Computer Science

We introduce CharacterGAN, a generative model that can be trained on only a few samples (8 - 15) of a given character. Our model generates novel poses based on keypoint locations, which can be modified in real time while providing interactive feedback, allowing for intuitive reposing and animation. Since we only have very limited training samples, one of the key challenges lies in how to address (dis)occlusions, e.g. when a hand moves behind or in front of a body. To address this, we introduce a novel layering approach which explicitly splits the input keypoints into different layers which are processed independently. These layers represent different parts of the character and provide a strong implicit bias that helps to obtain realistic results even with strong (dis)occlusions. To combine the features of individual layers we use an adaptive scaling approach conditioned on all keypoints. Finally, we introduce a mask connectivity constraint to reduce distortion artifacts that occur with extreme out-of-distribution poses at test time. We show that our approach outperforms recent baselines and creates realistic animations for diverse characters. We also show that our model can handle discrete state changes, for example a profile facing left or right, that the different layers do indeed learn features specific for the respective keypoints in those layers, and that our model scales to larger datasets when more data is available.

Automatic image and digit recognition is a computationally challenging task for image processing and pattern recognition, requiring an adequate appreciation of the syntactic and semantic importance of the image for the identification ofthe handwritten digits. Image and Pattern Recognition has been identified as one of the driving forces in the research areas because of its shifting of different types of applications, such as safety frameworks, clinical frameworks, diversion, and so this http URL this study, for recognition, we implemented a hybrid neural network model that is capable of recognizing the digit of MNISTdataset and achieved a remarkable result. The proposed neural model network can extract features from the image and recognize the features in the layer by layer. To expand, it is so important for the neural network to recognize how the proposed modelcan work in each layer, how it can generate output, and so on. Besides, it also can recognize the auto-encoding system and the variational auto-encoding system of the MNIST dataset. This study will explore those issues that are discussed above, and the explanation for them, and how this phenomenon can be overcome.

Medical image segmentation models are typically supervised by expert annotations at the pixel-level, which can be expensive to acquire. In this work, we propose a method that combines the high quality of pixel-level expert annotations with the scale of coarse DNN-generated saliency maps for training multi-label semantic segmentation models. We demonstrate the application of our semi-supervised method, which we call CheXseg, on multi-label chest X-ray interpretation. We find that CheXseg improves upon the performance (mIoU) of fully-supervised methods that use only pixel-level expert annotations by 9.7% and weakly-supervised methods that use only DNN-generated saliency maps by 73.1%. Our best method is able to match radiologist agreement on three out of ten pathologies and reduces the overall performance gap by 57.2% as compared to weakly-supervised methods.

Structured pruning methods are among the effective strategies for extracting small resource-efficient convolutional neural networks from their dense counterparts with minimal loss in accuracy. However, most existing methods still suffer from one or more limitations, that include 1) the need for training the dense model from scratch with pruning-related parameters embedded in the architecture, 2) requiring model-specific hyperparameter settings, 3) inability to include budget-related constraint in the training process, and 4) instability under scenarios of extreme pruning. In this paper, we present ChipNet, a deterministic pruning strategy that employs continuous Heaviside function and a novel crispness loss to identify a highly sparse network out of an existing dense network. Our choice of continuous Heaviside function is inspired by the field of design optimization, where the material distribution task is posed as a continuous optimization problem, but only discrete values (0 or 1) are practically feasible and expected as final outcomes. Our approach's flexible design facilitates its use with different choices of budget constraints while maintaining stability for very low target budgets. Experimental results show that ChipNet outperforms state-of-the-art structured pruning methods by remarkable margins of up to 16.1% in terms of accuracy. Further, we show that the masks obtained with ChipNet are transferable across datasets. For certain cases, it was observed that masks transferred from a model trained on feature-rich teacher dataset provide better performance on the student dataset than those obtained by directly pruning on the student data itself.

New categories can be discovered by transforming semantic features into synthesized visual features without corresponding training samples in zero-shot image classification. Although significant progress has been made in generating high-quality synthesized visual features using generative adversarial networks, guaranteeing semantic consistency between the semantic features and visual features remains very challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel zero-shot learning approach, GAN-CST, based on class knowledge to visual feature learning to tackle the problem. The approach consists of three parts, class knowledge overlay, semi-supervised learning and triplet loss. It applies class knowledge overlay (CKO) to obtain knowledge not only from the corresponding class but also from other classes that have the knowledge overlay. It ensures that the knowledge-to-visual learning process has adequate information to generate synthesized visual features. The approach also applies a semi-supervised learning process to re-train knowledge-to-visual model. It contributes to reinforcing synthesized visual features generation as well as new category prediction. We tabulate results on a number of benchmark datasets demonstrating that the proposed model delivers superior performance over state-of-the-art approaches.

This article discusses the problem of handwriting recognition in Kazakh and Russian languages. This area is poorly studied since in the literature there are almost no works in this direction. We have tried to describe various approaches and achievements of recent years in the development of handwritten recognition models in relation to Cyrillic graphics. The first model uses deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for feature extraction and a fully connected multilayer perceptron neural network (MLP) for word classification. The second model, called SimpleHTR, uses CNN and recurrent neural network (RNN) layers to extract information from images. We also proposed the Bluechet and Puchserver models to compare the results. Due to the lack of available open datasets in Russian and Kazakh languages, we carried out work to collect data that included handwritten names of countries and cities from 42 different Cyrillic words, written more than 500 times in different handwriting. We also used a handwritten database of Kazakh and Russian languages (HKR). This is a new database of Cyrillic words (not only countries and cities) for the Russian and Kazakh languages, created by the authors of this work.

Deep learning has enabled algorithms to generate realistic images. However, accurately predicting long video sequences requires understanding long-term dependencies and remains an open challenge. While existing video prediction models succeed at generating sharp images, they tend to fail at accurately predicting far into the future. We introduce the Clockwork VAE (CW-VAE), a video prediction model that leverages a hierarchy of latent sequences, where higher levels tick at slower intervals. We demonstrate the benefits of both hierarchical latents and temporal abstraction on 4 diverse video prediction datasets with sequences of up to 1000 frames, where CW-VAE outperforms top video prediction models. Additionally, we propose a Minecraft benchmark for long-term video prediction. We conduct several experiments to gain insights into CW-VAE and confirm that slower levels learn to represent objects that change more slowly in the video, and faster levels learn to represent faster objects.

We present the Colorization Transformer, a novel approach for diverse high fidelity image colorization based on self-attention. Given a grayscale image, the colorization proceeds in three steps. We first use a conditional autoregressive transformer to produce a low resolution coarse coloring of the grayscale image. Our architecture adopts conditional transformer layers to effectively condition grayscale input. Two subsequent fully parallel networks upsample the coarse colored low resolution image into a finely colored high resolution image. Sampling from the Colorization Transformer produces diverse colorings whose fidelity outperforms the previous state-of-the-art on colorising ImageNet based on FID results and based on a human evaluation in a Mechanical Turk test. Remarkably, in more than 60% of cases human evaluators prefer the highest rated among three generated colorings over the ground truth. The code and pre-trained checkpoints for Colorization Transformer are publicly available at this https URL

Event cameras are novel vision sensors that report per-pixel brightness changes as a stream of asynchronous "events". They offer significant advantages compared to standard cameras due to their high temporal resolution, high dynamic range and lack of motion blur. However, events only measure the varying component of the visual signal, which limits their ability to encode scene context. By contrast, standard cameras measure absolute intensity frames, which capture a much richer representation of the scene. Both sensors are thus complementary. However, due to the asynchronous nature of events, combining them with synchronous images remains challenging, especially for learning-based methods. This is because traditional recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are not designed for asynchronous and irregular data from additional sensors. To address this challenge, we introduce Recurrent Asynchronous Multimodal (RAM) networks, which generalize traditional RNNs to handle asynchronous and irregular data from multiple sensors. Inspired by traditional RNNs, RAM networks maintain a hidden state that is updated asynchronously and can be queried at any time to generate a prediction. We apply this novel architecture to monocular depth estimation with events and frames where we show an improvement over state-of-the-art methods by up to 30% in terms of mean absolute depth error. To enable further research on multimodal learning with events, we release EventScape, a new dataset with events, intensity frames, semantic labels, and depth maps recorded in the CARLA simulator.

Visual storytelling is a task of generating relevant and interesting stories for given image sequences. In this work we aim at increasing the diversity of the generated stories while preserving the informative content from the images. We propose to foster the diversity and informativeness of a generated story by using a concept selection module that suggests a set of concept candidates. Then, we utilize a large scale pre-trained model to convert concepts and images into full stories. To enrich the candidate concepts, a commonsense knowledge graph is created for each image sequence from which the concept candidates are proposed. To obtain appropriate concepts from the graph, we propose two novel modules that consider the correlation among candidate concepts and the image-concept correlation. Extensive automatic and human evaluation results demonstrate that our model can produce reasonable concepts. This enables our model to outperform the previous models by a large margin on the diversity and informativeness of the story, while retaining the relevance of the story to the image sequence.