Is strong supervision necessary for learning a good visual representation? Do we really need millions of semantically-labeled images to train a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)? In this paper, we present a simple yet surprisingly powerful approach for unsupervised learning of CNN. Specifically, we use hundreds of thousands of unlabeled videos from the web to learn visual representations.Our key idea is that visual tracking provides the supervision. That is, two patches connected by a track should have similar visual representation in deep feature space since they probably belong to the same object or object part. We design a Siamese-triplet network with a ranking loss function to train this CNN representation. Without using a single image from ImageNet, just using 100K unlabeled videos and the VOC 2012 dataset, we train an ensemble of unsupervised networks that achieves 52% mAP (no bounding box regression). This performance comes tantalizingly close to its ImageNet-supervised counterpart, an ensemble which achieves a mAP of 54.4%. We also show that our unsupervised network can perform competitively in other tasks such as surface-normal estimation.

We present an unsupervised representation learning approach using videos without semantic labels. We leverage the temporal coherence as a supervisory signal by formulating representation learning as a sequence sorting task. We take temporally shuffled frames (i.e., in non-chronological order) as inputs and train a convolutional neural network to sort the shuffled sequences. Similar to comparison-based sorting algorithms, we propose to extract features from all frame pairs and aggregate them to predict the correct order. As sorting shuffled image sequence requires an understanding of the statistical temporal structure of images, training with such a proxy task allows us to learn rich and generalizable visual representation. We validate the effectiveness of the learned representation using our method as pre-training on high-level recognition problems. The experimental results show that our method compares favorably against state-of-the-art methods on action recognition, image classification and object detection tasks.

This work explores the use of spatial context as a source of free and plentiful supervisory signal for training a rich visual representation. Given only a large, unlabeled image collection, we extract random pairs of patches from each image and train a convolutional neural net to predict the position of the second patch relative to the first. We argue that doing well on this task requires the model to learn to recognize objects and their parts. We demonstrate that the feature representation learned using this within-image context indeed captures visual similarity across images. For example, this representation allows us to perform unsupervised visual discovery of objects like cats, people, and even birds from the Pascal VOC 2011 detection dataset. Furthermore, we show that the learned ConvNet can be used in the R-CNN framework [21] and provides a significant boost over a randomly-initialized ConvNet, resulting in state-of-theart performance among algorithms which use only Pascalprovided training set annotations.

In this paper we study the problem of image representation learning without human annotation. By following the principles of selfsupervision, we build a convolutional neural network (CNN) that can be trained to solve Jigsaw puzzles as a pretext task, which requires no manual labeling, and then later repurposed to solve object classification and detection. To maintain the compatibility across tasks we introduce the context-free network (CFN), a siamese-ennead CNN. The CFN takes image tiles as input and explicitly limits the receptive field (or context) of its early processing units to one tile at a time. We show that the CFN includes fewer parameters than AlexNet while preserving the same semantic learning capabilities. By training the CFN to solve Jigsaw puzzles, we learn both a feature mapping of object parts as well as their correct spatial arrangement. Our experimental evaluations show that the learned features capture semantically relevant content. Our proposed method for learning visual representations outperforms state of the art methods in several transfer learning benchmarks.

Object detection performance, as measured on the canonical PASCAL VOC dataset, has plateaued in the last few years. The best-performing methods are complex ensemble systems that typically combine multiple low-level image features with high-level context. In this paper, we propose a simple and scalable detection algorithm that improves mean average precision (mAP) by more than 30% relative to the previous best result on VOC 2012-achieving a mAP of 53.3%. Our approach combines two key insights:(1) one can apply high-capacity convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to bottom-up region proposals in order to localize and segment objects and (2) when labeled training data is scarce, supervised pre-training for an auxiliary task, followed by domain-specific fine-tuning, yields a significant performance boost. Since we combine region proposals with CNNs, we call our method R-CNN: Regions with CNN features. We also compare R-CNN to OverFeat, a recently proposed sliding-window detector based on a similar CNN architecture. We find that R-CNN outperforms OverFeat by a large margin on the 200-class ILSVRC2013 detection dataset. Source code for the complete system is available at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/ ˜rbg/rcnn.

The success of deep learning in vision can be attributed to: (a) models with high capacity; (b) increased computational power; and (c) availability of large-scale labeled data. Since 2012, there have been significant advances in representation capabilities of the models and computational capabilities of GPUs. But the size of the biggest dataset has surprisingly remained constant. What will happen if we increase the dataset size by 10× or 100×? This paper takes a step towards clearing the clouds of mystery surrounding the relationship between 'enormous data' and visual deep learning. By exploiting the JFT-300M dataset which has more than 375M noisy labels for 300M images, we investigate how the performance of current vision tasks would change if this data was used for representation learning. Our paper delivers some surprising (and some expected) findings. First, we find that the performance on vision tasks increases logarithmically based on volume of training data size. Second, we show that representation learning (or pretraining) still holds a lot of promise. One can improve performance on many vision tasks by just training a better base model. Finally, as expected, we present new state-of-theart results for different vision tasks including image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation and human pose estimation. Our sincere hope is that this inspires vision community to not undervalue the data and develop collective efforts in building larger datasets.

In this paper, we present an approach for learning a visual representation from the raw spatiotemporal signals in videos. Our representation is learned without supervision from semantic labels. We formulate our method as an unsupervised sequential verification task, i.e., we determine whether a sequence of frames from a video is in the correct temporal order. With this simple task and no semantic labels, we learn a powerful visual representation using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The representation contains complementary information to that learned from supervised image datasets like ImageNet. Qualitative results show that our method captures information that is temporally varying, such as human pose. When used as pre-training for action recognition, our method gives significant gains over learning without external data on benchmark datasets like UCF101 and HMDB51. To demonstrate its sensitivity to human pose, we show results for pose estimation on the FLIC and MPII datasets that are competitive, or better than approaches using significantly more supervision. Our method can be combined with supervised representations to provide an additional boost in accuracy.

This paper presents a novel yet intuitive approach to unsupervised feature learning. Inspired by the human visual system, we explore whether low-level motion-based grouping cues can be used to learn an effective visual representation. Specifically, we use unsupervised motion-based segmentation on videos to obtain segments, which we use as 'pseudo ground truth' to train a convolutional network to segment objects from a single frame. Given the extensive evidence that motion plays a key role in the development of the human visual system, we hope that this straightforward approach to unsupervised learning will be more effective than cleverly designed 'pretext' tasks studied in the literature. Indeed, our extensive experiments show that this is the case. When used for transfer learning on object detection, our representation significantly outperforms previous unsupervised approaches across multiple settings, especially when training data for the target task is scarce.

Clustering is a class of unsupervised learning methods that has been extensively applied and studied in computer vision. Little work has been done to adapt it to the end-to-end training of visual features on large scale datasets. In this work, we present DeepCluster, a clustering method that jointly learns the parameters of a neural network and the cluster assignments of the resulting features. DeepCluster iteratively groups the features with a standard clustering algorithm, kmeans, and uses the subsequent assignments as supervision to update the weights of the network. We apply DeepCluster to the unsupervised training of convolutional neural networks on large datasets like ImageNet and YFCC100M. The resulting model outperforms the current state of the art by a significant margin on all the standard benchmarks.

Existing deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) require a fixed-size (e.g., 224×224) input image. This requirement is "artificial" and may reduce the recognition accuracy for the images or sub-images of an arbitrary size/scale. In this work, we equip the networks with another pooling strategy, "spatial pyramid pooling", to eliminate the above requirement. The new network structure, called SPP-net, can generate a fixed-length representation regardless of image size/scale. Pyramid pooling is also robust to object deformations. With these advantages, SPP-net should in general improve all CNN-based image classification methods. On the ImageNet 2012 dataset, we demonstrate that SPP-net boosts the accuracy of a variety of CNN architectures despite their different designs. On the Pascal VOC 2007 and Caltech101 datasets, SPP-net achieves state-of-theart classification results using a single full-image representation and no fine-tuning.The power of SPP-net is also significant in object detection. Using SPP-net, we compute the feature maps from the entire image only once, and then pool features in arbitrary regions (sub-images) to generate fixed-length representations for training the detectors. This method avoids repeatedly computing the convolutional features. In processing test images, our method is 24-102× faster than the R-CNN method, while achieving better or comparable accuracy on Pascal VOC 2007.In ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) 2014, our methods rank #2 in object detection and #3 in image classification among all 38 teams. This manuscript also introduces the improvement made for this competition.

Large-scale labeled data are generally required to train deep neural networks in order to obtain better performance in visual feature learning from images or videos for computer vision applications. To avoid extensive cost of collecting and annotating large-scale datasets, as a subset of unsupervised learning methods, self-supervised learning methods are proposed to learn general image and video features from large-scale unlabeled data without using any human-annotated labels. This paper provides an extensive review of deep learning-based self-supervised general visual feature learning methods from images or videos. First, the motivation, general pipeline, and terminologies of this field are described. Then the common deep neural network architectures that used for self-supervised learning are summarized. Next, the schema and evaluation metrics of self-supervised learning methods are reviewed followed by the commonly used image and video datasets and the existing self-supervised visual feature learning methods. Finally, quantitative performance comparisons of the reviewed methods on benchmark datasets are summarized and discussed for both image and video feature learning. At last, this paper is concluded and lists a set of promising future directions for self-supervised visual feature learning.

We investigate methods for combining multiple selfsupervised tasks-i.e., supervised tasks where data can be collected without manual labeling-in order to train a single visual representation. First, we provide an apples-toapples comparison of four different self-supervised tasks using the very deep ResNet-101 architecture. We then combine tasks to jointly train a network. We also explore lasso regularization to encourage the network to factorize the information in its representation, and methods for "harmonizing" network inputs in order to learn a more unified representation. We evaluate all methods on ImageNet classification, PASCAL VOC detection, and NYU depth prediction. Our results show that deeper networks work better, and that combining tasks-even via a naïve multihead architecture-always improves performance. Our best joint network nearly matches the PASCAL performance of a model pre-trained on ImageNet classification, and matches the ImageNet network on NYU depth prediction.

We propose a new self-supervised CNN pre-training technique based on a novel auxiliary task called odd-oneout learning. In this task, the machine is asked to identify the unrelated or odd element from a set of otherwise related elements. We apply this technique to self-supervised video representation learning where we sample subsequences from videos and ask the network to learn to predict the odd video subsequence. The odd video subsequence is sampled such that it has wrong temporal order of frames while the even ones have the correct temporal order. Therefore, to generate a odd-one-out question no manual annotation is required. Our learning machine is implemented as multi-stream convolutional neural network, which is learned end-to-end. Using odd-one-out networks, we learn temporal representations for videos that generalizes to other related tasks such as action recognition.On action classification, our method obtains 60.3% on the UCF101 dataset using only UCF101 data for training which is approximately 10% better than current stateof-the-art self-supervised learning methods. Similarly, on HMDB51 dataset we outperform self-supervised state-ofthe art methods by 12.7% on action classification task.

Jitendra Malik once said, "Supervision is the opium of the AI researcher". Most deep learning techniques heavily rely on extreme amounts of human labels to work effectively. In today's world, the rate of data creation greatly surpasses the rate of data annotation. Full reliance on human annotations is just a temporary means to solve current closed problems in AI. In reality, only a tiny fraction of data is annotated. Annotation Efficient Learning (AEL) is a study of algorithms to train models effectively with fewer annotations. To thrive in AEL environments, we need deep learning techniques that rely less on manual annotations (e.g., image, bounding-box, and per-pixel labels), but learn useful information from unlabeled data. In this thesis, we explore five different techniques for handling AEL.

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have recently shown outstanding image classification performance in the largescale visual recognition challenge (ILSVRC2012). The success of CNNs is attributed to their ability to learn rich midlevel image representations as opposed to hand-designed low-level features used in other image classification methods. Learning CNNs, however, amounts to estimating millions of parameters and requires a very large number of annotated image samples. This property currently prevents application of CNNs to problems with limited training data.In this work we show how image representations learned with CNNs on large-scale annotated datasets can be efficiently transferred to other visual recognition tasks with limited amount of training data. We design a method to reuse layers trained on the ImageNet dataset to compute mid-level image representation for images in the PASCAL VOC dataset. We show that despite differences in image statistics and tasks in the two datasets, the transferred representation leads to significantly improved results for object and action classification, outperforming the current state of the art on Pascal VOC 2007 and 2012 datasets. We also show promising results for object and action localization.

We investigate and improve self-supervision as a dropin replacement for ImageNet pretraining, focusing on automatic colorization as the proxy task. Self-supervised training has been shown to be more promising for utilizing unlabeled data than other, traditional unsupervised learning methods. We build on this success and evaluate the ability of our self-supervised network in several contexts. On VOC segmentation and classification tasks, we present results that are state-of-the-art among methods not using Im-ageNet labels for pretraining representations.Moreover, we present the first in-depth analysis of selfsupervision via colorization, concluding that formulation of the loss, training details and network architecture play important roles in its effectiveness. This investigation is further expanded by revisiting the ImageNet pretraining paradigm, asking questions such as: How much training data is needed? How many labels are needed? How much do features change when fine-tuned? We relate these questions back to self-supervision by showing that colorization provides a similarly powerful supervisory signal as various flavors of ImageNet pretraining.

近年来，已经产生了大量的视觉内容，并从许多领域共享，例如社交媒体平台，医学成像和机器人。这种丰富的内容创建和共享引入了新的挑战，特别是在寻找类似内容内容的图像检索（CBIR）-A的数据库中，即长期建立的研究区域，其中需要改进的效率和准确性来实时检索。人工智能在CBIR中取得了进展，并大大促进了实例搜索过程。在本调查中，我们审查了最近基于深度学习算法和技术开发的实例检索工作，通过深网络架构类型，深度功能，功能嵌入方法以及网络微调策略组织了调查。我们的调查考虑了各种各样的最新方法，在那里，我们识别里程碑工作，揭示各种方法之间的联系，并呈现常用的基准，评估结果，共同挑战，并提出未来的未来方向。

Image descriptors based on activations of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have become dominant in image retrieval due to their discriminative power, compactness of representation, and search efficiency. Training of CNNs, either from scratch or fine-tuning, requires a large amount of annotated data, where a high quality of annotation is often crucial. In this work, we propose to fine-tune CNNs for image retrieval on a large collection of unordered images in a fully automated manner. Reconstructed 3D models obtained by the state-of-the-art retrieval and structure-from-motion methods guide the selection of the training data. We show that both hard-positive and hard-negative examples, selected by exploiting the geometry and the camera positions available from the 3D models, enhance the performance of particular-object retrieval. CNN descriptor whitening discriminatively learned from the same training data outperforms commonly used PCA whitening. We propose a novel trainable Generalized-Mean (GeM) pooling layer that generalizes max and average pooling and show that it boosts retrieval performance. Applying the proposed method to the VGG network achieves state-of-the-art performance on the standard benchmarks: Oxford Buildings, Paris, and Holidays datasets.

近年来，已经开发了几种无监督和自我监督的方法，以从大规模未标记的数据集中学习视觉功能。然而，它们的主要缺点是，如果简单地旋转或相机的视角更改，这些方法几乎无法识别同一对象的视觉特征。为了克服此限制，同时利用有用的监督来源，我们考虑了视频对象轨道。遵循直觉，轨道中的两个补丁应该在学习的特征空间中具有相似的视觉表示形式，我们采用了一种无监督的基于群集的方法，并约束此类表示为同一类别，因为它们可能属于同一对象或对象零件。与先前的工作相比，不同数据集上两个下游任务的实验结果证明了我们在线深度聚类（ODCT）方法的有效性，而视频轨道一致性（ODCT）方法没有利用时间信息。此外，我们表明，与依靠昂贵和精确的轨道注释相比，利用无监督的类不知所措但嘈杂的轨道生成器的产量提高了准确性。

Neural net classifiers trained on data with annotated class labels can also capture apparent visual similarity among categories without being directed to do so. We study whether this observation can be extended beyond the conventional domain of supervised learning: Can we learn a good feature representation that captures apparent similarity among instances, instead of classes, by merely asking the feature to be discriminative of individual instances?We formulate this intuition as a non-parametric classification problem at the instance-level, and use noisecontrastive estimation to tackle the computational challenges imposed by the large number of instance classes.Our experimental results demonstrate that, under unsupervised learning settings, our method surpasses the stateof-the-art on ImageNet classification by a large margin. Our method is also remarkable for consistently improving test performance with more training data and better network architectures. By fine-tuning the learned feature, we further obtain competitive results for semi-supervised learning and object detection tasks. Our non-parametric model is highly compact: With 128 features per image, our method requires only 600MB storage for a million images, enabling fast nearest neighbour retrieval at the run time.