Research papers and code for "Philip H. S. Torr":
Pixelwise Instance Segmentation with a Dynamically Instantiated Network
Anurag Arnab, Philip H. S Torr
Semantic segmentation and object detection research have recently achieved rapid progress. However, the former task has no notion of different instances of the same object, and the latter operates at a coarse, bounding-box level. We propose an Instance Segmentation system that produces a segmentation map where each pixel is assigned an object class and instance identity label. Most approaches adapt object detectors to produce segments instead of boxes. In contrast, our method is based on an initial semantic segmentation module, which feeds into an instance subnetwork. This subnetwork uses the initial category-level segmentation, along with cues from the output of an object detector, within an end-to-end CRF to predict instances. This part of our model is dynamically instantiated to produce a variable number of instances per image. Our end-to-end approach requires no post-processing and considers the image holistically, instead of processing independent proposals. Therefore, unlike some related work, a pixel cannot belong to multiple instances. Furthermore, far more precise segmentations are achieved, as shown by our state-of-the-art results (particularly at high IoU thresholds) on the Pascal VOC and Cityscapes datasets.
* CVPR 2017
Bottom-up Instance Segmentation using Deep Higher-Order CRFs
Anurag Arnab, Philip H. S. Torr
Traditional Scene Understanding problems such as Object Detection and Semantic Segmentation have made breakthroughs in recent years due to the adoption of deep learning. However, the former task is not able to localise objects at a pixel level, and the latter task has no notion of different instances of objects of the same class. We focus on the task of Instance Segmentation which recognises and localises objects down to a pixel level. Our model is based on a deep neural network trained for semantic segmentation. This network incorporates a Conditional Random Field with end-to-end trainable higher order potentials based on object detector outputs. This allows us to reason about instances from an initial, category-level semantic segmentation. Our simple method effectively leverages the great progress recently made in semantic segmentation and object detection. The accurate instance-level segmentations that our network produces is reflected by the considerable improvements obtained over previous work.
* British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC) 2016
Object Proposal Generation using Two-Stage Cascade SVMs
Ziming Zhang, Philip H. S. Torr
Object proposal algorithms have shown great promise as a first step for object recognition and detection. Good object proposal generation algorithms require high object recall rate as well as low computational cost, because generating object proposals is usually utilized as a preprocessing step. The problem of how to accelerate the object proposal generation and evaluation process without decreasing recall is thus of great interest. In this paper, we propose a new object proposal generation method using two-stage cascade SVMs, where in the first stage linear filters are learned for predefined quantized scales/aspect-ratios independently, and in the second stage a global linear classifier is learned across all the quantized scales/aspect-ratios for calibration, so that all the proposals can be compared properly. The proposals with highest scores are our final output. Specifically, we explain our scale/aspect-ratio quantization scheme, and investigate the effects of combinations of $\ell_1$ and $\ell_2$ regularizers in cascade SVMs with/without ranking constraints in learning. Comprehensive experiments on VOC2007 dataset are conducted, and our results achieve the state-of-the-art performance with high object recall rate and high computational efficiency. Besides, our method has been demonstrated to be suitable for not only class-specific but also generic object proposal generation.
Recurrent Instance Segmentation
Bernardino Romera-Paredes, Philip H. S. Torr
Instance segmentation is the problem of detecting and delineating each distinct object of interest appearing in an image. Current instance segmentation approaches consist of ensembles of modules that are trained independently of each other, thus missing opportunities for joint learning. Here we propose a new instance segmentation paradigm consisting in an end-to-end method that learns how to segment instances sequentially. The model is based on a recurrent neural network that sequentially finds objects and their segmentations one at a time. This net is provided with a spatial memory that keeps track of what pixels have been explained and allows occlusion handling. In order to train the model we designed a principled loss function that accurately represents the properties of the instance segmentation problem. In the experiments carried out, we found that our method outperforms recent approaches on multiple person segmentation, and all state of the art approaches on the Plant Phenotyping dataset for leaf counting.
* ECCV 2016. 14th European Conference on Computer Vision
* 14 pages (main paper). 24 pages including references and appendix
Hypergraph Convolution and Hypergraph Attention
Song Bai, Feihu Zhang, Philip H. S. Torr
Recently, graph neural networks have attracted great attention and achieved prominent performance in various research fields. Most of those algorithms have assumed pairwise relationships of objects of interest. However, in many real applications, the relationships between objects are in higher-order, beyond a pairwise formulation. To efficiently learn deep embeddings on the high-order graph-structured data, we introduce two end-to-end trainable operators to the family of graph neural networks, i.e., hypergraph convolution and hypergraph attention. Whilst hypergraph convolution defines the basic formulation of performing convolution on a hypergraph, hypergraph attention further enhances the capacity of representation learning by leveraging an attention module. With the two operators, a graph neural network is readily extended to a more flexible model and applied to diverse applications where non-pairwise relationships are observed. Extensive experimental results with semi-supervised node classification demonstrate the effectiveness of hypergraph convolution and hypergraph attention.
Weakly- and Semi-Supervised Panoptic Segmentation
Qizhu Li, Anurag Arnab, Philip H. S Torr
We present a weakly supervised model that jointly performs both semantic- and instance-segmentation -- a particularly relevant problem given the substantial cost of obtaining pixel-perfect annotation for these tasks. In contrast to many popular instance segmentation approaches based on object detectors, our method does not predict any overlapping instances. Moreover, we are able to segment both "thing" and "stuff" classes, and thus explain all the pixels in the image. "Thing" classes are weakly-supervised with bounding boxes, and "stuff" with image-level tags. We obtain state-of-the-art results on Pascal VOC, for both full and weak supervision (which achieves about 95% of fully-supervised performance). Furthermore, we present the first weakly-supervised results on Cityscapes for both semantic- and instance-segmentation. Finally, we use our weakly supervised framework to analyse the relationship between annotation quality and predictive performance, which is of interest to dataset creators.
* ECCV 2018. The first two authors contributed equally
With Friends Like These, Who Needs Adversaries?
Saumya Jetley, Nicholas A. Lord, Philip H. S. Torr
The vulnerability of deep image classification networks to adversarial attack is now well known, but less well understood. Via a novel experimental analysis, we illustrate some facts about deep convolutional networks (DCNs) that shed new light on their behaviour and its connection to the problem of adversaries, with two key results. The first is a straightforward explanation of the existence of universal adversarial perturbations and their association with specific class identities, obtained by analysing the properties of nets' logit responses as functions of 1D movements along specific image-space directions. The second is the clear demonstration of the tight coupling between classification performance and vulnerability to adversarial attack within the spaces spanned by these directions. Prior work has noted the importance of low-dimensional subspaces in adversarial vulnerability: we illustrate that this likewise represents the nets' notion of saliency. In all, we provide a digestible perspective from which to understand previously reported results which have appeared disjoint or contradictory, with implications for efforts to construct neural nets that are both accurate and robust to adversarial attack.
* 15 pages, 7 figures, 1 table
On the Robustness of Semantic Segmentation Models to Adversarial Attacks
Anurag Arnab, Ondrej Miksik, Philip H. S. Torr
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have demonstrated exceptional performance on most recognition tasks such as image classification and segmentation. However, they have also been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial examples. This phenomenon has recently attracted a lot of attention but it has not been extensively studied on multiple, large-scale datasets and structured prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation which often require more specialised networks with additional components such as CRFs, dilated convolutions, skip-connections and multiscale processing. In this paper, we present what to our knowledge is the first rigorous evaluation of adversarial attacks on modern semantic segmentation models, using two large-scale datasets. We analyse the effect of different network architectures, model capacity and multiscale processing, and show that many observations made on the task of classification do not always transfer to this more complex task. Furthermore, we show how mean-field inference in deep structured models, multiscale processing (and more generally, input transformations) naturally implement recently proposed adversarial defenses. Our observations will aid future efforts in understanding and defending against adversarial examples. Moreover, in the shorter term, we show how to effectively benchmark robustness and show which segmentation models should currently be preferred in safety-critical applications due to their inherent robustness.
* CVPR 2018 extended version
Intriguing Properties of Learned Representations
Amartya Sanyal, Varun Kanade, Philip H. S. Torr
A key feature of neural networks, particularly deep convolutional neural networks, is their ability to "learn" useful representations from data. The very last layer of a neural network is then simply a linear model trained on these "learned" representations. Despite their numerous applications in other tasks such as classification, retrieval, clustering etc., a.k.a. transfer learning, not much work has been published that investigates the structure of these representations or indeed whether structure can be imposed on them during the training process. In this paper, we study the effective dimensionality of the learned representations by models that have proved highly successful for image classification. We focus on ResNet-18, ResNet-50 and VGG-19 and observe that when trained on CIFAR10 or CIFAR100, the learned representations exhibit a fairly low rank structure. We propose a modification to the training procedure, which further encourages low rank structure on learned activations. Empirically, we show that this has implications for robustness to adversarial examples and compression.
Holistic, Instance-Level Human Parsing
Qizhu Li, Anurag Arnab, Philip H. S. Torr
Object parsing -- the task of decomposing an object into its semantic parts -- has traditionally been formulated as a category-level segmentation problem. Consequently, when there are multiple objects in an image, current methods cannot count the number of objects in the scene, nor can they determine which part belongs to which object. We address this problem by segmenting the parts of objects at an instance-level, such that each pixel in the image is assigned a part label, as well as the identity of the object it belongs to. Moreover, we show how this approach benefits us in obtaining segmentations at coarser granularities as well. Our proposed network is trained end-to-end given detections, and begins with a category-level segmentation module. Thereafter, a differentiable Conditional Random Field, defined over a variable number of instances for every input image, reasons about the identity of each part by associating it with a human detection. In contrast to other approaches, our method can handle the varying number of people in each image and our holistic network produces state-of-the-art results in instance-level part and human segmentation, together with competitive results in category-level part segmentation, all achieved by a single forward-pass through our neural network.
* Poster at BMVC 2017
Feature sampling and partitioning for visual vocabulary generation on large action classification datasets
Michael Sapienza, Fabio Cuzzolin, Philip H. S. Torr
The recent trend in action recognition is towards larger datasets, an increasing number of action classes and larger visual vocabularies. State-of-the-art human action classification in challenging video data is currently based on a bag-of-visual-words pipeline in which space-time features are aggregated globally to form a histogram. The strategies chosen to sample features and construct a visual vocabulary are critical to performance, in fact often dominating performance. In this work we provide a critical evaluation of various approaches to building a vocabulary and show that good practises do have a significant impact. By subsampling and partitioning features strategically, we are able to achieve state-of-the-art results on 5 major action recognition datasets using relatively small visual vocabularies.
A Tiered Move-making Algorithm for General Non-submodular Pairwise Energies
Vibhav Vineet, Jonathan Warrell, Philip H. S. Torr
A large number of problems in computer vision can be modelled as energy minimization problems in a Markov Random Field (MRF) or Conditional Random Field (CRF) framework. Graph-cuts based $\alpha$-expansion is a standard move-making method to minimize the energy functions with sub-modular pairwise terms. However, certain problems require more complex pairwise terms where the $\alpha$-expansion method is generally not applicable. In this paper, we propose an iterative {\em tiered move making algorithm} which is able to handle general pairwise terms. Each move to the next configuration is based on the current labeling and an optimal tiered move, where each tiered move requires one application of the dynamic programming based tiered labeling method introduced in Felzenszwalb et. al. \cite{tiered_cvpr_felzenszwalbV10}. The algorithm converges to a local minimum for any general pairwise potential, and we give a theoretical analysis of the properties of the algorithm, characterizing the situations in which we can expect good performance. We first evaluate our method on an object-class segmentation problem using the Pascal VOC-11 segmentation dataset where we learn general pairwise terms. Further we evaluate the algorithm on many other benchmark labeling problems such as stereo, image segmentation, image stitching and image denoising. Our method consistently gets better accuracy and energy values than alpha-expansion, loopy belief propagation (LBP), quadratic pseudo-boolean optimization (QPBO), and is competitive with TRWS.
Stable Rank Normalization for Improved Generalization in Neural Networks and GANs
Amartya Sanyal, Philip H. S. Torr, Puneet K. Dokania
Exciting new work on the generalization bounds for neural networks (NN) given by Neyshabur et al. , Bartlett et al. closely depend on two parameter-depenedent quantities: the Lipschitz constant upper-bound and the stable rank (a softer version of the rank operator). This leads to an interesting question of whether controlling these quantities might improve the generalization behaviour of NNs. To this end, we propose stable rank normalization (SRN), a novel, optimal, and computationally efficient weight-normalization scheme which minimizes the stable rank of a linear operator. Surprisingly we find that SRN, inspite of being non-convex problem, can be shown to have a unique optimal solution. Moreover, we show that SRN allows control of the data-dependent empirical Lipschitz constant, which in contrast to the Lipschitz upper-bound, reflects the true behaviour of a model on a given dataset. We provide thorough analyses to show that SRN, when applied to the linear layers of a NN for classification, provides striking improvements-11.3% on the generalization gap compared to the standard NN along with significant reduction in memorization. When applied to the discriminator of GANs (called SRN-GAN) it improves Inception, FID, and Neural divergence scores on the CIFAR 10/100 and CelebA datasets, while learning mappings with low empirical Lipschitz constants.
3D Hand Shape and Pose from Images in the Wild
Adnane Boukhayma, Rodrigo de Bem, Philip H. S. Torr
We present in this work the first end-to-end deep learning based method that predicts both 3D hand shape and pose from RGB images in the wild. Our network consists of the concatenation of a deep convolutional encoder, and a fixed model-based decoder. Given an input image, and optionally 2D joint detections obtained from an independent CNN, the encoder predicts a set of hand and view parameters. The decoder has two components: A pre-computed articulated mesh deformation hand model that generates a 3D mesh from the hand parameters, and a re-projection module controlled by the view parameters that projects the generated hand into the image domain. We show that using the shape and pose prior knowledge encoded in the hand model within a deep learning framework yields state-of-the-art performance in 3D pose prediction from images on standard benchmarks, and produces geometrically valid and plausible 3D reconstructions. Additionally, we show that training with weak supervision in the form of 2D joint annotations on datasets of images in the wild, in conjunction with full supervision in the form of 3D joint annotations on limited available datasets allows for good generalization to 3D shape and pose predictions on images in the wild.
Meta Learning Deep Visual Words for Fast Video Object Segmentation
Harkirat Singh Behl, Mohammad Najafi, Philip H. S. Torr
Meta learning has attracted a lot of attention recently. In this paper, we propose a fast and novel meta learning based method for video object segmentation that quickly adapts to new domains without any fine-tuning. The proposed model performs segmentation by matching pixels to object parts. The model represents object parts using deep visual words, and meta learns them with the objective of minimizing the object segmentation loss. This is however not straightforward as no ground-truth information is available for the object parts. We tackle this problem by iteratively performing unsupervised learning of the deep visual words, followed by supervised learning of the segmentation problem, given the visual words. Our experiments show that the proposed method performs on-par with state-of-the-art methods, while being computationally much more efficient.
* The first two authors have contributed equally and assert joint first authorship
Discovering Class-Specific Pixels for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation
Arslan Chaudhry, Puneet K. Dokania, Philip H. S. Torr
We propose an approach to discover class-specific pixels for the weakly-supervised semantic segmentation task. We show that properly combining saliency and attention maps allows us to obtain reliable cues capable of significantly boosting the performance. First, we propose a simple yet powerful hierarchical approach to discover the class-agnostic salient regions, obtained using a salient object detector, which otherwise would be ignored. Second, we use fully convolutional attention maps to reliably localize the class-specific regions in a given image. We combine these two cues to discover class-specific pixels which are then used as an approximate ground truth for training a CNN. While solving the weakly supervised semantic segmentation task, we ensure that the image-level classification task is also solved in order to enforce the CNN to assign at least one pixel to each object present in the image. Experimentally, on the PASCAL VOC12 val and test sets, we obtain the mIoU of 60.8% and 61.9%, achieving the performance gains of 5.1% and 5.2% compared to the published state-of-the-art results. The code is made publicly available.
* 28th British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), 2017
A Signal Propagation Perspective for Pruning Neural Networks at Initialization
Namhoon Lee, Thalaiyasingam Ajanthan, Stephen Gould, Philip H. S. Torr
Network pruning is a promising avenue for compressing deep neural networks. A typical approach to pruning starts by training a model and removing unnecessary parameters while minimizing the impact on what is learned. Alternatively, a recent approach shows that pruning can be done at initialization prior to training. However, it remains unclear exactly why pruning an untrained, randomly initialized neural network is effective. In this work, we consider the pruning problem from a signal propagation perspective, formally characterizing initialization conditions that ensure faithful signal propagation throughout a network. Based on singular values of a network's input-output Jacobian, we find that orthogonal initialization enables more faithful signal propagation compared to other initialization schemes, thereby enhancing pruning results on a range of modern architectures and datasets. Also, we empirically study the effect of supervision for pruning at initialization, and show that often unsupervised pruning can be as effective as the supervised pruning. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our signal propagation perspective, combined with unsupervised pruning, can indeed be useful in various scenarios where pruning is applied to non-standard arbitrarily-designed architectures.
Alpha MAML: Adaptive Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning
Harkirat Singh Behl, Atılım Güneş Baydin, Philip H. S. Torr
Model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) is a meta-learning technique to train a model on a multitude of learning tasks in a way that primes the model for few-shot learning of new tasks. The MAML algorithm performs well on few-shot learning problems in classification, regression, and fine-tuning of policy gradients in reinforcement learning, but comes with the need for costly hyperparameter tuning for training stability. We address this shortcoming by introducing an extension to MAML, called Alpha MAML, to incorporate an online hyperparameter adaptation scheme that eliminates the need to tune meta-learning and learning rates. Our results with the Omniglot database demonstrate a substantial reduction in the need to tune MAML training hyperparameters and improvement to training stability with less sensitivity to hyperparameter choice.
* 6th ICML Workshop on Automated Machine Learning (2019)
GA-Net: Guided Aggregation Net for End-to-end Stereo Matching
Feihu Zhang, Victor Prisacariu, Ruigang Yang, Philip H. S. Torr
In the stereo matching task, matching cost aggregation is crucial in both traditional methods and deep neural network models in order to accurately estimate disparities. We propose two novel neural net layers, aimed at capturing local and the whole-image cost dependencies respectively. The first is a semi-global aggregation layer which is a differentiable approximation of the semi-global matching, the second is the local guided aggregation layer which follows a traditional cost filtering strategy to refine thin structures. These two layers can be used to replace the widely used 3D convolutional layer which is computationally costly and memory-consuming as it has cubic computational/memory complexity. In the experiments, we show that nets with a two-layer guided aggregation block easily outperform the state-of-the-art GC-Net which has nineteen 3D convolutional layers. We also train a deep guided aggregation network (GA-Net) which gets better accuracies than state-of-the-art methods on both Scene Flow dataset and KITTI benchmarks.
* CVPR 2019 (Oral Presentation)
Deep Virtual Networks for Memory Efficient Inference of Multiple Tasks
Eunwoo Kim, Chanho Ahn, Philip H. S. Torr, Songhwai Oh
Deep networks consume a large amount of memory by their nature. A natural question arises can we reduce that memory requirement whilst maintaining performance. In particular, in this work we address the problem of memory efficient learning for multiple tasks. To this end, we propose a novel network architecture producing multiple networks of different configurations, termed deep virtual networks (DVNs), for different tasks. Each DVN is specialized for a single task and structured hierarchically. The hierarchical structure, which contains multiple levels of hierarchy corresponding to different numbers of parameters, enables multiple inference for different memory budgets. The building block of a deep virtual network is based on a disjoint collection of parameters of a network, which we call a unit. The lowest level of hierarchy in a deep virtual network is a unit, and higher levels of hierarchy contain lower levels' units and other additional units. Given a budget on the number of parameters, a different level of a deep virtual network can be chosen to perform the task. A unit can be shared by different DVNs, allowing multiple DVNs in a single network. In addition, shared units provide assistance to the target task with additional knowledge learned from another tasks. This cooperative configuration of DVNs makes it possible to handle different tasks in a memory-aware manner. Our experiments show that the proposed method outperforms existing approaches for multiple tasks. Notably, ours is more efficient than others as it allows memory-aware inference for all tasks.