Visual Recognition with Text

@inproceedings{ZhuICCV15,
title = {Aligning Books and Movies: Towards Story-like Visual Explanations by Watching Movies and Reading Books},
author = {Yukun Zhu and Ryan Kiros and Richard Zemel and Ruslan Salakhutdinov and Raquel Urtasun and Antonio Torralba and Sanja Fidler},
booktitle = {ICCV},
year = {2015}
}

Books are a rich source of both fine-grained information, how a character, an object or a scene looks like, as well as high-level semantics, what someone is thinking, feeling and how these states evolve through a story. This paper aims to align books to their movie releases in order to provide rich descriptive explanations for visual content that go semantically far beyond the captions available in current datasets. To align movies and books we exploit a neural sentence embedding that is trained in an unsupervised way from a large corpus of books, as well as a video-text neural embedding for computing similarities between movie clips and sentences in the book. We propose a context-aware CNN to combine information from multiple sources. We demonstrate good quantitative performance for movie/book alignment and show several qualitative examples that showcase the diversity of tasks our model can be used for.

@inproceedings{WangICCV15,
title = {Lost Shopping! Monocular Localization in Large Indoor Spaces},
author = {Shenlong Wang and Sanja Fidler and Raquel Urtasun},
booktitle = {ICCV},
year = {2015}
}

In this paper we propose a novel approach to localization in very large indoor spaces (i.e., 200+ store shopping malls) that takes a single image and a floor plan of the environment as input. We formulate the localization problem as inference in a Markov random field, which jointly reasons about text detection (localizing shop's names in the image with precise bounding boxes), shop facade segmentation, as well as camera's rotation and translation within the entire shopping mall. The power of our approach is that it does not use any prior information about appearance and instead exploits text detections corresponding to the shop names. This makes our method applicable to a variety of domains and robust to store appearance variation across countries, seasons, and illumination conditions. We demonstrate the performance of our approach in a new dataset we collected of two very large shopping malls, and show the power of holistic reasoning.

@inproceedings{BaICCV15,
title = {Predicting Deep Zero-Shot Convolutional Neural Networks using Textual Descriptions},
author = {Jimmy Ba and Kevin Swersky and Sanja Fidler and Ruslan Salakhutdinov},
booktitle = {ICCV},
year = {2015}
}

One of the main challenges in Zero-Shot Learning of visual categories is gathering semantic attributes to accompany images. Recent work has shown that learning from textual descriptions, such as Wikipedia articles, avoids the problem of having to explicitly define these attributes. We present a new model that can classify unseen categories from their textual description. Specifically, we use text features to predict the output weights of both the convolutional and the fully connected layers in a deep convolutional neural network (CNN). We take advantage of the architecture of CNNs and learn features at different layers, rather than just learning an embedding space for both modalities, as is common with existing approaches. The proposed model also allows us to automatically generate a list of pseudo- attributes for each visual category consisting of words from Wikipedia articles. We train our models end-to-end us- ing the Caltech-UCSD bird and flower datasets and evaluate both ROC and Precision-Recall curves. Our empirical results show that the proposed model significantly outperforms previous methods.

@inproceedings{KirosNIPS15,
title = {Skip-Thought Vectors},
author = {Ryan Kiros and Yukun Zhu and Ruslan Salakhutdinov and Richard Zemel and Antonio Torralba and Raquel Urtasun and Sanja Fidler},
booktitle = {NIPS},
year = {2015}
}

We describe an approach for unsupervised learning of a generic, distributed sentence encoder. Using the continuity of text from books, we train an encoder-decoder model that tries to reconstruct the surrounding sentences of an encoded passage. Sentences that share semantic and syntactic properties are thus mapped to similar vector representations. We next introduce a simple vocabulary expansion method to encode words that were not seen as part of training, allowing us to expand our vocabulary to a million words. After training our model, we extract and evaluate our vectors with linear models on 8 tasks: semantic relatedness, paraphrase detection, image-sentence ranking, question-type classification and 4 benchmark sentiment and subjectivity datasets. The end result is an off-the-shelf encoder that can produce highly generic sentence representations that are robust and perform well in practice. We will make our encoder publicly available.