Learning paradigms involving varying levels of supervision have received a lot of interest within the computer vision and machine learning communities. The supervisory information is typically considered to come from a human supervisor -- a "teacher" figure. In this paper, we consider an alternate source of supervision -- a "peer" -- i.e. a different machine. We introduce cooperative learning, where two agents trying to learn the same visual concepts, but in potentially different environments using different sources of data (sensors), communicate their current knowledge of these concepts to each other. Given the distinct sources of data in both agents, the mode of communication between the two agents is not obvious. We propose the use of visual attributes -- semantic mid-level visual properties such as furry, wooden, etc.-- as the mode of communication between the agents. Our experiments in three domains -- objects, scenes, and animals -- demonstrate that our proposed cooperative learning approach improves the performance of both agents as compared to their performance if they were to learn in isolation. Our approach is particularly applicable in scenarios where privacy, security and or bandwidth constraints restrict the amount and type of information the two agents can exchange.
@cite_13: Unsupervised image clustering is a challenging and often ill-posed problem. Existing image descriptors fail to capture the clustering criterion well, and more importantly, the criterion itself may depend on (unknown) user preferences. Semi-supervised approaches such as distance metric learning and constrained clustering thus leverage user-provided annotations indicating which pairs of images belong to the same cluster (must-link) and which ones do not (cannot-link). These approaches require many such constraints before achieving good clustering performance because each constraint only provides weak cues about the desired clustering. In this paper, we propose to use image attributes as a modality for the user to provide more informative cues. In particular, the clustering algorithm iteratively and actively queries a user with an image pair. Instead of the user simply providing a must-link cannot-link constraint for the pair, the user also provides an attribute-based reasoning e.g. “these two images are similar because both are natural and have still water” or “these two people are dissimilar because one is way older than the other”. Under the guidance of this explanation, and equipped with attribute predictors, many additional constraints are automatically generated. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by incorporating the proposed attribute-based explanations in three standard semi-supervised clustering algorithms: Constrained K-Means, MPCK-Means, and Spectral Clustering, on three domains: scenes, shoes, and faces, using both binary and relative attributes.
@cite_38: We consider the problem of semi-supervised bootstrap learning for scene categorization. Existing semi-supervised approaches are typically unreliable and face semantic drift because the learning task is under-constrained. This is primarily because they ignore the strong interactions that often exist between scene categories, such as the common attributes shared across categories as well as the attributes which make one scene different from another. The goal of this paper is to exploit these relationships and constrain the semi-supervised learning problem. For example, the knowledge that an image is an auditorium can improve labeling of amphitheaters by enforcing constraint that an amphitheater image should have more circular structures than an auditorium image. We propose constraints based on mutual exclusion, binary attributes and comparative attributes and show that they help us to constrain the learning problem and avoid semantic drift. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through extensive experiments, including results on a very large dataset of one million images.
@cite_22: We propose a novel mode of feedback for image search, where a user describes which properties of exemplar images should be adjusted in order to more closely match his her mental model of the image(s) sought. For example, perusing image results for a query “black shoes”, the user might state, “Show me shoe images like these, but sportier.” Offline, our approach first learns a set of ranking functions, each of which predicts the relative strength of a nameable attribute in an image (‘sportiness’, ‘furriness’, etc.). At query time, the system presents an initial set of reference images, and the user selects among them to provide relative attribute feedback. Using the resulting constraints in the multi-dimensional attribute space, our method updates its relevance function and re-ranks the pool of images. This procedure iterates using the accumulated constraints until the top ranked images are acceptably close to the user's envisioned target. In this way, our approach allows a user to efficiently “whittle away” irrelevant portions of the visual feature space, using semantic language to precisely communicate her preferences to the system. We demonstrate the technique for refining image search for people, products, and scenes, and show it outperforms traditional binary relevance feedback in terms of search speed and accuracy.
@cite_19: Image representations, from SIFT and Bag of Visual Words to Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), are a crucial component of almost any image understanding system. Nevertheless, our understanding of them remains limited. In this paper we conduct a direct analysis of the visual information contained in representations by asking the following question: given an encoding of an image, to which extent is it possible to reconstruct the image itself? To answer this question we contribute a general framework to invert representations. We show that this method can invert representations such as HOG and SIFT more accurately than recent alternatives while being applicable to CNNs too. We then use this technique to study the inverse of recent state-of-the-art CNN image representations for the first time. Among our findings, we show that several layers in CNNs retain photographically accurate information about the image, with different degrees of geometric and photometric invariance.
@cite_40: 
@cite_27: We propose to shift the goal of recognition from naming to describing. Doing so allows us not only to name familiar objects, but also: to report unusual aspects of a familiar object (“spotty dog”, not just “dog”); to say something about unfamiliar objects (“hairy and four-legged”, not just “unknown”); and to learn how to recognize new objects with few or no visual examples. Rather than focusing on identity assignment, we make inferring attributes the core problem of recognition. These attributes can be semantic (“spotty”) or discriminative (“dogs have it but sheep do not”). Learning attributes presents a major new challenge: generalization across object categories, not just across instances within a category. In this paper, we also introduce a novel feature selection method for learning attributes that generalize well across categories. We support our claims by thorough evaluation that provides insights into the limitations of the standard recognition paradigm of naming and demonstrates the new abilities provided by our attribute-based framework.
@cite_15: The concepts of objects and attributes are both important for describing images precisely, since verbal descriptions often contain both adjectives and nouns (e.g. 'I see a shiny red chair'). In this paper, we formulate the problem of joint visual attribute and object class image segmentation as a dense multi-labelling problem, where each pixel in an image can be associated with both an object-class and a set of visual attributes labels. In order to learn the label correlations, we adopt a boosting-based piecewise training approach with respect to the visual appearance and co-occurrence cues. We use a filtering-based mean-field approximation approach for efficient joint inference. Further, we develop a hierarchical model to incorporate region-level object and attribute information. Experiments on the aPASCAL, CORE and attribute augmented NYU indoor scenes datasets show that the proposed approach is able to achieve state-of-the-art results.
@cite_34: We have created the first image search engine based entirely on faces. Using simple text queries such as "smiling men with blond hair and mustaches," users can search through over 3.1 million faces which have been automatically labeled on the basis of several facial attributes. Faces in our database have been extracted and aligned from images downloaded from the internet using a commercial face detector, and the number of images and attributes continues to grow daily. Our classification approach uses a novel combination of Support Vector Machines and Adaboost which exploits the strong structure of faces to select and train on the optimal set of features for each attribute. We show state-of-the-art classification results compared to previous works, and demonstrate the power of our architecture through a functional, large-scale face search engine. Our framework is fully automatic, easy to scale, and computes all labels off-line, leading to fast on-line search performance. In addition, we describe how our system can be used for a number of applications, including law enforcement, social networks, and personal photo management. Our search engine will soon be made publicly available.
@cite_10: The construction of robust multimodal interfaces often requires large amounts of labeled training data to account for cross-user differences and variation in the environment. In this work, we investigate whether unlabeled training data can be leveraged to build more reliable audio-visual classifiers through co-training, a multi-view learning algorithm. Multimodal tasks are good candidates for multi-view learning, since each modality provides a potentially redundant view to the learning algorithm. We apply co-training to two problems: audio-visual speech unit classification, and user agreement recognition using spoken utterances and head gestures. We demonstrate that multimodal co-training can be used to learn from only a few labeled examples in one or both of the audio-visual modalities. We also propose a co-adaptation algorithm, which adapts existing audio-visual classifiers to a particular user or noise condition by leveraging the redundancy in the unlabeled data.
Visual attributes have been used quite extensively for a variety of tasks such as image classification @cite_10 @cite_19 @cite_40 , deeper image understanding @cite_27 , image search @cite_22 @cite_34 , segmentation @cite_15 and semi-supervised learning @cite_38 . They are mid-level semantic ( nameable) visual properties such as furry, wooden, young, . They have been shown to be an effective modality for humans and machines to communicate with each other @cite_22 @cite_40 @cite_34 @cite_13 . We build upon these recent developments and propose attributes as a mode of communication among machines that may otherwise be unable to communicate due to differences in sources of data and sensors. The fact that attributes are semantic ensures that humans annotating the first few labeled images in both domains are annotating the same semantic concept. This provides a common ground between both domains, necessary for communication.