Recent progress on neural architecture search (NAS) has demonstrated exciting results on automating deep network architecture designs. In order to overcome the unaffordable complexity of training each candidate architecture from scratch, the state-of-the-art one-shot NAS approaches adopt a weight-sharing strategy to improve training efficiency. Although the computational cost is greatly reduced, such oneshot process introduces a severe weight coupling problem that largely degrades the evaluation accuracy of each candidate. The existing approaches often address the problem by shrinking the search space, model distillation, or fewshot training. Instead, in this paper, we propose a novel distribution consistent one-shot neural architecture search algorithm. We first theoretically investigate how the weight coupling problem affects the network searching performance from a parameter distribution perspective, and then propose a novel supernet training strategy with a Distribution Consistent Constraint that can provide a good measurement for the extent to which two architectures can share weights. Our strategy optimizes the supernet through iteratively inferring network weights and corresponding local sharing states. Such joint optimization of supernet's weights and topologies can diminish the discrepancy between the weights inherited from the supernet and the ones that are trained with a stand-alone model. As a result, it enables a more accurate model evaluation phase and leads to a better searching performance. We conduct extensive experiments on benchmark datasets with multiple searching spaces. The resulting architecture achieves superior performance over the current state-of-the-art NAS algorithms with comparable search costs, which demonstrates the efficacy of our approach.

This paper focuses on the challenging task of learning 3D object surface reconstructions from single RGB images. Existing methods achieve varying degrees of success by using different geometric representations. However, they all have their own drawbacks, and cannot well reconstruct those surfaces of complex topologies. To this end, we propose in this paper a skeleton-bridged, stage-wise learning approach to address the challenge. Our use of skeleton is due to its nice property of topology preservation, while being of lower complexity to learn. To learn skeleton from an input image, we design a deep architecture whose decoder is based on a novel design of parallel streams respectively for synthesis of curve- and surface-like skeleton points. We use different shape representations of point cloud, volume, and mesh in our stage-wise learning, in order to take their respective advantages. We also propose multi-stage use of the input image to correct prediction errors that are possibly accumulated in each stage. We conduct intensive experiments to investigate the efficacy of our proposed approach. Qualitative and quantitative results on representative object categories of both simple and complex topologies demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing ones. We will make our ShapeNet-Skeleton dataset publicly available.

Reconstructing the 3D mesh of a general object from a single image is now possible thanks to the latest advances of deep learning technologies. However, due to the nontrivial difficulty of generating a feasible mesh structure, the state-of-the-art approaches often simplify the problem by learning the displacements of a template mesh that deforms it to the target surface. Though reconstructing a 3D shape with complex topology can be achieved by deforming multiple mesh patches, it remains difficult to stitch the results to ensure a high meshing quality. In this paper, we present an end-to-end single-view mesh reconstruction framework that is able to generate high-quality meshes with complex topologies from a single genus-0 template mesh. The key to our approach is a novel progressive shaping framework that alternates between mesh deformation and topology modification. While a deformation network predicts the per-vertex translations that reduce the gap between the reconstructed mesh and the ground truth, a novel topology modification network is employed to prune the error-prone faces, enabling the evolution of topology. By iterating over the two procedures, one can progressively modify the mesh topology while achieving higher reconstruction accuracy. Moreover, a boundary refinement network is designed to refine the boundary conditions to further improve the visual quality of the reconstructed mesh. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively, especially for the shapes with complex topologies.

This work presents a novel architecture of deep neural networks to generate meshes approximating the surface of a 3D object from a single image. Compared to existing learning-based 3D reconstruction models, our architecture is characterized by (1) deep mesh deformation stacks with residual network design, where a simple mesh is transformed to approximate the target surface and undergoes multiple deformation steps to progressively refine the result and reduce the residuals, and (2) parallel paths per deformation step, which can exponentially enrich the generated meshes using deeper structure and more model parameters. We also propose novel regularization scheme that encourages the meshes to be both globally complementary to cover the target surface and locally consistent with each other. Empirical evaluation on benchmark datasets show advantage of the proposed architecture over existing methods.