As a common problem in the visual world, contextual bias means the recognition may depend on the co-occurrence context rather than the objects themselves, which is even more severe in multi-label tasks due to multiple targets and the absence of location. Although some studies have focused on tackling the problem, removing the negative effect of context is still challenging because it is difficult to obtain the representation of contextual bias. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective framework employing causal inference to mitigate contextual bias. We first present a Structural Causal Model (SCM) clarifying the causal relation among object representations, context, and predictions. Then, we develop a novel Causal Context Debiasing (CCD) Module to pursue the direct effect of an instance. Specifically, we adopt causal intervention to eliminate the effect of confounder and counterfactual reasoning to obtain a Total Direct Effect (TDE) free from the contextual bias. Note that our CCD framework is orthogonal to existing statistical models and thus can be migrated to any other backbones. Extensive experiments on several multi-label classification datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model over other state-of-the-art baselines.

Given an input face photo, the goal of caricature generation is to produce stylized, exaggerated caricatures that share the same identity as the photo. It requires simultaneous style transfer and shape exaggeration with rich diversity, and meanwhile preserving the identity of the input. To address this challenging problem, we propose a novel framework called Multi-Warping GAN (MW-GAN), including a style network and a geometric network that are designed to conduct style transfer and geometric exaggeration respectively. We bridge the gap between the style/landmark space and their corresponding latent code spaces by a dual way design, so as to generate caricatures with arbitrary styles and geometric exaggeration, which can be specified either through random sampling of latent code or from a given caricature sample. Besides, we apply identity preserving loss to both image space and landmark space, leading to a great improvement in quality of generated caricatures. Experiments show that caricatures generated by MW-GAN have better quality than existing methods.

Cross-domain image translation attempt to translate images from one domain to another domain, with the content of images preserved. Current approaches treat image's content as the underlying spatial structure, and translation only change image's style of color and texture. These methods can generate realistic results, but may not be able to preserve image's fine grained semantic category information and suffer from the lack of diversity in objects' shapes and viewing angles. In this paper, we propose the problem of fine grained category preserving image translation that aims at preserving image's fine grained category information in cross-domain translation. A novel framework called Cross-Domain Adversarial AutoEncoder (CDAAE) is proposed to solve the problem. CDAAE assumes that cross-domain images have shared content-latent-code space and separate style-latent-code spaces. The content latent code encodes image's basic category information, while the style latent code represents other domain-specific properties, including color, texture, shape, etc. Our experiments evaluate models from aspects of image's quality, diversity as well as category preserving ability, showing CDAAE's advantages over current methods. We also design an algorithm to apply CDAAE to domain adaptation. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results.