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Learning Enriched Features for Real Image Restoration and Enhancement

We present MIRNet, a novel architecture that maintains spatially-precise high-resolution representations while receiving strong contextual information from low-resolution streams. Our multi-scale residual blocks with parallel convolution streams, information exchange, and attention mechanisms achieve state-of-the-art results on image denoising, super-resolution, and enhancement tasks.

A Self-supervised Approach for Adversarial Robustness

We propose a self-supervised adversarial training mechanism in the input space that provides generalizable defense against adversarial attacks. Our plug-and-play approach significantly improves robustness across classification, segmentation, and detection tasks, reducing attack success rates from 82.6% to 31.9%.

CycleISP: Real Image Restoration via Improved Data Synthesis

We present CycleISP, a framework that models camera imaging pipelines in forward and reverse directions to generate realistic synthetic training data for image denoising. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on real camera benchmarks with 5× fewer parameters than previous methods, and generalizes beyond denoising to tasks like color matching.

iTAML: An Incremental Task-Agnostic Meta-learning Approach

Humans can continuously learn new knowledge as their experience grows. In contrast, previous learning in deep neural networks can quickly fade out when they are trained on a new task. In this paper, we hypothesize this problem can be avoided by learning a set of generalized parameters, that are neither specific to old nor new tasks. In this pursuit, we introduce a novel meta-learning approach that seeks to maintain an equilibrium between all the encountered tasks. This is ensured by a new meta-update rule which avoids catastrophic forgetting. In comparison to previous meta-learning techniques, our approach is task-agnostic. When presented with a continuum of data, our model automatically identifies the task and quickly adapts to it with just a single update. We perform extensive experiments on five datasets in a class-incremental setting, leading to significant improvements over the state of the art methods (e.g., a 21.3% boost on CIFAR100 with 10 incremental tasks). Specifically, on large-scale datasets that generally prove difficult cases for incremental learning, our approach delivers absolute gains as high as 19.1% and 7.4% on ImageNet and MS-Celeb datasets, respectively.

Gaussian affinity for max-margin class imbalanced learning

Real-world object classes appear in imbalanced ratios. This poses a significant challenge for classifiers which get biased towards frequent classes. We hypothesize that improving the generalization capability of a classifier should improve learning on imbalanced datasets. Here, we introduce the first hybrid loss function that jointly performs classification and clustering in a single formulation. Our approach is based on an 'affinity measure' in Euclidean space that leads to the following benefits: (1) direct enforcement of maximum margin constraints on classification boundaries, (2) a tractable way to ensure uniformly spaced and equidistant cluster centers, (3) flexibility to learn multiple class prototypes to support diversity and discriminability in feature space. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the significant performance improvements on visual classification and verification tasks on multiple imbalanced datasets. The proposed loss can easily be plugged in any deep architecture as a differentiable block and demonstrates robustness against different levels of data imbalance and corrupted labels.

Random path selection for continual learning

We propose RPS-Net, a random path selection algorithm for continual learning that progressively chooses optimal paths for new tasks while encouraging parameter sharing. Integrated with knowledge distillation and a dynamic plasticity controller, our approach surpasses state-of-the-art incremental learning performance while running in constant time.

Adversarial defense by restricting the hidden space of deep neural networks

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which can fool them by adding minuscule perturbations to the input images. The robustness of existing defenses suffers greatly under white-box attack settings, where an adversary has full knowledge about the network and can iterate several times to find strong perturbations. We observe that the main reason for the existence of such perturbations is the close proximity of different class samples in the learned feature space. This allows model decisions to be totally changed by adding an imperceptible perturbation in the inputs. To counter this, we propose to class-wise disentangle the intermediate feature representations of deep networks. Specifically, we force the features for each class to lie inside a convex polytope that is maximally separated from the polytopes of other classes. In this manner, the network is forced to learn distinct and distant decision regions for each class. We observe that this simple constraint on the features greatly enhances the robustness of learned models, even against the strongest white-box attacks, without degrading the classification performance on clean images. We report extensive evaluations in both black-box and white-box attack scenarios and show significant gains in comparison to state-of-the art defenses.

Striking the right balance with uncertainty

Learning unbiased models on imbalanced datasets is a significant challenge. Rare classes tend to get a concentrated representation in the classification space which hampers the generalization of learned boundaries to new test examples. In this paper, we demonstrate that the Bayesian uncertainty estimates directly correlate with the rarity of classes and the difficulty level of individual samples. Subsequently, we present a novel framework for uncertainty based class imbalance learning that follows two key insights: First, classification boundaries should be extended further away from a more uncertain (rare) class to avoid overfitting and enhance its generalization. Second, each sample should be modeled as a multi-variate Gaussian distribution with a mean vector and a covariance matrix defined by the sample's uncertainty. The learned boundaries should respect not only the individual samples but also their distribution in the feature space. Our proposed approach efficiently utilizes sample and class uncertainty information to learn robust features and more generalizable classifiers. We systematically study the class imbalance problem and derive a novel loss formulation for max-margin learning based on Bayesian uncertainty measure. The proposed method shows significant performance improvements on six benchmark datasets for face verification, attribute prediction, digit/object classification and skin lesion detection.

Unsupervised primitive discovery for improved 3D generative modeling

3D shape generation is a challenging problem due to the high-dimensional output space and complex part configurations of real-world objects. As a result, existing algorithms experience difficulties in accurate generative modeling of 3D shapes. Here, we propose a novel factorized generative model for 3D shape generation that sequentially transitions from coarse to fine scale shape generation. To this end, we introduce an unsupervised primitive discovery algorithm based on a higher-order conditional random field model. Using the primitive parts for shapes as attributes, a parameterized 3D representation is modeled in the first stage. This representation is further refined in the next stage by adding fine scale details to shape. Our results demonstrate improved representation ability of the generative model and better quality samples of newly generated 3D shapes. Further, our primitive generation approach can accurately parse common objects into a simplified representation.

Adversarial training of variational auto-encoders for high fidelity image generation