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Oncel Tuzel

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Published work

16 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Velox: Learning Representations of 4D Geometry and Appearance

We introduce a framework for learning latent representations of 4D objects which are descriptive, faithfully capturing object geometry and appearance; compressive, aiding in downstream efficiency; and accessible, requiring minimal input, i.e., an unstructured dynamic point cloud, to construct. Specifically, Velox trains an encoder to compress spatiotemporal color point clouds into a set of dynamic shape tokens. These tokens are supervised using two complementary decoders: a 4D surface decoder, which models the time-varying surface distribution capturing the geometry; and a Gaussian decoder, which maps the tokens to 3D Gaussians, helping learn appearance. To demonstrate the utility of our representation, we evaluate it across three downstream tasks -- video-to-4D generation, 3D tracking, and cloth simulation via image-to-4D generation -- and observe strong performances in all settings.

preprint2022arXiv

Forward Compatible Training for Large-Scale Embedding Retrieval Systems

In visual retrieval systems, updating the embedding model requires recomputing features for every piece of data. This expensive process is referred to as backfilling. Recently, the idea of backward compatible training (BCT) was proposed. To avoid the cost of backfilling, BCT modifies training of the new model to make its representations compatible with those of the old model. However, BCT can significantly hinder the performance of the new model. In this work, we propose a new learning paradigm for representation learning: forward compatible training (FCT). In FCT, when the old model is trained, we also prepare for a future unknown version of the model. We propose learning side-information, an auxiliary feature for each sample which facilitates future updates of the model. To develop a powerful and flexible framework for model compatibility, we combine side-information with a forward transformation from old to new embeddings. Training of the new model is not modified, hence, its accuracy is not degraded. We demonstrate significant retrieval accuracy improvement compared to BCT for various datasets: ImageNet-1k (+18.1%), Places-365 (+5.4%), and VGG-Face2 (+8.3%). FCT obtains model compatibility when the new and old models are trained across different datasets, losses, and architectures.

preprint2022arXiv

Style Equalization: Unsupervised Learning of Controllable Generative Sequence Models

Controllable generative sequence models with the capability to extract and replicate the style of specific examples enable many applications, including narrating audiobooks in different voices, auto-completing and auto-correcting written handwriting, and generating missing training samples for downstream recognition tasks. However, under an unsupervised-style setting, typical training algorithms for controllable sequence generative models suffer from the training-inference mismatch, where the same sample is used as content and style input during training but unpaired samples are given during inference. In this paper, we tackle the training-inference mismatch encountered during unsupervised learning of controllable generative sequence models. The proposed method is simple yet effective, where we use a style transformation module to transfer target style information into an unrelated style input. This method enables training using unpaired content and style samples and thereby mitigate the training-inference mismatch. We apply style equalization to text-to-speech and text-to-handwriting synthesis on three datasets. We conduct thorough evaluation, including both quantitative and qualitative user studies. Our results show that by mitigating the training-inference mismatch with the proposed style equalization, we achieve style replication scores comparable to real data in our user studies.

preprint2021arXiv

Optimize what matters: Training DNN-HMM Keyword Spotting Model Using End Metric

Deep Neural Network--Hidden Markov Model (DNN-HMM) based methods have been successfully used for many always-on keyword spotting algorithms that detect a wake word to trigger a device. The DNN predicts the state probabilities of a given speech frame, while HMM decoder combines the DNN predictions of multiple speech frames to compute the keyword detection score. The DNN, in prior methods, is trained independent of the HMM parameters to minimize the cross-entropy loss between the predicted and the ground-truth state probabilities. The mis-match between the DNN training loss (cross-entropy) and the end metric (detection score) is the main source of sub-optimal performance for the keyword spotting task. We address this loss-metric mismatch with a novel end-to-end training strategy that learns the DNN parameters by optimizing for the detection score. To this end, we make the HMM decoder (dynamic programming) differentiable and back-propagate through it to maximize the score for the keyword and minimize the scores for non-keyword speech segments. Our method does not require any change in the model architecture or the inference framework; therefore, there is no overhead in run-time memory or compute requirements. Moreover, we show significant reduction in false rejection rate (FRR) at the same false trigger experience (> 70% over independent DNN training).

preprint2021arXiv

SapAugment: Learning A Sample Adaptive Policy for Data Augmentation

Data augmentation methods usually apply the same augmentation (or a mix of them) to all the training samples. For example, to perturb data with noise, the noise is sampled from a Normal distribution with a fixed standard deviation, for all samples. We hypothesize that a hard sample with high training loss already provides strong training signal to update the model parameters and should be perturbed with mild or no augmentation. Perturbing a hard sample with a strong augmentation may also make it too hard to learn from. Furthermore, a sample with low training loss should be perturbed by a stronger augmentation to provide more robustness to a variety of conditions. To formalize these intuitions, we propose a novel method to learn a Sample-Adaptive Policy for Augmentation -- SapAugment. Our policy adapts the augmentation parameters based on the training loss of the data samples. In the example of Gaussian noise, a hard sample will be perturbed with a low variance noise and an easy sample with a high variance noise. Furthermore, the proposed method combines multiple augmentation methods into a methodical policy learning framework and obviates hand-crafting augmentation parameters by trial-and-error. We apply our method on an automatic speech recognition (ASR) task, and combine existing and novel augmentations using the proposed framework. We show substantial improvement, up to 21% relative reduction in word error rate on LibriSpeech dataset, over the state-of-the-art speech augmentation method.

preprint2020arXiv

Least squares binary quantization of neural networks

Quantizing weights and activations of deep neural networks results in significant improvement in inference efficiency at the cost of lower accuracy. A source of the accuracy gap between full precision and quantized models is the quantization error. In this work, we focus on the binary quantization, in which values are mapped to -1 and 1. We provide a unified framework to analyze different scaling strategies. Inspired by the pareto-optimality of 2-bits versus 1-bit quantization, we introduce a novel 2-bits quantization with provably least squares error. Our quantization algorithms can be implemented efficiently on the hardware using bitwise operations. We present proofs to show that our proposed methods are optimal, and also provide empirical error analysis. We conduct experiments on the ImageNet dataset and show a reduced accuracy gap when using the proposed least squares quantization algorithms.

preprint2020arXiv

Subject-Aware Contrastive Learning for Biosignals

Datasets for biosignals, such as electroencephalogram (EEG) and electrocardiogram (ECG), often have noisy labels and have limited number of subjects (<100). To handle these challenges, we propose a self-supervised approach based on contrastive learning to model biosignals with a reduced reliance on labeled data and with fewer subjects. In this regime of limited labels and subjects, intersubject variability negatively impacts model performance. Thus, we introduce subject-aware learning through (1) a subject-specific contrastive loss, and (2) an adversarial training to promote subject-invariance during the self-supervised learning. We also develop a number of time-series data augmentation techniques to be used with the contrastive loss for biosignals. Our method is evaluated on publicly available datasets of two different biosignals with different tasks: EEG decoding and ECG anomaly detection. The embeddings learned using self-supervision yield competitive classification results compared to entirely supervised methods. We show that subject-invariance improves representation quality for these tasks, and observe that subject-specific loss increases performance when fine-tuning with supervised labels.

preprint2020arXiv

Unsupervised Style and Content Separation by Minimizing Mutual Information for Speech Synthesis

We present a method to generate speech from input text and a style vector that is extracted from a reference speech signal in an unsupervised manner, i.e., no style annotation, such as speaker information, is required. Existing unsupervised methods, during training, generate speech by computing style from the corresponding ground truth sample and use a decoder to combine the style vector with the input text. Training the model in such a way leaks content information into the style vector. The decoder can use the leaked content and ignore some of the input text to minimize the reconstruction loss. At inference time, when the reference speech does not match the content input, the output may not contain all of the content of the input text. We refer to this problem as "content leakage", which we address by explicitly estimating and minimizing the mutual information between the style and the content through an adversarial training formulation. We call our method MIST - Mutual Information based Style Content Separation. The main goal of the method is to preserve the input content in the synthesized speech signal, which we measure by the word error rate (WER) and show substantial improvements over state-of-the-art unsupervised speech synthesis methods.

preprint2016arXiv

Coupled Generative Adversarial Networks

We propose coupled generative adversarial network (CoGAN) for learning a joint distribution of multi-domain images. In contrast to the existing approaches, which require tuples of corresponding images in different domains in the training set, CoGAN can learn a joint distribution without any tuple of corresponding images. It can learn a joint distribution with just samples drawn from the marginal distributions. This is achieved by enforcing a weight-sharing constraint that limits the network capacity and favors a joint distribution solution over a product of marginal distributions one. We apply CoGAN to several joint distribution learning tasks, including learning a joint distribution of color and depth images, and learning a joint distribution of face images with different attributes. For each task it successfully learns the joint distribution without any tuple of corresponding images. We also demonstrate its applications to domain adaptation and image transformation.

preprint2016arXiv

Global-Local Face Upsampling Network

Face hallucination, which is the task of generating a high-resolution face image from a low-resolution input image, is a well-studied problem that is useful in widespread application areas. Face hallucination is particularly challenging when the input face resolution is very low (e.g., 10 x 12 pixels) and/or the image is captured in an uncontrolled setting with large pose and illumination variations. In this paper, we revisit the algorithm introduced in [1] and present a deep interpretation of this framework that achieves state-of-the-art under such challenging scenarios. In our deep network architecture the global and local constraints that define a face can be efficiently modeled and learned end-to-end using training data. Conceptually our network design can be partitioned into two sub-networks: the first one implements the holistic face reconstruction according to global constraints, and the second one enhances face-specific details and enforces local patch statistics. We optimize the deep network using a new loss function for super-resolution that combines reconstruction error with a learned face quality measure in adversarial setting, producing improved visual results. We conduct extensive experiments in both controlled and uncontrolled setups and show that our algorithm improves the state of the art both numerically and visually.

preprint2016arXiv

Robust Face Alignment Using a Mixture of Invariant Experts

Face alignment, which is the task of finding the locations of a set of facial landmark points in an image of a face, is useful in widespread application areas. Face alignment is particularly challenging when there are large variations in pose (in-plane and out-of-plane rotations) and facial expression. To address this issue, we propose a cascade in which each stage consists of a mixture of regression experts. Each expert learns a customized regression model that is specialized to a different subset of the joint space of pose and expressions. The system is invariant to a predefined class of transformations (e.g., affine), because the input is transformed to match each expert's prototype shape before the regression is applied. We also present a method to include deformation constraints within the discriminative alignment framework, which makes our algorithm more robust. Our algorithm significantly outperforms previous methods on publicly available face alignment datasets.

preprint2015arXiv

Deep Gaussian Conditional Random Field Network: A Model-based Deep Network for Discriminative Denoising

We propose a novel deep network architecture for image\\ denoising based on a Gaussian Conditional Random Field (GCRF) model. In contrast to the existing discriminative denoising methods that train a separate model for each noise level, the proposed deep network explicitly models the input noise variance and hence is capable of handling a range of noise levels. Our deep network, which we refer to as deep GCRF network, consists of two sub-networks: (i) a parameter generation network that generates the pairwise potential parameters based on the noisy input image, and (ii) an inference network whose layers perform the computations involved in an iterative GCRF inference procedure.\ We train the entire deep GCRF network (both parameter generation and inference networks) discriminatively in an end-to-end fashion by maximizing the peak signal-to-noise ratio measure. Experiments on Berkeley segmentation and PASCALVOC datasets show that the proposed deep GCRF network outperforms state-of-the-art image denoising approaches for several noise levels.

preprint2015arXiv

Deep Hierarchical Parsing for Semantic Segmentation

This paper proposes a learning-based approach to scene parsing inspired by the deep Recursive Context Propagation Network (RCPN). RCPN is a deep feed-forward neural network that utilizes the contextual information from the entire image, through bottom-up followed by top-down context propagation via random binary parse trees. This improves the feature representation of every super-pixel in the image for better classification into semantic categories. We analyze RCPN and propose two novel contributions to further improve the model. We first analyze the learning of RCPN parameters and discover the presence of bypass error paths in the computation graph of RCPN that can hinder contextual propagation. We propose to tackle this problem by including the classification loss of the internal nodes of the random parse trees in the original RCPN loss function. Secondly, we use an MRF on the parse tree nodes to model the hierarchical dependency present in the output. Both modifications provide performance boosts over the original RCPN and the new system achieves state-of-the-art performance on Stanford Background, SIFT-Flow and Daimler urban datasets.

preprint2015arXiv

Efficient Upsampling of Natural Images

We propose a novel method of efficient upsampling of a single natural image. Current methods for image upsampling tend to produce high-resolution images with either blurry salient edges, or loss of fine textural detail, or spurious noise artifacts. In our method, we mitigate these effects by modeling the input image as a sum of edge and detail layers, operating upon these layers separately, and merging the upscaled results in an automatic fashion. We formulate the upsampled output image as the solution to a non-convex energy minimization problem, and propose an algorithm to obtain a tractable approximate solution. Our algorithm comprises two main stages. 1) For the edge layer, we use a nonparametric approach by constructing a dictionary of patches from a given image, and synthesize edge regions in a higher-resolution version of the image. 2) For the detail layer, we use a global parametric texture enhancement approach to synthesize detail regions across the image. We demonstrate that our method is able to accurately reproduce sharp edges as well as synthesize photorealistic textures, while avoiding common artifacts such as ringing and haloing. In addition, our method involves no training phase or estimation of model parameters, and is easily parallelizable. We demonstrate the utility of our method on a number of challenging standard test photos.

preprint2015arXiv

Layered Interpretation of Street View Images

We propose a layered street view model to encode both depth and semantic information on street view images for autonomous driving. Recently, stixels, stix-mantics, and tiered scene labeling methods have been proposed to model street view images. We propose a 4-layer street view model, a compact representation over the recently proposed stix-mantics model. Our layers encode semantic classes like ground, pedestrians, vehicles, buildings, and sky in addition to the depths. The only input to our algorithm is a pair of stereo images. We use a deep neural network to extract the appearance features for semantic classes. We use a simple and an efficient inference algorithm to jointly estimate both semantic classes and layered depth values. Our method outperforms other competing approaches in Daimler urban scene segmentation dataset. Our algorithm is massively parallelizable, allowing a GPU implementation with a processing speed about 9 fps.

preprint2012arXiv

Compressed Inference for Probabilistic Sequential Models

Hidden Markov models (HMMs) and conditional random fields (CRFs) are two popular techniques for modeling sequential data. Inference algorithms designed over CRFs and HMMs allow estimation of the state sequence given the observations. In several applications, estimation of the state sequence is not the end goal; instead the goal is to compute some function of it. In such scenarios, estimating the state sequence by conventional inference techniques, followed by computing the functional mapping from the estimate is not necessarily optimal. A more formal approach is to directly infer the final outcome from the observations. In particular, we consider the specific instantiation of the problem where the goal is to find the state trajectories without exact transition points and derive a novel polynomial time inference algorithm that outperforms vanilla inference techniques. We show that this particular problem arises commonly in many disparate applications and present experiments on three of them: (1) Toy robot tracking; (2) Single stroke character recognition; (3) Handwritten word recognition.