Santosh Divvala

Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai, Santosh Divvala, Louis-Philippe Morency et al.

Visual relationship reasoning is a crucial yet challenging task for understanding rich interactions across visual concepts. For example, a relationship 'man, open, door' involves a complex relation 'open' between concrete entities 'man, door'. While much of the existing work has studied this problem in the context of still images, understanding visual relationships in videos has received limited attention. Due to their temporal nature, videos enable us to model and reason about a more comprehensive set of visual relationships, such as those requiring multiple (temporal) observations (e.g., 'man, lift up, box' vs. 'man, put down, box'), as well as relationships that are often correlated through time (e.g., 'woman, pay, money' followed by 'woman, buy, coffee'). In this paper, we construct a Conditional Random Field on a fully-connected spatio-temporal graph that exploits the statistical dependency between relational entities spatially and temporally. We introduce a novel gated energy function parametrization that learns adaptive relations conditioned on visual observations. Our model optimization is computationally efficient, and its space computation complexity is significantly amortized through our proposed parameterization. Experimental results on benchmark video datasets (ImageNet Video and Charades) demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across three standard relationship reasoning tasks: Detection, Tagging, and Recognition.

Krishna Kumar Singh, Santosh Divvala, Ali Farhadi et al.

We present a scalable approach for Detecting Objects by transferring Common-sense Knowledge (DOCK) from source to target categories. In our setting, the training data for the source categories have bounding box annotations, while those for the target categories only have image-level annotations. Current state-of-the-art approaches focus on image-level visual or semantic similarity to adapt a detector trained on the source categories to the new target categories. In contrast, our key idea is to (i) use similarity not at the image-level, but rather at the region-level, and (ii) leverage richer common-sense (based on attribute, spatial, etc.) to guide the algorithm towards learning the correct detections. We acquire such common-sense cues automatically from readily-available knowledge bases without any extra human effort. On the challenging MS COCO dataset, we find that common-sense knowledge can substantially improve detection performance over existing transfer-learning baselines.

Gunnar A. Sigurdsson, Santosh Divvala, Ali Farhadi et al.

Actions are more than just movements and trajectories: we cook to eat and we hold a cup to drink from it. A thorough understanding of videos requires going beyond appearance modeling and necessitates reasoning about the sequence of activities, as well as the higher-level constructs such as intentions. But how do we model and reason about these? We propose a fully-connected temporal CRF model for reasoning over various aspects of activities that includes objects, actions, and intentions, where the potentials are predicted by a deep network. End-to-end training of such structured models is a challenging endeavor: For inference and learning we need to construct mini-batches consisting of whole videos, leading to mini-batches with only a few videos. This causes high-correlation between data points leading to breakdown of the backprop algorithm. To address this challenge, we present an asynchronous variational inference method that allows efficient end-to-end training. Our method achieves a classification mAP of 22.4% on the Charades benchmark, outperforming the state-of-the-art (17.2% mAP), and offers equal gains on the task of temporal localization.

Hamid Izadinia, Fereshteh Sadeghi, Santosh Kumar Divvala et al.

We introduce Segment-Phrase Table (SPT), a large collection of bijective associations between textual phrases and their corresponding segmentations. Leveraging recent progress in object recognition and natural language semantics, we show how we can successfully build a high-quality segment-phrase table using minimal human supervision. More importantly, we demonstrate the unique value unleashed by this rich bimodal resource, for both vision as well as natural language understanding. First, we show that fine-grained textual labels facilitate contextual reasoning that helps in satisfying semantic constraints across image segments. This feature enables us to achieve state-of-the-art segmentation results on benchmark datasets. Next, we show that the association of high-quality segmentations to textual phrases aids in richer semantic understanding and reasoning of these textual phrases. Leveraging this feature, we motivate the problem of visual entailment and visual paraphrasing, and demonstrate its utility on a large dataset.

Joseph Redmon, Santosh Divvala, Ross Girshick et al.

We present YOLO, a new approach to object detection. Prior work on object detection repurposes classifiers to perform detection. Instead, we frame object detection as a regression problem to spatially separated bounding boxes and associated class probabilities. A single neural network predicts bounding boxes and class probabilities directly from full images in one evaluation. Since the whole detection pipeline is a single network, it can be optimized end-to-end directly on detection performance. Our unified architecture is extremely fast. Our base YOLO model processes images in real-time at 45 frames per second. A smaller version of the network, Fast YOLO, processes an astounding 155 frames per second while still achieving double the mAP of other real-time detectors. Compared to state-of-the-art detection systems, YOLO makes more localization errors but is far less likely to predict false detections where nothing exists. Finally, YOLO learns very general representations of objects. It outperforms all other detection methods, including DPM and R-CNN, by a wide margin when generalizing from natural images to artwork on both the Picasso Dataset and the People-Art Dataset.

Santosh K. Divvala, Alexei A. Efros, Martial Hebert

The main stated contribution of the Deformable Parts Model (DPM) detector of Felzenszwalb et al. (over the Histogram-of-Oriented-Gradients approach of Dalal and Triggs) is the use of deformable parts. A secondary contribution is the latent discriminative learning. Tertiary is the use of multiple components. A common belief in the vision community (including ours, before this study) is that their ordering of contributions reflects the performance of detector in practice. However, what we have experimentally found is that the ordering of importance might actually be the reverse. First, we show that by increasing the number of components, and switching the initialization step from their aspect-ratio, left-right flipping heuristics to appearance-based clustering, considerable improvement in performance is obtained. But more intriguingly, we show that with these new components, the part deformations can now be completely switched off, yet obtaining results that are almost on par with the original DPM detector. Finally, we also show initial results for using multiple components on a different problem -- scene classification, suggesting that this idea might have wider applications in addition to object detection.