Jaehyeong Cho, Wataru Shimoda, Keiji Yanai

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Auto-TLDR; Style-controlled Image Synthesis from Semantic Segmentation masks using GANs

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In recent years, the advances in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown impressive results for image generation and translation tasks. In particular, the image-to-image translation is a method of learning mapping from a source domain to a target domain and synthesizing an image. Image-to-image translation can be applied to a variety of tasks, making it possible to quickly and easily synthesize realistic images from semantic segmentation masks. However, in the existing image-to-image translation method, there is a limitation on controlling the style of the translated image, and it is not easy to synthesize an image by controlling the style of each mask element in detail. Therefore, we propose an image synthesis method that controls the style of each element by improving the existing image-to-image translation method. In the proposed method, we implement a style encoder that extracts style features for each mask element. The extracted style features are concatenated to the semantic mask in the normalization layer, and used the style-controlled image synthesis of each mask element. In experiments, we train style-controlled images synthesis using the datasets consisting of semantic segmentation masks and real images. The results show that the proposed method has excellent performance for style-controlled images synthesis for each element.

Discriminative Multi-Level Reconstruction under Compact Latent Space for One-Class Novelty Detection

Jaewoo Park, Yoon Gyo Jung, Andrew Teoh

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Auto-TLDR; Discriminative Compact AE for One-Class novelty detection and Adversarial Example Detection

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In one-class novelty detection, a model learns solely on the in-class data to single out out-class instances. Autoencoder (AE) variants aim to compactly model the in-class data to reconstruct it exclusively, thus differentiating the in-class from out-class by the reconstruction error. However, compact modeling in an improper way might collapse the latent representations of the in-class data and thus their reconstruction, which would lead to performance deterioration. Moreover, to properly measure the reconstruction error of high-dimensional data, a metric is required that captures high-level semantics of the data. To this end, we propose Discriminative Compact AE (DCAE) that learns both compact and collapse-free latent representations of the in-class data, thereby reconstructing them both finely and exclusively. In DCAE, (a) we force a compact latent space to bijectively represent the in-class data by reconstructing them through internal discriminative layers of generative adversarial nets. (b) Based on the deep encoder's vulnerability to open set risk, out-class instances are encoded into the same compact latent space and reconstructed poorly without sacrificing the quality of in-class data reconstruction. (c) In inference, the reconstruction error is measured by a novel metric that computes the dissimilarity between a query and its reconstruction based on the class semantics captured by the internal discriminator. Extensive experiments on public image datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed model on both novelty and adversarial example detection, delivering state-of-the-art performance.

Multi-Modal Deep Clustering: Unsupervised Partitioning of Images

Guy Shiran, Daphna Weinshall

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Auto-TLDR; Multi-Modal Deep Clustering for Unlabeled Images

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The clustering of unlabeled raw images is a daunting task, which has recently been approached with some success by deep learning methods. Here we propose an unsupervised clustering framework, which learns a deep neural network in an end-to-end fashion, providing direct cluster assignments of images without additional processing. Multi-Modal Deep Clustering (MMDC), trains a deep network to align its image embeddings with target points sampled from a Gaussian Mixture Model distribution. The cluster assignments are then determined by mixture component association of image embeddings. Simultaneously, the same deep network is trained to solve an additional self-supervised task. This pushes the network to learn more meaningful image representations and stabilizes the training. Experimental results show that MMDC achieves or exceeds state-of-the-art performance on four challenging benchmarks. On natural image datasets we improve on previous results with significant margins of up to 11% absolute accuracy points, yielding an accuracy of 70% on CIFAR-10 and 61% on STL-10.

Feature-Dependent Cross-Connections in Multi-Path Neural Networks

Dumindu Tissera, Kasun Vithanage, Rukshan Wijesinghe, Kumara Kahatapitiya, Subha Fernando, Ranga Rodrigo

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Auto-TLDR; Multi-path Networks for Adaptive Feature Extraction

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Learning a particular task from a dataset, samples in which originate from diverse contexts, is challenging, and usually addressed by deepening or widening standard neural networks. As opposed to conventional network widening, multi-path architectures restrict the quadratic increment of complexity to a linear scale. However, existing multi-column/path networks or model ensembling methods do not consider any feature-dependant allocation of parallel resources, and therefore, tend to learn redundant features. Given a layer in a multi-path network, if we restrict each path to learn a context-specific set of features and introduce a mechanism to intelligently allocate incoming feature maps to such paths, each path can specialize in a certain context, reducing the redundancy and improving the quality of extracted features. This eventually leads to better-optimized usage of parallel resources. To do this, we propose inserting feature-dependant cross-connections between parallel sets of feature maps in successive layers. The weights of these cross-connections are learned based on the input features of the particular layer. Our multi-path networks show improved image recognition accuracy at a similar complexity compared to conventional and state-of-the-art methods for deepening, widening and adaptive feature extracting, in both small and large scale datasets.

Separation of Aleatoric and Epistemic Uncertainty in Deterministic Deep Neural Networks

Denis Huseljic, Bernhard Sick, Marek Herde, Daniel Kottke

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Auto-TLDR; AE-DNN: Modeling Uncertainty in Deep Neural Networks

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Despite the success of deep neural networks (DNN) in many applications, their ability to model uncertainty is still significantly limited. For example, in safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving, it is crucial to obtain a prediction that reflects different types of uncertainty to address life-threatening situations appropriately. In such cases, it is essential to be aware of the risk (i.e., aleatoric uncertainty) and the reliability (i.e., epistemic uncertainty) that comes with a prediction. We present AE-DNN, a model allowing the separation of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty while maintaining a proper generalization capability. AE-DNN is based on deterministic DNN, which can determine the respective uncertainty measures in a single forward pass. In analyses with synthetic and image data, we show that our method improves the modeling of epistemic uncertainty while providing an intuitively understandable separation of risk and reliability.

Local-Global Interactive Network for Face Age Transformation

Jie Song, Ping Wei, Huan Li, Yongchi Zhang, Nanning Zheng

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Auto-TLDR; A Novel Local-Global Interaction Framework for Long-span Face Age Transformation

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Face age transformation, which aims to generate a face image in the past or future, has receiving increasing attention due to its significant application value in some special fields, such as looking for a lost child, tracking criminals and entertainment, etc. Currently, most existing methods mainly focus on unidirectional short-span face aging. In this paper, we propose a novel local-global interaction framework for long-span face age transformation. Firstly, we divide a face image into five independent parts and design a local generative network for each of them to learn the local structure changes of a face image, while we utilize a global generative network to learn the global structure changes. Then we introduce an interactive network and an age classification network, which are respectively used to integrate the local and global features and maintain the corresponding age features in different age groups. Given any face image at a certain age, our network can produce a clear and realistic image of face aging or rejuvenation. We test and evaluate the model on complex datasets, and extensive qualitative comparison experiments has proved the effectiveness and immense potential of our proposed method.

Disentangled Representation Learning for Controllable Image Synthesis: An Information-Theoretic Perspective

Shichang Tang, Xu Zhou, Xuming He, Yi Ma

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Auto-TLDR; Controllable Image Synthesis in Deep Generative Models using Variational Auto-Encoder

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In this paper, we look into the problem of disentangled representation learning and controllable image synthesis in a deep generative model. We develop an encoder-decoder architecture for a variant of the Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) with two latent codes $z_1$ and $z_2$. Our framework uses $z_2$ to capture specified factors of variation while $z_1$ captures the complementary factors of variation. To this end, we analyze the learning problem from the perspective of multivariate mutual information, derive optimizable lower bounds of the conditional mutual information in the image synthesis processes and incorporate them into the training objective. We validate our method empirically on the Color MNIST dataset and the CelebA dataset by showing controllable image syntheses. Our proposed paradigm is simple yet effective and is applicable to many situations, including those where there is not an explicit factorization of features available, or where the features are non-categorical.

UCCTGAN: Unsupervised Clothing Color Transformation Generative Adversarial Network

Shuming Sun, Xiaoqiang Li, Jide Li

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Auto-TLDR; An Unsupervised Clothing Color Transformation Generative Adversarial Network

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Clothing color transformation refers to changing the clothes color in an original image to the clothes color in a target image. In this paper, we propose an Unsupervised Clothing Color Transformation Generative Adversarial Network (UCCTGAN) for the task. UCCTGAN adopts the color histogram of a target clothes as color guidance and an improved U-net architecture called AntennaNet is put forward to fuse the extracted color information with the original image. Meanwhile, to accomplish unsupervised learning, the loss function is carefully designed according to color moment, which evaluates the chromatic aberration between the target clothing and the generated clothing. Experimental results show that our network has the ability to generate convincing color transformation results.

High Resolution Face Age Editing

Xu Yao, Gilles Puy, Alasdair Newson, Yann Gousseau, Pierre Hellier

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Auto-TLDR; An Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Face Age editing on High Resolution Images

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Face age editing has become a crucial task in film post-production, and is also becoming popular for general purpose photography. Recently, adversarial training has produced some of the most visually impressive results for image manipulation, including the face aging/de-aging task. In spite of considerable progress, current methods often present visual artifacts and can only deal with low-resolution images. In order to achieve aging/de-aging with the high quality and robustness necessary for wider use, these problems need to be addressed. This is the goal of the present work. We present an encoder-decoder architecture for face age editing. The core idea of our network is to encode a face image to age-invariant features, and learn a modulation vector corresponding to a target age. We then combine these two elements to produce a realistic image of the person with the desired target age. Our architecture is greatly simplified with respect to other approaches, and allows for fine-grained age editing on high resolution images in a single unified model. Source codes are available at https://github.com/InterDigitalInc/HRFAE.

An Unsupervised Approach towards Varying Human Skin Tone Using Generative Adversarial Networks

Debapriya Roy, Diganta Mukherjee, Bhabatosh Chanda

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Auto-TLDR; Unsupervised Skin Tone Change Using Augmented Reality Based Models

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With the increasing popularity of augmented and virtual reality, retailers are now more focusing towards customer satisfaction to increase the amount of sales. Although augmented reality is not a new concept but it has gained its much needed attention over the past few years. Our present work is targeted towards this direction which may be used to enhance user experience in various virtual and augmented reality based applications. We propose a model to change skin tone of person. Given any input image of a person or a group of persons with some value indicating the desired change of skin color towards fairness or darkness, this method can change the skin tone of the persons in the image. This is an unsupervised method and also unconstrained in terms of pose, illumination, number of persons in the image etc. The goal of this work is to reduce the complexity in terms of time and effort which is generally needed for changing the skin tone using existing applications by professionals or novice. Rigorous experiments shows the efficacy of this method in terms of synthesizing perceptually convincing outputs.

Enlarging Discriminative Power by Adding an Extra Class in Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Hai Tran, Sumyeong Ahn, Taeyoung Lee, Yung Yi

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Auto-TLDR; Unsupervised Domain Adaptation using Artificial Classes

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We study the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation that aims at obtaining a prediction model for the target domain using labeled data from the source domain and unlabeled data from the target domain. There exists an array of recent research based on the idea of extracting features that are not only invariant for both domains but also provide high discriminative power for the target domain. In this paper, we propose an idea of improving the discriminativeness: Adding an extra artificial class and training the model on the given data together with the GAN-generated samples of the new class. The trained model based on the new class samples is capable of extracting the features that are more discriminative by repositioning data of current classes in the target domain and therefore increasing the distances among the target clusters in the feature space. Our idea is highly generic so that it is compatible with many existing methods such as DANN, VADA, and DIRT-T. We conduct various experiments for the standard data commonly used for the evaluation of unsupervised domain adaptations and demonstrate that our algorithm achieves the SOTA performance for many scenarios.

JUMPS: Joints Upsampling Method for Pose Sequences

Lucas Mourot, Francois Le Clerc, Cédric Thébault, Pierre Hellier

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Auto-TLDR; JUMPS: Increasing the Number of Joints in 2D Pose Estimation and Recovering Occluded or Missing Joints

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Human Pose Estimation is a low-level task useful for surveillance, human action recognition, and scene understanding at large. It also offers promising perspectives for the animation of synthetic characters. For all these applications, and especially the latter, estimating the positions of many joints is desirable for improved performance and realism. To this purpose, we propose a novel method called JUMPS for increasing the number of joints in 2D pose estimates and recovering occluded or missing joints. We believe this is the first attempt to address the issue. We build on a deep generative model that combines a GAN and an encoder. The GAN learns the distribution of high-resolution human pose sequences, the encoder maps the input low-resolution sequences to its latent space. Inpainting is obtained by computing the latent representation whose decoding by the GAN generator optimally matches the joints locations at the input. Post-processing a 2D pose sequence using our method provides a richer representation of the character motion. We show experimentally that the localization accuracy of the additional joints is on average on par with the original pose estimates.

Image Inpainting with Contrastive Relation Network

Xiaoqiang Zhou, Junjie Li, Zilei Wang, Ran He, Tieniu Tan

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Auto-TLDR; Two-Stage Inpainting with Graph-based Relation Network

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Image inpainting faces the challenging issue of the requirements on structure reasonableness and texture coherence. In this paper, we propose a two-stage inpainting framework to address this issue. The basic idea is to address the two requirements in two separate stages. Completed segmentation of the corrupted image is firstly predicted through segmentation reconstruction network, while fine-grained image details are restored in the second stage through an image generator. The two stages are connected in series as the image details are generated under the guidance of completed segmentation map that predicted in the first stage. Specifically, in the second stage, we propose a novel graph-based relation network to model the relationship existed in corrupted image. In relation network, both intra-relationship for pixels in the same semantic region and inter-relationship between different semantic parts are considered, improving the consistency and compatibility of image textures. Besides, contrastive loss is designed to facilitate the relation network training. Such a framework not only simplifies the inpainting problem directly, but also exploits the relationship in corrupted image explicitly. Extensive experiments on various public datasets quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared with the state-of-the-art.

A Novel Random Forest Dissimilarity Measure for Multi-View Learning

Hongliu Cao, Simon Bernard, Robert Sabourin, Laurent Heutte

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Auto-TLDR; Multi-view Learning with Random Forest Relation Measure and Instance Hardness

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Multi-view learning is a learning task in which data is described by several concurrent representations. Its main challenge is most often to exploit the complementarities between these representations to help solve a classification/regression task. This is a challenge that can be met nowadays if there is a large amount of data available for learning. However, this is not necessarily true for all real-world problems, where data are sometimes scarce (e.g. problems related to the medical environment). In these situations, an effective strategy is to use intermediate representations based on the dissimilarities between instances. This work presents new ways of constructing these dissimilarity representations, learning them from data with Random Forest classifiers. More precisely, two methods are proposed, which modify the Random Forest proximity measure, to adapt it to the context of High Dimension Low Sample Size (HDLSS) multi-view classification problems. The second method, based on an Instance Hardness measurement, is significantly more accurate than other state-of-the-art measurements including the original RF Proximity measurement and the Large Margin Nearest Neighbor (LMNN) metric learning measurement.

Variational Capsule Encoder

Harish Raviprakash, Syed Anwar, Ulas Bagci

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Auto-TLDR; Bayesian Capsule Networks for Representation Learning in latent space

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We propose a novel capsule network based variational encoder architecture, called Bayesian capsules (B-Caps), to modulate the mean and standard deviation of the sampling distribution in the latent space. We hypothesize that this approach can learn a better representation of features in the latent space than traditional approaches. Our hypothesis was tested by using the learned latent variables for image reconstruction task, where for MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets, different classes were separated successfully in the latent space using our proposed model. Our experimental results have shown improved reconstruction and classification performances for both datasets adding credence to our hypothesis. We also showed that by increasing the latent space dimension, the proposed B-Caps was able to learn a better representation when compared to the traditional variational auto-encoders (VAE). Hence our results indicate the strength of capsule networks in representation learning which has never been examined under the VAE settings before.

Ω-GAN: Object Manifold Embedding GAN for Image Generation by Disentangling Parameters into Pose and Shape Manifolds

Yasutomo Kawanishi, Daisuke Deguchi, Ichiro Ide, Hiroshi Murase

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Auto-TLDR; Object Manifold Embedding GAN with Parametric Sampling and Object Identity Loss

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In this paper, we propose Object Manifold Embedding GAN (Ω-GAN) to generate images of variously shaped and arbitrarily posed objects from a noise variable sampled from a distribution defined over the pose and the shape manifolds in a vector space. We introduce Parametric Manifold Sampling to sample noise variables from a distribution over the pose manifold to conditionally generate object images in arbitrary poses by tuning the pose parameter. We also introduce Object Identity Loss for clearly disentangling the pose and shape parameters, which allows us to maintain the shape of the object instance when only the pose parameter is changed. Through evaluation, we confirmed that the proposed Ω-GAN could generate variously shaped object images in arbitrary poses by changing the pose and shape parameters independently. We also introduce an application of the proposed method for object pose estimation, through which we confirmed that the object poses in the generated images are accurate.

Augmentation of Small Training Data Using GANs for Enhancing the Performance of Image Classification

Shih-Kai Hung, John Q. Gan

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Auto-TLDR; Generative Adversarial Network for Image Training Data Augmentation

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It is difficult to achieve high performance without sufficient training data for deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) to learn. Data augmentation plays an important role in improving robustness and preventing overfitting in machine learning for many applications such as image classification. In this paper, a novel method for data augmentation is proposed to solve the problem of machine learning with small training datasets. The proposed method can synthesise similar images with rich diversity from only a single original training sample to increase the number of training data by using generative adversarial networks (GANs). It is expected that the synthesised images possess class-informative features, which may be in the validation or testing data but not in the training data due to that the training dataset is small, and thus they can be effective as augmented training data to improve classification accuracy of DCNNs. The experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed method with a novel GAN framework for image training data augmentation can significantly enhance the classification performance of DCNNs for applications where original training data is limited.

CardioGAN: An Attention-Based Generative Adversarial Network for Generation of Electrocardiograms

Subhrajyoti Dasgupta, Sudip Das, Ujjwal Bhattacharya

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Auto-TLDR; CardioGAN: Generative Adversarial Network for Synthetic Electrocardiogram Signals

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Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal is studied to obtain crucial information about the condition of a patient's heart. Machine learning based automated medical diagnostic systems that may help to evaluate the condition of the heart from this signal are required to be trained using large volumes of labelled training samples and the same may increase the chance of compromising with the patients' privacy. To solve this issue, generation of synthetic electrocardiogram signals by learning only from the general distributions of the available real training samples have been attempted in the literature. However, these studies did not pay necessary attention to the specific vital details of these signals, such as the P wave, the QRS complex, and the T wave. This shortcoming often results in the generation of unrealistic synthetic signals, such as a signal which does not contain one or more of the above components. In the present study, a novel deep generative architecture, termed as CardioGAN, based on generative adversarial network and powered by the effective attention mechanism has been designed which is capable of learning the intricate inter-dependencies among the various parts of real samples leading to the generation of more realistic electrocardiogram signals. Also, it helps in reducing the risk of breaching the privacy of patients. Extensive experimentation performed by us establishes that the proposed method achieves a better performance in generating synthetic electrocardiogram signals in comparison to the existing methods. The source code will be made available on github.

Identity-Preserved Face Beauty Transformation with Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks

Zhitong Huang, Ching Y Suen

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Auto-TLDR; Identity-preserved face beauty transformation using conditional GANs

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Identity-preserved face beauty transformation aims to change the beauty scale of a face image while preserving the identity of the original face. In our framework of conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (cGANs), the synthesized face produced by the generator would have the same beauty scale indicated by the input condition. Unlike the discrete class labels used in most cGANs, the condition of target beauty scale in our framework is given by a continuous real-valued beauty score in the range [1 to 5], which makes the work challenging. To tackle the problem, we have implemented a triple structure, in which the conditional discriminator is divided into a normal discriminator and a separate face beauty predictor. We have also developed another new structure called Conditioned Instance Normalization to replace the original concatenation used in cGANs, which makes the combination of the input image and condition more effective. Furthermore, Self-Consistency Loss is introduced as a new parameter to improve the stability of training and quality of the generated image. In the end, the objectives of beauty transformation and identity preservation are evaluated by the pretrained face beauty predictor and state-of-the-art face recognition network. The result is encouraging and it also shows that certain facial features could be synthesized by the generator according to the target beauty scale, while preserving the original identity.

Free-Form Image Inpainting Via Contrastive Attention Network

Xin Ma, Xiaoqiang Zhou, Huaibo Huang, Zhenhua Chai, Xiaolin Wei, Ran He

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Auto-TLDR; Self-supervised Siamese inference for image inpainting

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Most deep learning based image inpainting approaches adopt autoencoder or its variants to fill missing regions in images. Encoders are usually utilized to learn powerful representational spaces, which are important for dealing with sophisticated learning tasks. Specifically, in the image inpainting task, masks with any shapes can appear anywhere in images (i.e., free-form masks) forming complex patterns. It is difficult for encoders to capture such powerful representations under this complex situation. To tackle this problem, we propose a self-supervised Siamese inference network to improve the robustness and generalization. Moreover, the restored image usually can not be harmoniously integrated into the exiting content, especially in the boundary area. To address this problem, we propose a novel Dual Attention Fusion module (DAF), which can combine both the restored and known regions in a smoother way and be inserted into decoder layers in a plug-and-play way. DAF is developed to not only adaptively rescale channel-wise features by taking interdependencies between channels into account but also force deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) focusing more on unknown regions. In this way, the unknown region will be naturally filled from the outside to the inside. Qualitative and quantitative experiments on multiple datasets, including facial and natural datasets (i.e., Celeb-HQ, Pairs Street View, Places2 and ImageNet), demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms against state-of-the-arts in generating high-quality inpainting results.