A new loss function for VAEs improves image quality and efficiency.
problem Training VAEs to generate realistic images requires a loss function that reflects human perception.
method Based on Watson's perceptual model, the loss function computes a weighted distance in frequency space, accounts for luminance and contrast masking, and is extended to color images.
result VAEs trained with the new loss function generated high-quality, less blurry images with fewer artifacts and less computational resources.
This paper presents a novel CNN-based approach for synthesizing high-resolution LiDAR point cloud data. Our approach generates semantically and perceptually realistic results with guidance from specialized loss-functions. First, we utilize a modified per-point loss that addresses missing LiDAR point measurements. Secon…
Despite the breakthroughs in accuracy and speed of single image super-resolution using faster and deeper convolutional neural networks, one central problem remains largely unsolved: how do we recover the finer texture details when we super-resolve at large upscaling factors? The behavior of optimization-based super-res…
In order to design haptic icons or build a haptic vocabulary, we require a set of easily distinguishable haptic signals to avoid perceptual ambiguity, which in turn requires a way to accurately estimate the perceptual (dis)similarity of such signals. In this work, we present a novel method to learn such a perceptual me…
New method compresses facial videos using GANs and latent space optimization.
problem Efficiently compressing facial videos at low bit rates.
method Leverages StyleGAN for latent space representation and compression, learns optimal compression through entropy model and perceptual loss.
result Significantly reduces perceptual distortion at low bit rates compared to state-of-the-art codecs.
We introduce autoregressive implicit quantile networks (AIQN), a fundamentally different approach to generative modeling than those commonly used, that implicitly captures the distribution using quantile regression. AIQN is able to achieve superior perceptual quality and improvements in evaluation metrics, without incu…
Generative networks improve fluid simulation quality by focusing on high frequencies.
problem Low-frequency details missing in fluid simulation reconstructions.
method Frequency-aware loss function for generative networks.
result Improved perceptual quality of fluid simulation results in mid-frequency bands.
New SSIM measure improves adversarial attacks' perceptual quality.
problem Lack of perceptual quality in traditional adversarial attacks.
method Replaced Lp norms with SSIM measure for better quality. result SSIM-constrained attacks achieve better quality and similar success rate.
Perceptual Kalman filters maintain human-perceptual quality while processing data.
problem Maintaining human-perceptual quality in signal processing under temporal constraints.
method An optimal causal filtering approach under a perfect perceptual-quality constraint.
result Adding perceptual quality constraints introduces a dilemma that requires sacrificing MSE for temporal consistency.
The popularity of high and ultra-high definition displays has led to the need for methods to improve the quality of videos already obtained at much lower resolutions. Current Video Super-Resolution methods are not robust to mismatch between training and testing degradation models since they are trained against a single…
New method defends against unseen threat models using perceptual adversarial training.
problem Lack of precise mathematical characterization of human perception in adversarial attacks.
method Adversarial training against the set of all imperceptible adversarial examples approximated by deep neural networks.
result Perceptual Adversarial Training (PAT) achieves state-of-the-art robustness against multiple diverse adversarial attacks.
Emotional aspects play an important part in our interaction with music. However, modelling these aspects in MIR systems have been notoriously challenging since emotion is an inherently abstract and subjective experience, thus making it difficult to quantify or predict in the first place, and to make sense of the predic…
CosmoVAE uses deep learning to fill in missing parts of the cosmic microwave background map.
problem Missing observations in the CMB map due to thermal dust noise.
method Variational autoencoder (VAE) trained with a new loss function.
result CosmoVAE achieves state-of-the-art performance in CMB map inpainting.
In this manuscript we propose two objective terms for neural image compression: a compression objective and a cycle loss. These terms are applied on the encoder output of an autoencoder and are used in combination with reconstruction losses. The compression objective encourages sparsity and low entropy in the activatio…
Generates high-resolution images from low-resolution inputs.
problem Generating realistic images from low-resolution inputs.
method Latent Adversarial Generator (LAG) using perceptual loss.
result Samples of high-resolution images from low-resolution inputs.
Study shows perceptual boost of visual attention varies with task difficulty and size.
problem Understanding how task-dependent the perceptual boost of visual attention is in natural settings.
method Designed and trained neural networks on various visual tasks, comparing results to baseline.
result Perceptual boost of attention is stronger with more difficult tasks and weaker with larger task sets.
For a standard convolutional neural network, optimizing over the input pixels to maximize the score of some target class will generally produce a grainy-looking version of the original image. However, Santurkar et al. (2019) demonstrated that for adversarially-trained neural networks, this optimization produces images …
Perceptual ad-blocking is a novel approach that detects online advertisements based on their visual content. Compared to traditional filter lists, the use of perceptual signals is believed to be less prone to an arms race with web publishers and ad networks. We demonstrate that this may not be the case. We describe att…
Introduces PCG for better counterfactual explanations in vision models.
problem Ambiguity in latent-space optimization methods for counterfactual explanations.
method Constructs counterfactuals by tracing geodesics under a perceptually Riemannian metric.
result PCG outperforms baselines and reveals hidden failure modes.
Modern generative models are usually designed to match target distributions directly in the data space, where the intrinsic dimension of data can be much lower than the ambient dimension. We argue that this discrepancy may contribute to the difficulties in training generative models. We therefore propose to map both th…
A new perceptual adjustment query for metric learning reduces complexity in high-dimensional data.
problem Metric learning in high-dimensional data with limited human feedback.
method Inverted measurement scheme and two-stage estimator for PAQs.
result Sample complexity guarantees for the two-stage estimator of metric learning from PAQs.
Metric functions for phoneme perception capture the similarity structure among phonemes in a given language and therefore play a central role in phonology and psycho-linguistics. Various phenomena depend on phoneme similarity, such as spoken word recognition or serial recall from verbal working memory. This study prese…
Paper proposes a new black-box attack approach to minimize visual distortion.
problem Constructing adversarial examples that minimize visual distortion in a black-box threat model.
method Learning the noise distribution of adversarial examples to approximate the gradient of a non-differentiable loss function.
result The proposed attack results in much lower visual distortion compared to state-of-the-art black-box attacks.
Stochastic encoders outperform deterministic ones in 'perfect perceptual quality'.
problem Understanding when stochastic encoders outperform deterministic ones.
method Provided a toy example to illustrate performance.
result Stochastic encoders can significantly outperform deterministic ones in 'perfect perceptual quality'.
Conventional SVM-based image coding methods are founded on independently restricting the distortion in every image coefficient at some particular image representation. Geometrically, this implies allowing arbitrary signal distortions in an n-dimensional rectangle defined by the ε-insensitivity zone in eac…
New method prevents class collapse in metric learning with margin-based losses.
problem Class collapse in metric learning due to diverse intra-class samples.
method Proposed a sampling method to select nearest same-class samples as positive elements in tuple.
result Demonstrated clear benefits on various fine-grained image retrieval datasets.
Recent work has shown that additive threat models, which only permit the addition of bounded noise to the pixels of an image, are insufficient for fully capturing the space of imperceivable adversarial examples. For example, small rotations and spatial transformations can fool classifiers, remain imperceivable to human…
Selfie and cartoon are two popular artistic forms that are widely presented in our daily life. Despite the great progress in image translation/stylization, few techniques focus specifically on selfie cartoonization, since cartoon images usually contain artistic abstraction (e.g., large smoothing areas) and exaggeration…
Lossy compression algorithms are typically designed and analyzed through the lens of Shannon's rate-distortion theory, where the goal is to achieve the lowest possible distortion (e.g., low MSE or high SSIM) at any given bit rate. However, in recent years, it has become increasingly accepted that "low distortion" is no…
Traditionally, the vision community has devised algorithms to estimate the distance between an original image and images that have been subject to perturbations. Inspiration was usually taken from the human visual perceptual system and how the system processes different perturbations in order to replicate to what exten…
PeL separates sensory interface optimization from decision learning.
problem Optimizing sensory interfaces without task-specific information.
method Formal separation of perception and decision learning, using metrics for stability, informativeness, and geometry.
result Updates preserving invariants are orthogonal to decision gradients.
Improved speech enhancement with larger neural networks using novel embeddings and biases.
problem Decreased robustness of speech enhancement models to real-world use cases.
method Frequency-positional embeddings, semi-supervised training, biased loss function.
result Better performance on real recordings with improved large neural network architecture.
Improved image generation with private data using perceptual features.
problem Difficulty in training generative models with differential privacy.
method Use pre-trained perceptual features to learn private data distribution.
result Generative models can generate high-quality images with low privacy budget (ϵ≈2). New method disentangles perceptual uncertainty and behavioral costs in partially observable systems.
problem Tackles inverse optimal control for non-linear partially observable systems.
method Probabilistic approach using maximum causal entropy formulations and local linearization.
result Disentangles perceptual factors and behavioral costs in sequential decision-making.
Stabilizes training of DNN for speech enhancement using PESQ scores.
problem Stability issues in training DNNs using non-differentiable OSQA scores.
method Approximate OSQA scores with a differentiable auxiliary DNN and stabilize training with reinforcement learning techniques.
result Stable training of DNN to achieve state-of-the-art PESQ scores and better sound quality.
Humans perceive the seemingly chaotic world in a structured and compositional way with the prerequisite of being able to segregate conceptual entities from the complex visual scenes. The mechanism of grouping basic visual elements of scenes into conceptual entities is termed as perceptual grouping. In this work, we pro…
In order to efficiently transmit and store speech signals, speech codecs create a minimally redundant representation of the input signal which is then decoded at the receiver with the best possible perceptual quality. In this work we demonstrate that a neural network architecture based on VQ-VAE with a WaveNet decoder …
Paper introduces adversarial lossy compression for video artifacts reduction.
problem Unpleasant reconstruction artifacts in standard video coding schemes at low bit-rates.
method Adversarial lossy video compression model minimizing an adversarial distortion objective.
result Reduction of perceptual artifacts and detail reconstruction under extreme compression.
Non-parallel many-to-many voice conversion, as well as zero-shot voice conversion, remain under-explored areas. Deep style transfer algorithms, such as generative adversarial networks (GAN) and conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE), are being applied as new solutions in this field. However, GAN training is sophist…
Paper presents a new video generation model using diffusion probabilistic methods.
problem Generating high-quality video sequences.
method Denoising diffusion probabilistic models, autoregressive, end-to-end optimization.
result Significant improvements in perceptual quality and probabilistic frame forecasting.
Geostatistical modeling of petrophysical properties is a key step in modern integrated oil and gas reservoir studies. Recently, generative adversarial networks (GAN) have been shown to be a successful method for generating unconditional simulations of pore- and reservoir-scale models. This contribution leverages the di…
Quaternion Conformer GAN (QC-GAN) is a parameter-efficient speech enhancement framework that combines a Quaternion Conformer generator with MetricGAN-based training.
problem Speech Enhancement
method Quaternion Conformer GAN
result Achieved a PESQ score of 3.48 with 0.89M parameters, comparable to state-of-the-art models at less than half their size.
Optimal transport as a loss for machine learning optimization problems has recently gained a lot of attention. Building upon recent advances in computational optimal transport, we develop an optimal transport non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) algorithm for supervised speech blind source separation (BSS). Optimal …
Deep learning has shown that learned functions can dramatically outperform hand-designed functions on perceptual tasks. Analogously, this suggests that learned optimizers may similarly outperform current hand-designed optimizers, especially for specific problems. However, learned optimizers are notoriously difficult to…
Perceptual manifolds arise when a neural population responds to an ensemble of sensory signals associated with different physical features (e.g., orientation, pose, scale, location, and intensity) of the same perceptual object. Object recognition and discrimination requires classifying the manifolds in a manner that is…
Neural codec for high-fidelity audio compression.
problem Efficiently compress audio while maintaining high quality.
method End-to-end neural network architecture with quantized latent space, single multiscale spectrogram adversary, loss balancer mechanism, and lightweight Transformer compression.
result 40% compression with no loss in quality, faster than real-time.
In recent years there has been a growing interest in image generation through deep learning. While an important part of the evaluation of the generated images usually involves visual inspection, the inclusion of human perception as a factor in the training process is often overlooked. In this paper we propose an altern…
In many classification problems a classifier should be robust to small variations in the input vector. This is a desired property not only for particular transformations, such as translation and rotation in image classification problems, but also for all others for which the change is small enough to retain the object …