Aravindh Mahendran
I do computer vision and machine learning research at Google Berlin. I am part of the Brain team.
I work on self-supervised learning of visual representations. In the past I also worked on visualizing convolutional neural networks. I did my PhD under the supervision of Prof. Andrea Vedaldi at the Visual Geometry Group, University of Oxford. Prior to that I did a MSc in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University and a B. Tech in Computer Science at IIIT Hyderabad.
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RUST: Latent Neural Scene Representations from Unposed Imagery
Thomas Kipf
Klaus Greff
Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) (2023) (to appear)
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Inferring the structure of 3D scenes from 2D observations is a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Recently popularized approaches based on neural scene representations have achieved tremendous impact and have been applied across a variety of applications. One of the major remaining challenges in this space is training a single model which can provide latent representations which effectively generalize beyond a single scene. Scene Representation Transformer (SRT) has shown promise in this direction, but scaling it to a larger set of diverse scenes is challenging and necessitates accurately posed ground truth data. To address this problem, we propose RUST (Really Unposed Scene representation Transformer), a pose-free approach to novel view synthesis trained on RGB images alone. Our main insight is that one can train a Pose Encoder that peeks at the target image and learns a latent pose embedding which is used by the decoder for view synthesis. We perform an empirical investigation into the learned latent pose structure and show that it allows meaningful test-time camera transformations and accurate explicit pose readouts. Perhaps surprisingly, RUST achieves similar quality as methods which have access to perfect camera pose, thereby unlocking the potential for large-scale training of amortized neural scene representations.
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Scaling Vision Transformers to 22 Billion Parameters
Josip Djolonga
Basil Mustafa
Piotr Padlewski
Justin Gilmer
Mathilde Caron
Rodolphe Jenatton
Michael Tschannen
Anurag Arnab
Carlos Riquelme
Fisher Yu
Avital Oliver
Fantine Huot
Mark Collier
Yi Tay
Filip Pavetić
Thomas Kipf
Arxiv (2023)
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The scaling of Transformers has driven breakthrough capabilities for language models.
At present, the largest large language models (LLMs) contain upwards of 100B parameters.
Vision Transformers (ViT) have introduced the same architecture to image and video modeling, but these have not yet been successfully scaled to nearly the same degree; the largest dense ViT contains 4B parameters. We present a recipe for highly efficient training of a 22B-parameter ViT and perform a wide variety of experiments on the resulting model. When evaluated on downstream tasks (often with a lightweight linear model on frozen features) ViT22B demonstrates increasing performance with scale. We further observe other interesting benefits of scale, including an improved tradeoff between bias and performance, an improved alignment to human visual perception in terms of shape/texture bias, and improved robustness. ViT22B demonstrates the potential for "LLM-like'' scaling in vision, and provides key steps towards getting there.
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Invariant Slot Attention: Object Discovery with Slot-Centric Reference Frames
Ondrej Biza
Thomas Kipf
International Conference on Machine Learning (2023), pp. 2507-2527
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Automatically discovering composable abstractions from raw perceptual data is a long-standing challenge in machine learning. Recent slot-based neural networks that learn about objects in a self-supervised manner have made exciting progress in this direction. However, they typically fall short at adequately capturing spatial symmetries present in the visual world, which leads to sample inefficiency, such as when entangling object appearance and pose. In this paper, we present a simple yet highly effective method for incorporating spatial symmetries via slot-centric reference frames. We incorporate equivariance to per-object pose transformations into the attention and generation mechanism of Slot Attention by translating, scaling, and rotating position encodings. These changes result in little computational overhead, are easy to implement, and can result in large gains in terms of data efficiency and overall improvements to object discovery. We evaluate our method on a wide range of synthetic object discovery benchmarks namely Tetrominoes, CLEVRTex, Objects Room and MultiShapeNet, and show promising improvements on the challenging real-world Waymo Open dataset.
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SAVi++: Towards End-to-End Object-Centric Learning from Real-World Videos
Klaus Greff
Michael Mozer
Thomas Kipf
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (2022), pp. 28940-28954
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The visual world can be parsimoniously characterized in terms of distinct entities with sparse interactions. Discovering this compositional structure in dynamic visual scenes has proven challenging for end-to-end computer vision approaches unless explicit instance-level supervision is provided. Slot-based models leveraging motion cues have recently shown great promise in learning to represent, segment, and track objects without direct supervision, but they still fail to scale to complex real-world multi-object videos. In an effort to bridge this gap, we take inspiration from human development and hypothesize that information about scene geometry in the form of depth signals can facilitate object-centric learning. We introduce SAVi++, an object-centric video model which is trained to predict depth signals from a slot-based video representation. By further leveraging best practices for model scaling, we are able to train SAVi++ to segment complex dynamic scenes recorded with moving cameras, containing both static and moving objects of diverse appearance on naturalistic backgrounds, without the need for segmentation supervision. Finally, we demonstrate that by using sparse depth signals obtained from LiDAR, SAVi++ is able to learn emergent object segmentation and tracking from videos in the real-world Waymo Open dataset.
Project page: https://slot-attention-video.github.io/savi++/
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Conditional Object-Centric Learning from Video
Thomas Kipf
Austin Stone
Rico Jonschkowski
Alexey Dosovitskiy
Klaus Greff
ICLR, ICLR (2022)
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Object-centric representations are a promising path toward more systematic generalization by providing flexible abstractions upon which compositional world models can be built. Recent work on simple 2D and 3D datasets has shown that models with object-centric inductive biases can learn to segment and represent meaningful objects from the statistical structure of the data alone without the need for any supervision. However, such fully-unsupervised methods still fail to scale to diverse realistic data, despite the use of increasingly complex inductive biases such as priors for the size of objects or the 3D geometry of the scene. In this paper, we instead take a weakly-supervised approach and focus on how 1) using the temporal dynamics of video data in the form of optical flow and 2) conditioning the model on simple object location cues can be used to enable segmenting and tracking objects in significantly more realistic synthetic data. We introduce a sequential extension to Slot Attention which we train to predict optical flow for realistic looking synthetic scenes and show that conditioning the initial state of this model on a small set of hints, such as center of mass of objects in the first frame, is sufficient to significantly improve instance segmentation. These benefits generalize beyond the training distribution to novel objects, novel backgrounds, and to longer video sequences. We also find that such initial-state-conditioning can be used during inference as a flexible interface to query the model for specific objects or parts of objects, which could pave the way for a range of weakly-supervised approaches and allow more effective interaction with trained models.
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Simple Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Vision Transformers
Austin Stone
Maxim Neumann
Dirk Weissenborn
Alexey Dosovitskiy
Anurag Arnab
Zhuoran Shen
Thomas Kipf
ECCV (Poster) (2022)
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Combining simple architectures with large-scale pre-training has led to massive improvements in image classification. For object detection, pre-training and scaling approaches are less well established, especially in the long-tailed and open-vocabulary setting, where training data is relatively scarce. In this paper, we propose a strong recipe for transferring image-text models to open-vocabulary object detection. We use a standard Vision Transformer architecture with minimal modifications, contrastive image-text pre-training, and end-to-end detection fine-tuning. Our analysis of the scaling properties of this setup shows that increasing image-level pre-training and model size yield consistent improvements on the downstream detection task. We provide the adaptation strategies and regularizations needed to attain very strong performance on zero-shot text-conditioned and one-shot image-conditioned object detection. Code and models are available on GitHub (https://github.com/google-research/scenic/tree/main/scenic/projects/owl_vit).
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Object Scene Representation Transformer
Filip Pavetić
Leonidas Guibas
Klaus Greff
Thomas Kipf
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (2022), pp. 9512-9524
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A compositional understanding of the world in terms of objects and their geometry in 3D space is considered a cornerstone of human cognition. Facilitating the learning of such a representation in neural networks holds promise for substantially improving labeled data efficiency. As a key step in this direction, we make progress on the problem of learning 3D-consistent decompositions of complex scenes into individual objects in an unsupervised fashion. We introduce Object Scene Representation Transformer (OSRT), a 3D-centric model in which individual object representations naturally emerge through novel view synthesis. OSRT scales to significantly more complex scenes with larger diversity of objects and backgrounds than existing methods. At the same time, it is multiple orders of magnitude faster at compositional rendering thanks to its light field parametrization and the novel Slot Mixer decoder.
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Representation learning from videos in-the-wild: An object-centric approach
Rob Romijnders
Michael Tschannen
Josip Djolonga
WACV (2021)
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We propose a method to learn image representations from uncurated videos. We combine a supervised loss from off-the-shelf object detectors and self-supervised losses which naturally arise from the video-shot-frame-object hierarchy present in each video. We report competitive results on 19 transfer learning tasks of the Visual Task Adaptation Benchmark (VTAB), and on 8 out-of-distribution-generalization tasks, and discuss the benefits and shortcomings of the proposed approach. In particular, it improves over the baseline on all 18/19 few-shot learning tasks and 8/8 out-of-distribution generalization tasks. Finally, we perform several ablation studies and analyze the impact of the pretrained object detector on the performance across this suite of tasks.
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Differentiable Patch Selection for Image Recognition
Jean-Baptiste Cordonnier
Alexey Dosovitskiy
Dirk Weissenborn
Jakob Uszkoreit
CVPR (2021) (to appear)
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Neural Networks require large amounts of memory and compute to process high resolution images, even when only a small part of the image is actually informative for the task at hand. We propose a method based on a differentiable Top-K operator to select the most relevant parts of the input to efficiently process high resolution images. Our method may be interfaced with any downstream neural network, is able to aggregate information from different patches in a flexible way, and allows the whole model to be trained end-to-end using backpropagation. We show results for traffic sign recognition, inter-patch relationship reasoning, and fine-grained recognition without using object/part bounding box annotations during training.
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Object-Centric Learning with Slot Attention
Francesco Locatello
Dirk Weissenborn
Jakob Uszkoreit
Alexey Dosovitskiy
Thomas Kipf
NeurIPS 2020
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Learning object-centric representations of complex scenes is a promising step towards enabling efficient abstract reasoning from low-level perceptual features. Yet, most deep learning approaches learn distributed representations that do not capture the compositional properties of natural scenes. In this paper, we present the Slot Attention module, an architectural component that interfaces with perceptual representations such as the output of a convolutional neural network and produces a set of task-dependent abstract representations which we call slots. These slots are exchangeable and can bind to any object in the input by specializing through a competitive procedure over multiple rounds of attention. We empirically demonstrate that Slot Attention can extract object-centric representations that enable generalization to unseen compositions when trained on unsupervised object discovery and supervised property prediction tasks.
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Self-Supervised Learning of Video-Induced Visual Invariances
Michael Tobias Tschannen
Josip Djolonga
Sylvain Gelly
Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (2020)
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We propose a general framework for self-supervised learning of transferable visual representations based on Video-Induced Visual Invariances (VIVI). We make use of the natural hierarchy consisting of (i) frame level invariances (e.g. color and contrast robustness), (ii) shot/clip level invariances (e.g. robustness to changes in object orientation and lighting conditions), and (iii) video level invariances (semantic relationships of scenes across shots/clips) to define a holistic self-supervised loss. We train the proposed model on the YouTube-8M dataset and show that this approach leads to state-of-the-art self-supervised results on the 19 diverse downstream tasks of the Visual Task Adaptation Benchmark (VTAB). We then show how to co-train the model jointly with labeled images, outperforming an ImageNet-pretrained ResNet-50 with $10x$ fewer labeled images.
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Visualizing Deep Convolutional Neural Networks Using Natural Pre-images
Andrea Vedaldi
International Journal of Computer Vision, vol. 120 (2016), pp. 233-255
Understanding Deep Image Representations by Inverting Them
Andrea Vedaldi
IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) (2015)
