Abstract: Automatic document content processing is affected by artifacts caused by the shape
of the paper, non-uniform and diverse color of lighting conditions. Fully-supervised
methods on real data are impossible due to the large amount of data needed. Hence, the
current state of the art deep learning models are trained on fully or partially synthetic images. However, document shadow or shading removal results still suffer because: (a) prior methods rely on uniformity of local color statistics, which limit their application on real-scenarios with complex document shapes and textures and; (b) synthetic or hybrid datasets with non-realistic, simulated lighting conditions are used to train the models. In this paper we tackle these problems with our two main contributions. First, a physically constrained learning-based method that directly estimates document reflectance based on intrinsic image formation which generalizes to challenging illumination conditions. Second, a new dataset that clearly improves previous synthetic ones, by adding a large range of realistic shading and diverse multi-illuminant conditions, uniquely customized to deal with documents in-the-wild. The proposed architecture works in two steps. First, a white balancing module neutralizes the color of the illumination on the input image. Based on the proposed multi-illuminant dataset we achieve a good white-balancing in really difficult conditions. Second, the shading separation module accurately disentangles the shading and paper material in a self-supervised manner where only the synthetic texture is used as a weak training signal (obviating the need for very costly ground truth with disentangled versions of shading and reflectance). The proposed approach leads to significant generalization of document reflectance estimation in real scenes with challenging illumination. We extensively evaluate on the real benchmark datasets available for intrinsic image decomposition and document shadow removal tasks. Our reflectance estimation scheme, when used as a pre-processing step of an OCR pipeline, shows a 21% improvement of character error rate (CER), thus, proving the practical applicability. The data and code will be available at: https://github.com/cvlab-stonybrook/DocIIW.

Abstract: We propose bookworm continual learning(BCL), a flexible setting where unseen classes can be inferred via a semantic model, and the visual model can be updated continually. Thus BCL generalizes both continual learning (CL) and zero-shot learning (ZSL). We also propose the bidirectional imagination (BImag) framework to address BCL where features of both past and future classes are generated. We observe that conditioning the feature generator on attributes can actually harm the continual learning ability, and propose two variants (joint class-attribute conditioning and asymmetric generation) to alleviate this problem.

Abstract: Outlier, or anomaly, detection is essential for optimal performance of machine learning methods and statistical predictive models. It is not just a technical step in a data cleaning process but a key topic in many fields such as fraudulent document detection, in medical applications and assisted diagnosis systems or detecting security threats. In contrast to population-based methods, neighborhood based local approaches are simple flexible methods that have the potential to perform well in small sample size unbalanced problems. However, a main concern of local approaches is the impact that the computation of each sample neighborhood has on the method performance. Most approaches use a distance in the feature space to define a single neighborhood that requires careful selection of several parameters. This work presents a local approach based on a local measure of the heterogeneity of sample labels in the feature space considered as a topological manifold. Topology is computed using the communities of a weighted graph codifying mutual nearest neighbors in the feature space. This way, we provide with a set of multiple neighborhoods able to describe the structure of complex spaces without parameter fine tuning. The extensive experiments on real-world data sets show that our approach overall outperforms, both, local and global strategies in multi and single view settings.

Abstract: Machine learning experimentation under controlled scenarios and standard datasets is necessary to compare algorithms performance by evaluating all of them in the same setup. However, experimentation on how those algorithms perform on unconstrained data and applied tasks to solve real world problems is also a must to ascertain how that research can contribute to our society.
In this dissertation we experiment with the latest computer vision and natural language processing algorithms applying them to multimodal scene interpretation. Particularly, we research on how image and text understanding can be jointly exploited to address real world problems, focusing on learning from Social Media data.
We address several tasks that involve image and textual information, discuss their characteristics and offer our experimentation conclusions. First, we work on detection of scene text in images. Then, we work with Social Media posts, exploiting the captions associated to images as supervision to learn visual features, which we apply to multimodal semantic image retrieval. Subsequently, we work with geolocated Social Media images with associated tags, experimenting on how to use the tags as supervision, on location sensitive image retrieval and on exploiting location information for image tagging. Finally, we work on a specific classification problem of Social Media publications consisting on an image and a text: Multimodal hate speech classification.

Abstract: Computer vision has gone through considerable changes in the last decade as neural networks have come into common use. As available computational capabilities have grown, neural networks have achieved breakthroughs in many computer vision tasks, and have even surpassed human performance in others. With accuracy being so high, focus has shifted to other issues and challenges. One research direction that saw a notable increase in interest is on lifelong learning systems. Such systems should be capable of efficiently performing tasks, identifying and learning new ones, and should moreover be able to deploy smaller versions of themselves which are experts on specific tasks. In this thesis, we contribute to research on lifelong learning and address the compression and adaptation of networks to small target domains, the incremental learning of networks faced with a variety of tasks, and finally the detection of out-of-distribution samples at inference time.
We explore how knowledge can be transferred from large pretrained models to more task-specific networks capable of running on smaller devices by extracting the most relevant information. Using a pretrained model provides more robust representations and a more stable initialization when learning a smaller task, which leads to higher performance and is known as domain adaptation. However, those models are too large for certain applications that need to be deployed on devices with limited memory and computational capacity. In this thesis we show that, after performing domain adaptation, some learned activations barely contribute to the predictions of the model. Therefore, we propose to apply network compression based on low-rank matrix decomposition using the activation statistics. This results in a significant reduction of the model size and the computational cost.
Like human intelligence, machine intelligence aims to have the ability to learn and remember knowledge. However, when a trained neural network is presented with learning a new task, it ends up forgetting previous ones. This is known as catastrophic forgetting and its avoidance is studied in continual learning. The work presented in this thesis extensively surveys continual learning techniques and presents an approach to avoid catastrophic forgetting in sequential task learning scenarios. Our technique is based on using ternary masks in order to update a network to new tasks, reusing the knowledge of previous ones while not forgetting anything about them. In contrast to earlier work, our masks are applied to the activations of each layer instead of the weights. This considerably reduces the number of parameters to be added for each new task. Furthermore, the analysis on a wide range of work on incremental learning without access to the task-ID, provides insight on current state-of-the-art approaches that focus on avoiding catastrophic forgetting by using regularization, rehearsal of previous tasks from a small memory, or compensating the task-recency bias.
Neural networks trained with a cross-entropy loss force the outputs of the model to tend toward a one-hot encoded vector. This leads to models being too overly confident when presented with images or classes that were not present in the training distribution. The capacity of a system to be aware of the boundaries of the learned tasks and identify anomalies or classes which have not been learned yet is key to lifelong learning and autonomous systems. In this thesis, we present a metric learning approach to out-of-distribution detection that learns the task at hand on an embedding space.

Abstract: Sectors as fintech, legaltech or insurance process an inflow of millions of forms, invoices, id documents, claims or similar every day. Together with these, historical archives provide gigantic amounts of digitized documents containing useful information that needs to be stored in machine encoded text with a meaningful structure. This procedure, known as information extraction (IE) comprises the steps of localizing and recognizing text, identifying named entities contained in it and optionally finding relationships among its elements. In this work we explore multi-task neural models at image and graph level to solve all steps in a unified way. While doing so we find benefits and limitations of these end-to-end approaches in comparison with sequential separate methods. More specifically, we first propose a method to produce textual as well as semantic labels with a unified model from handwritten text line images. We do so with the use of a convolutional recurrent neural model trained with connectionist temporal classification to predict the textual as well as semantic information encoded in the images. Secondly, motivated by the success of this approach we investigate the unification of the localization and recognition tasks of handwritten text in full pages with an end-to-end model, observing benefits in doing so. Having two models that tackle information extraction subsequent task pairs in an end-to-end to end manner, we lastly contribute with a method to put them all together in a single neural network to solve the whole information extraction pipeline in a unified way. Doing so we observe some benefits and some limitations in the approach, suggesting that in certain cases it is beneficial to train specialized models that excel at a single challenging task of the information extraction process, as it can be the recognition of named entities or the extraction of relationships between them. For this reason we lastly study the use of the recently arrived graph neural network architectures for the semantic tasks of the information extraction process, which are recognition of named entities and relation extraction, achieving promising results on the relation extraction part.