The conventional mini-batch gradient descent algorithms are usually trapped in the local batch-level distribution information, resulting in the ``zig-zag'' effect in the learning process. To characterize the correlation information between the batch-level distribution and the global data distribution, we propose a novel learning scheme called epoch-evolving Gaussian process guided learning (GPGL) to encode the global data distribution information in a non-parametric way. Upon a set of class-aware anchor samples, our GP model is built to estimate the class distribution for each sample in mini-batch through label propagation from the anchor samples to the batch samples. The class distribution, also named the context label, is provided as a complement for the ground-truth one-hot label. Such a class distribution structure has a smooth property and usually carries a rich body of contextual information that is capable of speeding up the convergence process. With the guidance of the context label and ground-truth label, the GPGL scheme provides a more efficient optimization through updating the model parameters with a triangle consistency loss. Furthermore, our GPGL scheme can be generalized and naturally applied to the current deep models, outperforming the state-of-the-art optimization methods on six benchmark datasets.

High-capacity image steganography, aimed at concealing a secret image in a cover image, is a technique to preserve sensitive data, e.g., faces and fingerprints. Previous methods focus on the security during transmission and subsequently run a risk of privacy leakage after the restoration of secret images at the receiving end. To address this issue, we propose a framework, called Multitask Identity-Aware Image Steganography (MIAIS), to achieve direct recognition on container images without restoring secret images. The key issue of the direct recognition is to preserve identity information of secret images into container images and make container images look similar to cover images at the same time. Thus, we introduce a simple content loss to preserve the identity information, and design a minimax optimization to deal with the contradictory aspects. We demonstrate that the robustness results can be transferred across different cover datasets. In order to be flexible for the secret image restoration in some cases, we incorporate an optional restoration network into our method, providing a multitask framework. The experiments under the multitask scenario show the effectiveness of our framework compared with other visual information hiding methods and state-of-the-art high-capacity image steganography methods. The code is available at https://github.com/jiabaocui/MIAIS.

Photorealistic style transfer is a challenging task, which demands the stylized image remains real. Existing methods are still suffering from unrealistic artifacts and heavy computational cost. In this paper, we propose a novel Style-Corpus Constrained Learning (SCCL) scheme to address these issues. The style-corpus with the style-specific and style-agnostic characteristics simultaneously is proposed to constrain the stylized image with the style consistency among different samples, which improves photorealism of stylization output. By using adversarial distillation learning strategy, a simple fast-to-execute network is trained to substitute previous complex feature transforms models, which reduces the computational cost significantly. Experiments demonstrate that our method produces rich-detailed photorealistic images, with 13 ~ 50 times faster than the state-of-the-art method (WCT2).

Clothing segmentation is a challenging vision problem typically implemented within a fine-grained semantic segmentation framework. Different from conventional segmentation, clothing segmentation has some domain-specific properties such as texture richness, diverse appearance variations, non-rigid geometry deformations, and small sample learning. To deal with these points, we propose a semantic locality-aware segmentation model, which adaptively attaches an original clothing image with a semantically similar (e.g., appearance or pose) auxiliary exemplar by search. Through considering the interactions of the clothing image and its exemplar, more intrinsic knowledge about the locality manifold structures of clothing images is discovered to make the learning process of small sample problem more stable and tractable. Furthermore, we present a CNN model based on the deformable convolutions to extract the non-rigid geometry-aware features for clothing images. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model against the state-of-the-art approaches.