Abstract: Image-to-image (I2I) translation has matured in recent years and is able to generate high-quality realistic images. However, despite current success, it still faces important challenges when applied to small domains. Existing methods use transfer learning for I2I translation, but they still require the learning of millions of parameters from scratch. This drawback severely limits its application on small domains. In this paper, we propose a new transfer learning for I2I translation (TransferI2I). We decouple our learning process into the image generation step and the I2I translation step. In the first step we propose two novel techniques: source-target initialization and self-initialization of the adaptor layer. The former finetunes the pretrained generative model (e.g., StyleGAN) on source and target data. The latter allows to initialize all non-pretrained network parameters without the need of any data. These techniques provide a better initialization for the I2I translation step. In addition, we introduce an auxiliary GAN that further facilitates the training of deep I2I systems even from small datasets. In extensive experiments on three datasets, (Animal faces, Birds, and Foods), we show that we outperform existing methods and that mFID improves on several datasets with over 25 points.

Abstract: Colours and emotions are associated in languages and traditions. Some of us may convey sadness by saying feeling blue or by wearing black clothes at funerals. The first example is a conceptual experience of colour and the second example is an immediate perceptual experience of colour. To investigate whether one or the other type of experience more strongly drives colour-emotion associations, we tested 64 congenitally red-green colour-blind men and 66 non-colour-blind men. All participants associated 12 colours, presented as terms or patches, with 20 emotion concepts, and rated intensities of the associated emotions. We found that colour-blind and non-colour-blind men associated similar emotions with colours, irrespective of whether colours were conveyed via terms (r = .82) or patches (r = .80). The colour-emotion associations and the emotion intensities were not modulated by participants' severity of colour blindness. Hinting at some additional, although minor, role of actual colour perception, the consistencies in associations for colour terms and patches were higher in non-colour-blind than colour-blind men. Together, these results suggest that colour-emotion associations in adults do not require immediate perceptual colour experiences, as conceptual experiences are sufficient.

Abstract: Domain adaptation (DA) aims to transfer the knowledge learned from a source domain to an unlabeled target domain. Some recent works tackle source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) where only a source pre-trained model is available for adaptation to the target domain. However, those methods do not consider keeping source performance which is of high practical value in real world applications. In this paper, we propose a new domain adaptation paradigm called Generalized Source-free Domain Adaptation (G-SFDA), where the learned model needs to perform well on both the target and source domains, with only access to current unlabeled target data during adaptation. First, we propose local structure clustering (LSC), aiming to cluster the target features with its semantically similar neighbors, which successfully adapts the model to the target domain in the absence of source data. Second, we propose sparse domain attention (SDA), it produces a binary domain specific attention to activate different feature channels for different domains, meanwhile the domain attention will be utilized to regularize the gradient during adaptation to keep source information. In the experiments, for target performance our method is on par with or better than existing DA and SFDA methods, specifically it achieves state-of-the-art performance (85.4%) on VisDA, and our method works well for all domains after adapting to single or multiple target domains.

Abstract: We present a novel solution to the garment animation problem through deep learning. Our contribution allows animating any template outfit with arbitrary topology and geometric complexity. Recent works develop models for garment edition, resizing and animation at the same time by leveraging the support body model (encoding garments as body homotopies). This leads to complex engineering solutions that suffer from scalability, applicability and compatibility. By limiting our scope to garment animation only, we are able to propose a simple model that can animate any outfit, independently of its topology, vertex order or connectivity. Our proposed architecture maps outfits to animated 3D models into the standard format for 3D animation (blend weights and blend shapes matrices), automatically providing of compatibility with any graphics engine. We also propose a methodology to complement supervised learning with an unsupervised physically based learning that implicitly solves collisions and enhances cloth quality.

Abstract: Neural image compression leverages deep neural networks to outperform traditional image codecs in rate-distortion performance. However, the resulting models are also heavy, computationally demanding and generally optimized for a single rate, limiting their practical use. Focusing on practical image compression, we propose slimmable compressive autoencoders (SlimCAEs), where rate (R) and distortion (D) are jointly optimized for different capacities. Once trained, encoders and decoders can be executed at different capacities, leading to different rates and complexities. We show that a successful implementation of SlimCAEs requires suitable capacity-specific RD tradeoffs. Our experiments show that SlimCAEs are highly flexible models that provide excellent rate-distortion performance, variable rate, and dynamic adjustment of memory, computational cost and latency, thus addressing the main requirements of practical image compression.

Abstract: Multimodal representations and continual learning are two areas closely related to human intelligence. The former considers the learning of shared representation spaces where information from different modalities can be compared and integrated (we focus on cross-modal retrieval between language and visual representations). The latter studies how to prevent forgetting a previously learned task when learning a new one. While humans excel in these two aspects, deep neural networks are still quite limited. In this paper, we propose a combination of both problems into a continual cross-modal retrieval setting, where we study how the catastrophic interference caused by new tasks impacts the embedding spaces and their cross-modal alignment required for effective retrieval. We propose a general framework that decouples the training, indexing and querying stages. We also identify and study different factors that may lead to forgetting, and propose tools to alleviate it. We found that the indexing stage pays an important role and that simply avoiding reindexing the database with updated embedding networks can lead to significant gains. We evaluated our methods in two image-text retrieval datasets, obtaining significant gains with respect to the fine tuning baseline.