Abstract: In this paper we present a deep learning method to estimate the illuminant of an image. Our model is not trained with illuminant annotations, but with the objective of improving performance on an auxiliary task such as object recognition. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first example of a deep
learning architecture for illuminant estimation that is trained without ground truth illuminants. We evaluate our solution on standard datasets for color constancy, and compare it with state of the art methods. Our proposal is shown to outperform most deep learning methods in a cross-dataset evaluation
setup, and to present competitive results in a comparison with parametric solutions.

Abstract: In this paper we propose an approach to avoiding catastrophic forgetting in sequential task learning scenarios. Our technique is based on a network reparameterization that approximately diagonalizes the Fisher Information Matrix of the network parameters. This reparameterization takes the form of
a factorized rotation of parameter space which, when used in conjunction with Elastic Weight Consolidation (which assumes a diagonal Fisher Information Matrix), leads to significantly better performance on lifelong learning of sequential tasks. Experimental results on the MNIST, CIFAR-100, CUB-200 and
Stanford-40 datasets demonstrate that we significantly improve the results of standard elastic weight consolidation, and that we obtain competitive results when compared to the state-of-the-art in lifelong learning without forgetting.

Abstract: This paper describes the multimodal Neural Machine Translation systems developed by LIUM and CVC for WMT18 Shared Task on Multimodal Translation. This year we propose several modifications to our previou multimodal attention architecture in order to better integrate convolutional features and refine them using encoder-side information. Our final constrained submissions
ranked first for English→French and second for English→German language pairs among the constrained submissions according to the automatic evaluation metric METEOR.

Abstract: Previous works on sequential learning address the problem of forgetting in discriminative models. In this paper we consider the case of generative models. In particular, we investigate generative adversarial networks (GANs) in the task of learning new categories in a sequential fashion. We first show that sequential fine tuning renders the network unable to properly generate images from previous categories (ie forgetting). Addressing this problem, we propose Memory Replay GANs (MeRGANs), a conditional GAN framework that integrates a memory replay generator. We study two methods to prevent forgetting by leveraging these replays, namely joint training with replay and replay alignment. Qualitative and quantitative experimental results in MNIST, SVHN and LSUN datasets show that our memory replay approach can generate competitive images while significantly mitigating the forgetting of previous categories.

Abstract: Siamese approaches address the visual tracking problem by extracting an appearance template from the current frame, which is used to localize the target in the next frame. In general, this template is linearly combined with the accumulated template from the previous frame, resulting in an exponential decay of information over time. While such an approach to updating has led to improved results, its simplicity limits the potential gain likely to be obtained by learning to update. Therefore, we propose to replace the handcrafted update function with a method which learns to update. We use a convolutional neural network, called UpdateNet, which given the initial template, the accumulated template and the template of the current frame aims to estimate the optimal template for the next frame. The UpdateNet is compact and can easily be integrated into existing Siamese trackers. We demonstrate the generality of the proposed approach by applying it to two Siamese trackers, SiamFC and DaSiamRPN. Extensive experiments on VOT2016, VOT2018, LaSOT, and TrackingNet datasets demonstrate that our UpdateNet effectively predicts the new target template, outperforming the standard linear update. On the large-scale TrackingNet dataset, our UpdateNet improves the results of DaSiamRPN with an absolute gain of 3.9% in terms of success score.

Abstract: Metric learning networks are used to compute image embeddings, which are widely used in many applications such as image retrieval and face recognition. In this paper, we propose to use network distillation to efficiently compute image embeddings with small networks. Network distillation has been successfully applied to improve image classification, but has hardly been explored for metric learning. To do so, we propose two new loss functions that model the
communication of a deep teacher network to a small student network. We evaluate our system in several datasets, including CUB-200-2011, Cars-196, Stanford Online Products and show that embeddings computed using small student networks perform significantly better than those computed using standard networks of similar size. Results on a very compact network (MobileNet-0.25), which can be
used on mobile devices, show that the proposed method can greatly improve Recall@1 results from 27.5% to 44.6%. Furthermore, we investigate various aspects of distillation for embeddings, including hint and attention layers, semisupervised learning and cross quality distillation.

Abstract: The cost of drawing object bounding boxes (ie labeling) for millions of images is prohibitively high. For instance, labeling pedestrians in a regular urban image could take 35 seconds on average. Active learning aims to reduce the cost of labeling by selecting only those images that are informative to improve the detection network accuracy. In this paper, we propose a method to perform active learning of object detectors based on convolutional neural networks. We propose a new image-level scoring process to rank unlabeled images for their automatic selection, which clearly outperforms classical scores. The proposed method can be applied to videos and sets of still images. In the former case, temporal selection rules can complement our scoring process. As a relevant use case, we extensively study the performance of our method on the task of pedestrian detection. Overall, the experiments show that the proposed method performs better than random selection.

Abstract: Mirror symmetry is a property most likely to be encountered in animals than in medium scale vegetation or inanimate objects in the natural world. This might be the reason why the human visual system has evolved to detect it quickly and robustly. Indeed, the perception of symmetry assists higher-level visual processing that are crucial for survival such as target recognition and identification irrespective of position and location. Although the task of detecting symmetrical objects seems effortless to us, it is very challenging for computers (to the extent that it has been proposed as a robust “captcha” by Funk & Liu in 2016). Indeed, the exact mechanism of symmetry detection in primates is not well understood: fMRI studies have shown that symmetrical shapes activate specific higher-level areas of the visual cortex (Sasaki et al.; 2005) and similarly, a large body of psychophysical experiments suggest that the symmetry perception is critically influenced by low-level mechanisms (Treder; 2010). In this work we attempt to find plausible low-level mechanisms that might form the basis for symmetry perception. Our simple model is made from banks of (i) odd-symmetric Gabors (resembling edge-detecting V1 neurons); and (ii) banks of larger odd- and even-symmetric Gabors (resembling higher visual cortex neurons), that pool signals from the 'edge image'. As reported previously (Akbarinia et al, ECVP2017), the convolution of the symmetrical lines with the two Gabor kernels of alternative phase produces a minimum in one and a maximum in the other (Osorio; 1996), and the rectification and combination of these signals create lines which hint of mirror symmetry in natural images. We improved the algorithm by combining these signals across several spatial scales. Our preliminary results suggest that such multiscale combination of convolutional operations might form the basis for much of the operation of the HVS in terms of symmetry detection and representation.

Abstract: In this study we present a unifed model of the visual cortex for predicting visual attention using real image scenes. Feedforward mechanisms from RGC and LGN have been functionally modeled using wavelet filters at distinct orientations and scales for each chromatic pathway (Magno-, Parvo-, Konio-cellular) and polarity (ON-/OFF-center), by processing image components in the CIE Lab space. In V1, we process cortical interactions with an excitatory-inhibitory network of fring rate neurons, initially proposed by (Li, 1999), later extended by (Penacchio et al. 2013). Firing rates from model’s output have been used as predictors of neuronal activity to be projected in a map in superior colliculus (with WTA-like computations), determining locations of visual fxations. These locations will be considered as already visited areas for future saccades, therefore we integrated a spatiotemporal function of inhibition of return mechanisms (where LIP/FEF is responsible) to feed to the model with spatial memory for next saccades. Foveation mechanisms have been simulated with a cortical magnifcation function, which distort spatial viewing properties for each fxation. Results show lower prediction errors than with respect no IoR cases (Fig. 1), and it is functionally consistent with human psychophysical measurements. Our model follows a biologically-constrained architecture, previously shown to reproduce visual saliency (Berga & Otazu, 2018), visual discomfort (Penacchio et al. 2016), brightness (Penacchio et al. 2013) and chromatic induction (Cerda & Otazu, 2016).