Learning to autonomously assemble shapes is a crucial skill for many robotic applications. While the majority of existing part assembly methods focus on correctly posing semantic parts to recreate a whole object, we interpret assembly more literally: as mating geometric parts together to achieve a snug fit. By focusing on shape alignment rather than semantic cues, we can achieve across category generalization and scaling. In this paper, we introduce a novel task, pairwise 3D geometric shape mating, and propose Neural Shape Mating (NSM) to tackle this problem. Given point clouds of two object parts of an unknown category, NSM learns to reason about the fit of the two parts and predict a pair of 3D poses that tightly mate them together. In addition, we couple the training of NSM with an implicit shape reconstruction task, making NSM more robust to imperfect point cloud observations. To train NSM, we present a self-supervised data collection pipeline that generates pairwise shape mating data with ground truth by randomly cutting an object mesh into two parts, resulting in a dataset that consists of 200K shape mating pairs with numerous object meshes and diverse cut types. We train NSM on the collected dataset and compare it with several point cloud registration methods and one part assembly baseline approach. Extensive experimental results and ablation studies under various settings demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Additional material is available at: neural-shape-mating.github.io.

We introduce Breaking Bad, a large-scale dataset of fractured objects. Our dataset consists of over one million fractured objects simulated from ten thousand base models. The fracture simulation is powered by a recent physically based algorithm that efficiently generates a variety of fracture modes of an object. Existing shape assembly datasets decompose objects according to semantically meaningful parts, effectively modeling the construction process. In contrast, Breaking Bad models the destruction process of how a geometric object naturally breaks into fragments. Our dataset serves as a benchmark that enables the study of fractured object reassembly and presents new challenges for geometric shape understanding. We analyze our dataset with several geometry measurements and benchmark three state-of-the-art shape assembly deep learning methods under various settings. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the difficulty of our dataset, calling on future research in model designs specifically for the geometric shape assembly task. We host our dataset at https://breaking-bad-dataset.github.io/.

Learning from visual data opens the potential to accrue a large range of manipulation behaviors by leveraging human demonstrations without specifying each of them mathe-matically, but rather through natural task specification. In this paper, we present Learning by Watching (LbW), an algorithmic framework for policy learning through imitation from a single video specifying the task. The key insights of our method are two-fold. First, since the human arms may not have the same morphology as robot arms, our framework learns unsupervised human to robot translation to overcome the morphology mis-match issue. Second, to capture the details in salient regions that are crucial for learning state representations, our model performs unsupervised keypoint detection on the translated robot videos. The detected keypoints form a structured representation that contains semantically meaningful information and can be used directly for computing reward and policy learning. We evaluate the effectiveness of our LbW framework on five robot manipulation tasks, including reaching, pushing, sliding, coffee making, and drawer closing. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that our method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art approaches. More results and analysis are available at pair.toronto.edu/lbw-kp/.

We present an approach for jointly matching and segmenting object instances of the same category within a collection of images. In contrast to existing algorithms that tackle the tasks of semantic matching and object co-segmentation in isolation, our method exploits the complementary nature of the two tasks. The key insights of our method are two-fold. First, the estimated dense correspondence fields from semantic matching provide supervision for object co-segmentation by enforcing consistency between the predicted masks from a pair of images. Second, the predicted object masks from object co-segmentation in turn allow us to reduce the adverse effects due to background clutters for improving semantic matching. Our model is end-to-end trainable and does not require supervision from manually annotated correspondences and object masks. We validate the efficacy of our approach on five benchmark datasets: TSS, Internet, PF-PASCAL, PF-WILLOW, and SPair-71k, and show that our algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods on both semantic matching and object co-segmentation tasks.

Person re-identification (re-ID) solves the task of matching images across cameras and is among the research topics in vision community. Since query images in real-world scenarios might suffer from resolution loss, how to solve the resolution mismatch problem during person re-ID becomes a practical problem. Instead of applying separate image super-resolution models, we propose a novel network architecture of Resolution Adaptation and re-Identification Network (RAIN) to solve cross-resolution person re-ID. Advancing the strategy of adversarial learning, we aim at extracting resolution-invariant representations for re-ID, while the proposed model is learned in an end-to-end training fashion. Our experiments confirm that the use of our model can recognize low-resolution query images, even if the resolution is not seen during training. Moreover, the extension of our model for semi-supervised re-ID further confirms the scalability of our proposed method for real-world scenarios and applications.

Unsupervised domain adaptation algorithms aim to transfer the knowledge learned from one domain to another (e.g., synthetic to real images). The adapted representations often do not capture pixel-level domain shifts that are crucial for dense prediction tasks (e.g., semantic segmentation). In this paper, we present a novel pixel-wise adversarial domain adaptation algorithm. By leveraging image-to-image translation methods for data augmentation, our key insight is that while the translated images between domains may differ in styles, their predictions for the task should be consistent. We exploit this property and introduce a cross-domain consistency loss that enforces our adapted model to produce consistent predictions. Through extensive experimental results, we show that our method compares favorably against the state-of-the-art on a wide variety of unsupervised domain adaptation tasks.

Object localization aims at localizing the object in a given image. Due to the recent success of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), existing methods have shown promising results in weakly-supervised learning fashion. By training a classifier, these methods learn to localize the objects by visualizing the class discriminative localization maps based on the classification prediction. However, correct classification results would not guarantee sufficient localization performance since the model may only focus on the most discriminative parts rather than the entire object. To address the aforementioned issue, we propose a novel and end-to-end trainable network for weakly-supervised object localization. The key insights to our algorithm are two-fold. First, to encourage our model to focus on detecting foreground objects, we develop a salient object detection module. Second, we propose a perceptual triplet loss that further enhances the foreground object detection capability. As such, our model learns to predict objectness, resulting in more accurate localization results. We conduct experiments on the challenging ILSVRC dataset. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach performs favorably against the state-of-the-arts.

Person re-identification (re-ID) aims at matching images of the same identity across camera views. Due to varying distances between cameras and persons of interest, resolution mismatch can be expected, which would degrade person re-ID performance in real-world scenarios. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel generative adversarial network to address cross-resolution person re-ID, allowing query images with varying resolutions. By advancing adversarial learning techniques, our proposed model learns resolution-invariant image representations while being able to recover the missing details in low-resolution input images. The resulting features can be jointly applied for improving person re-ID performance due to preserving resolution invariance and recovering re-ID oriented discriminative details. Our experiments on five benchmark datasets confirm the effectiveness of our approach and its superiority over the state-of-the-art methods, especially when the input resolutions are unseen during training.

Cyber security has grown up to be a hot issue in recent years. How to identify potential malware becomes a challenging task. To tackle this challenge, we adopt deep learning approaches and perform flow detection on real data. However, real data often encounters an issue of imbalanced data distribution which will lead to a gradient dilution issue. When training a neural network, this problem will not only result in a bias toward the majority class but show the inability to learn from the minority classes. In this paper, we propose a Tree-Shaped Deep Neural Network (TSDNN) which classifies the data in a layer-wise manner. To better learn from the minority classes, we propose a Quantity Dependent Backpropagation (QDBP) algorithm which incorporates the knowledge of the disparity between classes. We evaluate our method on an imbalanced data set. Experimental result demonstrates that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and justifies that the proposed method is able to overcome the difficulty of imbalanced learning. We also conduct a partial flow experiment which shows the feasibility of realtime detection and a zero-shot learning experiment which justifies the generalization capability of deep learning in cyber security.