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Margret Keuper

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Published work

18 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

3D-WAG: Hierarchical Wavelet-Guided Autoregressive Generation for High-Fidelity 3D Shapes

Autoregressive (AR) models have achieved remarkable success in natural language and image generation, but their application to 3D shape modeling remains largely unexplored. Unlike diffusion models, AR models enable more efficient and controllable generation with faster inference times, making them especially suitable for data-intensive domains. Traditional 3D generative models using AR approaches often rely on ``next-token" predictions at the voxel or point level. While effective for certain applications, these methods can be restrictive and computationally expensive when dealing with large-scale 3D data. To tackle these challenges, we introduce 3D-WAG, an AR model for 3D implicit distance fields that can perform unconditional shape generation, class-conditioned and also text-conditioned shape generation. Our key idea is to encode shapes as multi-scale wavelet token maps and use a Transformer to predict the ``next higher-resolution token map" in an autoregressive manner. By redefining 3D AR generation task as ``next-scale" prediction, we reduce the computational cost of generation compared to traditional ``next-token" prediction models, while preserving essential geometric details of 3D shapes in a more structured and hierarchical manner. We evaluate 3D-WAG to showcase its benefit by quantitative and qualitative comparisons with state-of-the-art methods on widely used benchmarks. Our results show 3D-WAG achieves superior performance in key metrics like Coverage and MMD, generating high-fidelity 3D shapes that closely match the real data distribution.

preprint2026arXiv

ClimateVID -- Social Media Videos Analysis and Challenges Involved

The pervasive growth of digital content, specifically short videos on social media platforms, has significantly altered how topics are discussed and understood in public discourse. In this work, we advance automated visual theme detection by assessing zero-shot and clustering capabilities on social media data. (1) We evaluated the capabilities of notable VLMs such as VideoChatGPT, PandaGPT, and VideoLLava using zero-shot image classification and compared their performance to the baseline provided by frame-wise CLIP image classification. (2) By treating clustering as a minimum cost multicut problem, we aim to uncover insightful patterns in an unsupervised manner. For both analysis strategies, we provide extensive evaluations and practical guidance to practitioners. While VLMs are currently not able to detect climate change specific classes, the clustering results are distinct visual frames. %Given that VLMs are not currently capable to grasp the climate change discourse, we focus the clustering evaluation of image embedding models. We find that both ConvNeXt V2 and DINOv2 produce meaningful clusters, with DINOv2 focusing more on style differences and abstract categories, while ConvNeXt V2 clusters differ in more fine-grained ways. Code available at https://github.com/KathPra/ClimateVID.git.

preprint2022arXiv

Learning to solve Minimum Cost Multicuts efficiently using Edge-Weighted Graph Convolutional Neural Networks

The minimum cost multicut problem is the NP-hard/APX-hard combinatorial optimization problem of partitioning a real-valued edge-weighted graph such as to minimize the total cost of the partition. While graph convolutional neural networks (GNN) have proven to be promising in the context of combinatorial optimization, most of them are only tailored to or tested on positive-valued edge weights, i.e. they do not comply to the nature of the multicut problem. We therefore adapt various GNN architectures including Graph Convolutional Networks, Signed Graph Convolutional Networks and Graph Isomorphic Networks to facilitate the efficient encoding of real-valued edge costs. Moreover, we employ a reformulation of the multicut ILP constraints to a polynomial program as loss function that allows to learn feasible multicut solutions in a scalable way. Thus, we provide the first approach towards end-to-end trainable multicuts. Our findings support that GNN approaches can produce good solutions in practice while providing lower computation times and largely improved scalability compared to LP solvers and optimized heuristics, especially when considering large instances.

preprint2022arXiv

Learning Where To Look -- Generative NAS is Surprisingly Efficient

The efficient, automated search for well-performing neural architectures (NAS) has drawn increasing attention in the recent past. Thereby, the predominant research objective is to reduce the necessity of costly evaluations of neural architectures while efficiently exploring large search spaces. To this aim, surrogate models embed architectures in a latent space and predict their performance, while generative models for neural architectures enable optimization-based search within the latent space the generator draws from. Both, surrogate and generative models, have the aim of facilitating query-efficient search in a well-structured latent space. In this paper, we further improve the trade-off between query-efficiency and promising architecture generation by leveraging advantages from both, efficient surrogate models and generative design. To this end, we propose a generative model, paired with a surrogate predictor, that iteratively learns to generate samples from increasingly promising latent subspaces. This approach leads to very effective and efficient architecture search, while keeping the query amount low. In addition, our approach allows in a straightforward manner to jointly optimize for multiple objectives such as accuracy and hardware latency. We show the benefit of this approach not only w.r.t. the optimization of architectures for highest classification accuracy but also in the context of hardware constraints and outperform state-of-the-art methods on several NAS benchmarks for single and multiple objectives. We also achieve state-of-the-art performance on ImageNet. The code is available at http://github.com/jovitalukasik/AG-Net .

preprint2022arXiv

SP-ViT: Learning 2D Spatial Priors for Vision Transformers

Recently, transformers have shown great potential in image classification and established state-of-the-art results on the ImageNet benchmark. However, compared to CNNs, transformers converge slowly and are prone to overfitting in low-data regimes due to the lack of spatial inductive biases. Such spatial inductive biases can be especially beneficial since the 2D structure of an input image is not well preserved in transformers. In this work, we present Spatial Prior-enhanced Self-Attention (SP-SA), a novel variant of vanilla Self-Attention (SA) tailored for vision transformers. Spatial Priors (SPs) are our proposed family of inductive biases that highlight certain groups of spatial relations. Unlike convolutional inductive biases, which are forced to focus exclusively on hard-coded local regions, our proposed SPs are learned by the model itself and take a variety of spatial relations into account. Specifically, the attention score is calculated with emphasis on certain kinds of spatial relations at each head, and such learned spatial foci can be complementary to each other. Based on SP-SA we propose the SP-ViT family, which consistently outperforms other ViT models with similar GFlops or parameters. Our largest model SP-ViT-L achieves a record-breaking 86.3% Top-1 accuracy with a reduction in the number of parameters by almost 50% compared to previous state-of-the-art model (150M for SP-ViT-L vs 271M for CaiT-M-36) among all ImageNet-1K models trained on 224x224 and fine-tuned on 384x384 resolution w/o extra data.

preprint2022arXiv

Surrogate NAS Benchmarks: Going Beyond the Limited Search Spaces of Tabular NAS Benchmarks

The most significant barrier to the advancement of Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is its demand for large computational resources, which hinders scientifically sound empirical evaluations of NAS methods. Tabular NAS benchmarks have alleviated this problem substantially, making it possible to properly evaluate NAS methods in seconds on commodity machines. However, an unintended consequence of tabular NAS benchmarks has been a focus on extremely small architectural search spaces since their construction relies on exhaustive evaluations of the space. This leads to unrealistic results that do not transfer to larger spaces. To overcome this fundamental limitation, we propose a methodology to create cheap NAS surrogate benchmarks for arbitrary search spaces. We exemplify this approach by creating surrogate NAS benchmarks on the existing tabular NAS-Bench-101 and on two widely used NAS search spaces with up to $10^{21}$ architectures ($10^{13}$ times larger than any previous tabular NAS benchmark). We show that surrogate NAS benchmarks can model the true performance of architectures better than tabular benchmarks (at a small fraction of the cost), that they lead to faithful estimates of how well different NAS methods work on the original non-surrogate benchmark, and that they can generate new scientific insight. We open-source all our code and believe that surrogate NAS benchmarks are an indispensable tool to extend scientifically sound work on NAS to large and exciting search spaces.

preprint2020arXiv

A Variational-Sequential Graph Autoencoder for Neural Architecture Performance Prediction

In computer vision research, the process of automating architecture engineering, Neural Architecture Search (NAS), has gained substantial interest. In the past, NAS was hardly accessible to researchers without access to large-scale compute systems, due to very long compute times for the recurrent search and evaluation of new candidate architectures. The NAS-Bench-101 dataset facilitates a paradigm change towards classical methods such as supervised learning to evaluate neural architectures. In this paper, we propose a graph encoder built upon Graph Neural Networks (GNN). We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed encoder on NAS performance prediction for seen architecture types as well an unseen ones (i.e., zero shot prediction). We also provide a new variational-sequential graph autoencoder (VS-GAE) based on the proposed graph encoder. The VS-GAE is specialized on encoding and decoding graphs of varying length utilizing GNNs. Experiments on different sampling methods show that the embedding space learned by our VS-GAE increases the stability on the accuracy prediction task.

preprint2020arXiv

Learning Embeddings for Image Clustering: An Empirical Study of Triplet Loss Approaches

In this work, we evaluate two different image clustering objectives, k-means clustering and correlation clustering, in the context of Triplet Loss induced feature space embeddings. Specifically, we train a convolutional neural network to learn discriminative features by optimizing two popular versions of the Triplet Loss in order to study their clustering properties under the assumption of noisy labels. Additionally, we propose a new, simple Triplet Loss formulation, which shows desirable properties with respect to formal clustering objectives and outperforms the existing methods. We evaluate all three Triplet loss formulations for K-means and correlation clustering on the CIFAR-10 image classification dataset.

preprint2020arXiv

Object Segmentation Tracking from Generic Video Cues

We propose a light-weight variational framework for online tracking of object segmentations in videos based on optical flow and image boundaries. While high-end computer vision methods on this task rely on sequence specific training of dedicated CNN architectures, we show the potential of a variational model, based on generic video information from motion and color. Such cues are usually required for tasks such as robot navigation or grasp estimation. We leverage them directly for video object segmentation and thus provide accurate segmentations at potentially very low extra cost. Our simple method can provide competitive results compared to the costly CNN-based methods with parameter tuning. Furthermore, we show that our approach can be combined with state-of-the-art CNN-based segmentations in order to improve over their respective results. We evaluate our method on the datasets DAVIS 16,17 and SegTrack v2.

preprint2020arXiv

Self-supervised Sparse to Dense Motion Segmentation

Observable motion in videos can give rise to the definition of objects moving with respect to the scene. The task of segmenting such moving objects is referred to as motion segmentation and is usually tackled either by aggregating motion information in long, sparse point trajectories, or by directly producing per frame dense segmentations relying on large amounts of training data. In this paper, we propose a self supervised method to learn the densification of sparse motion segmentations from single video frames. While previous approaches towards motion segmentation build upon pre-training on large surrogate datasets and use dense motion information as an essential cue for the pixelwise segmentation, our model does not require pre-training and operates at test time on single frames. It can be trained in a sequence specific way to produce high quality dense segmentations from sparse and noisy input. We evaluate our method on the well-known motion segmentation datasets FBMS59 and DAVIS16.

preprint2020arXiv

Spectral Distribution Aware Image Generation

Recent advances in deep generative models for photo-realistic images have led to high quality visual results. Such models learn to generate data from a given training distribution such that generated images can not be easily distinguished from real images by the human eye. Yet, recent work on the detection of such fake images pointed out that they are actually easily distinguishable by artifacts in their frequency spectra. In this paper, we propose to generate images according to the frequency distribution of the real data by employing a spectral discriminator. The proposed discriminator is lightweight, modular and works stably with different commonly used GAN losses. We show that the resulting models can better generate images with realistic frequency spectra, which are thus harder to detect by this cue.

preprint2020arXiv

Unmasking DeepFakes with simple Features

Deep generative models have recently achieved impressive results for many real-world applications, successfully generating high-resolution and diverse samples from complex datasets. Due to this improvement, fake digital contents have proliferated growing concern and spreading distrust in image content, leading to an urgent need for automated ways to detect these AI-generated fake images. Despite the fact that many face editing algorithms seem to produce realistic human faces, upon closer examination, they do exhibit artifacts in certain domains which are often hidden to the naked eye. In this work, we present a simple way to detect such fake face images - so-called DeepFakes. Our method is based on a classical frequency domain analysis followed by basic classifier. Compared to previous systems, which need to be fed with large amounts of labeled data, our approach showed very good results using only a few annotated training samples and even achieved good accuracies in fully unsupervised scenarios. For the evaluation on high resolution face images, we combined several public datasets of real and fake faces into a new benchmark: Faces-HQ. Given such high-resolution images, our approach reaches a perfect classification accuracy of 100% when it is trained on as little as 20 annotated samples. In a second experiment, in the evaluation of the medium-resolution images of the CelebA dataset, our method achieves 100% accuracy supervised and 96% in an unsupervised setting. Finally, evaluating a low-resolution video sequences of the FaceForensics++ dataset, our method achieves 91% accuracy detecting manipulated videos. Source Code: https://github.com/cc-hpc-itwm/DeepFakeDetection

preprint2020arXiv

Unsupervised Multiple Person Tracking using AutoEncoder-Based Lifted Multicuts

Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) is a long-standing task in computer vision. Current approaches based on the tracking by detection paradigm either require some sort of domain knowledge or supervision to associate data correctly into tracks. In this work, we present an unsupervised multiple object tracking approach based on visual features and minimum cost lifted multicuts. Our method is based on straight-forward spatio-temporal cues that can be extracted from neighboring frames in an image sequences without superivison. Clustering based on these cues enables us to learn the required appearance invariances for the tracking task at hand and train an autoencoder to generate suitable latent representation. Thus, the resulting latent representations can serve as robust appearance cues for tracking even over large temporal distances where no reliable spatio-temporal features could be extracted. We show that, despite being trained without using the provided annotations, our model provides competitive results on the challenging MOT Benchmark for pedestrian tracking.

preprint2020arXiv

Watch your Up-Convolution: CNN Based Generative Deep Neural Networks are Failing to Reproduce Spectral Distributions

Generative convolutional deep neural networks, e.g. popular GAN architectures, are relying on convolution based up-sampling methods to produce non-scalar outputs like images or video sequences. In this paper, we show that common up-sampling methods, i.e. known as up-convolution or transposed convolution, are causing the inability of such models to reproduce spectral distributions of natural training data correctly. This effect is independent of the underlying architecture and we show that it can be used to easily detect generated data like deepfakes with up to 100% accuracy on public benchmarks. To overcome this drawback of current generative models, we propose to add a novel spectral regularization term to the training optimization objective. We show that this approach not only allows to train spectral consistent GANs that are avoiding high frequency errors. Also, we show that a correct approximation of the frequency spectrum has positive effects on the training stability and output quality of generative networks.

preprint2016arXiv

A Multi-cut Formulation for Joint Segmentation and Tracking of Multiple Objects

Recently, Minimum Cost Multicut Formulations have been proposed and proven to be successful in both motion trajectory segmentation and multi-target tracking scenarios. Both tasks benefit from decomposing a graphical model into an optimal number of connected components based on attractive and repulsive pairwise terms. The two tasks are formulated on different levels of granularity and, accordingly, leverage mostly local information for motion segmentation and mostly high-level information for multi-target tracking. In this paper we argue that point trajectories and their local relationships can contribute to the high-level task of multi-target tracking and also argue that high-level cues from object detection and tracking are helpful to solve motion segmentation. We propose a joint graphical model for point trajectories and object detections whose Multicuts are solutions to motion segmentation {\it and} multi-target tracking problems at once. Results on the FBMS59 motion segmentation benchmark as well as on pedestrian tracking sequences from the 2D MOT 2015 benchmark demonstrate the promise of this joint approach.

preprint2016arXiv

FlowNet 2.0: Evolution of Optical Flow Estimation with Deep Networks

The FlowNet demonstrated that optical flow estimation can be cast as a learning problem. However, the state of the art with regard to the quality of the flow has still been defined by traditional methods. Particularly on small displacements and real-world data, FlowNet cannot compete with variational methods. In this paper, we advance the concept of end-to-end learning of optical flow and make it work really well. The large improvements in quality and speed are caused by three major contributions: first, we focus on the training data and show that the schedule of presenting data during training is very important. Second, we develop a stacked architecture that includes warping of the second image with intermediate optical flow. Third, we elaborate on small displacements by introducing a sub-network specializing on small motions. FlowNet 2.0 is only marginally slower than the original FlowNet but decreases the estimation error by more than 50%. It performs on par with state-of-the-art methods, while running at interactive frame rates. Moreover, we present faster variants that allow optical flow computation at up to 140fps with accuracy matching the original FlowNet.

preprint2016arXiv

Point-wise mutual information-based video segmentation with high temporal consistency

In this paper, we tackle the problem of temporally consistent boundary detection and hierarchical segmentation in videos. While finding the best high-level reasoning of region assignments in videos is the focus of much recent research, temporal consistency in boundary detection has so far only rarely been tackled. We argue that temporally consistent boundaries are a key component to temporally consistent region assignment. The proposed method is based on the point-wise mutual information (PMI) of spatio-temporal voxels. Temporal consistency is established by an evaluation of PMI-based point affinities in the spectral domain over space and time. Thus, the proposed method is independent of any optical flow computation or previously learned motion models. The proposed low-level video segmentation method outperforms the learning-based state of the art in terms of standard region metrics.

preprint2015arXiv

Efficient Decomposition of Image and Mesh Graphs by Lifted Multicuts

Formulations of the Image Decomposition Problem as a Multicut Problem (MP) w.r.t. a superpixel graph have received considerable attention. In contrast, instances of the MP w.r.t. a pixel grid graph have received little attention, firstly, because the MP is NP-hard and instances w.r.t. a pixel grid graph are hard to solve in practice, and, secondly, due to the lack of long-range terms in the objective function of the MP. We propose a generalization of the MP with long-range terms (LMP). We design and implement two efficient algorithms (primal feasible heuristics) for the MP and LMP which allow us to study instances of both problems w.r.t. the pixel grid graphs of the images in the BSDS-500 benchmark. The decompositions we obtain do not differ significantly from the state of the art, suggesting that the LMP is a competitive formulation of the Image Decomposition Problem. To demonstrate the generality of the LMP, we apply it also to the Mesh Decomposition Problem posed by the Princeton benchmark, obtaining state-of-the-art decompositions.