Publications | Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems

2017

avg Mescheder, L., Nowozin, S., Geiger, A. The Numerics of GANs In Proceedings from the conference "Neural Information Processing Systems 2017., (Editors: Guyon I. and Luxburg U.v. and Bengio S. and Wallach H. and Fergus R. and Vishwanathan S. and Garnett R.), Curran Associates, Inc., Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30 (NIPS), December 2017 (inproceedings)

arXiv PDF On the Design of LQR Kernels for Efficient Controller Learning - CDC presentation DOI Project Page [BibTex]

On the Design of LQR Kernels for Efficient Controller Learning

Marco, A., Hennig, P., Schaal, S., Trimpe, S.

Proceedings of the 56th IEEE Annual Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), pages: 5193-5200, IEEE, IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, December 2017 (conference)

Abstract

Finding optimal feedback controllers for nonlinear dynamic systems from data is hard. Recently, Bayesian optimization (BO) has been proposed as a powerful framework for direct controller tuning from experimental trials. For selecting the next query point and finding the global optimum, BO relies on a probabilistic description of the latent objective function, typically a Gaussian process (GP). As is shown herein, GPs with a common kernel choice can, however, lead to poor learning outcomes on standard quadratic control problems. For a first-order system, we construct two kernels that specifically leverage the structure of the well-known Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR), yet retain the flexibility of Bayesian nonparametric learning. Simulations of uncertain linear and nonlinear systems demonstrate that the LQR kernels yield superior learning performance.

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am ics pn Marco, A., Hennig, P., Schaal, S., Trimpe, S. On the Design of LQR Kernels for Efficient Controller Learning Proceedings of the 56th IEEE Annual Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), pages: 5193-5200, IEEE, IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, December 2017 (conference)

arXiv PDF On the Design of LQR Kernels for Efficient Controller Learning - CDC presentation DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Probabilistic Line Searches for Stochastic Optimization

Mahsereci, M., Hennig, P.

Journal of Machine Learning Research, 18(119):1-59, November 2017 (article)

pn Mahsereci, M., Hennig, P. Probabilistic Line Searches for Stochastic Optimization Journal of Machine Learning Research, 18(119):1-59, November 2017 (article)

pdf suppmat Poster Project Page [BibTex]

Bounding Boxes, Segmentations and Object Coordinates: How Important is Recognition for 3D Scene Flow Estimation in Autonomous Driving Scenarios?

Behl, A., Jafari, O. H., Mustikovela, S. K., Alhaija, H. A., Rother, C., Geiger, A.

In Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), October 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Existing methods for 3D scene flow estimation often fail in the presence of large displacement or local ambiguities, e.g., at texture-less or reflective surfaces. However, these challenges are omnipresent in dynamic road scenes, which is the focus of this work. Our main contribution is to overcome these 3D motion estimation problems by exploiting recognition. In particular, we investigate the importance of recognition granularity, from coarse 2D bounding box estimates over 2D instance segmentations to fine-grained 3D object part predictions. We compute these cues using CNNs trained on a newly annotated dataset of stereo images and integrate them into a CRF-based model for robust 3D scene flow estimation - an approach we term Instance Scene Flow. We analyze the importance of each recognition cue in an ablation study and observe that the instance segmentation cue is by far strongest, in our setting. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on the challenging KITTI 2015 scene flow benchmark where we achieve state-of-the-art performance at the time of submission.

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avg Behl, A., Jafari, O. H., Mustikovela, S. K., Alhaija, H. A., Rother, C., Geiger, A. Bounding Boxes, Segmentations and Object Coordinates: How Important is Recognition for 3D Scene Flow Estimation in Autonomous Driving Scenarios? In Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), October 2017 (inproceedings)

pdf suppmat Poster Project Page [BibTex]

Sparsity Invariant CNNs

Uhrig, J., Schneider, N., Schneider, L., Franke, U., Brox, T., Geiger, A.

International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV) 2017, International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV), October 2017 (conference)

Abstract

In this paper, we consider convolutional neural networks operating on sparse inputs with an application to depth upsampling from sparse laser scan data. First, we show that traditional convolutional networks perform poorly when applied to sparse data even when the location of missing data is provided to the network. To overcome this problem, we propose a simple yet effective sparse convolution layer which explicitly considers the location of missing data during the convolution operation. We demonstrate the benefits of the proposed network architecture in synthetic and real experiments \wrt various baseline approaches. Compared to dense baselines, the proposed sparse convolution network generalizes well to novel datasets and is invariant to the level of sparsity in the data. For our evaluation, we derive a novel dataset from the KITTI benchmark, comprising 93k depth annotated RGB images. Our dataset allows for training and evaluating depth upsampling and depth prediction techniques in challenging real-world settings.

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avg Uhrig, J., Schneider, N., Schneider, L., Franke, U., Brox, T., Geiger, A. Sparsity Invariant CNNs International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV) 2017, International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV), October 2017 (conference)

pdf Video 1 Video 2 Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

OctNetFusion: Learning Depth Fusion from Data

Riegler, G., Ulusoy, A. O., Bischof, H., Geiger, A.

International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV) 2017, International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV), October 2017 (conference)

Abstract

In this paper, we present a learning based approach to depth fusion, i.e., dense 3D reconstruction from multiple depth images. The most common approach to depth fusion is based on averaging truncated signed distance functions, which was originally proposed by Curless and Levoy in 1996. While this method is simple and provides great results, it is not able to reconstruct (partially) occluded surfaces and requires a large number frames to filter out sensor noise and outliers. Motivated by the availability of large 3D model repositories and recent advances in deep learning, we present a novel 3D CNN architecture that learns to predict an implicit surface representation from the input depth maps. Our learning based method significantly outperforms the traditional volumetric fusion approach in terms of noise reduction and outlier suppression. By learning the structure of real world 3D objects and scenes, our approach is further able to reconstruct occluded regions and to fill in gaps in the reconstruction. We demonstrate that our learning based approach outperforms both vanilla TSDF fusion as well as TV-L1 fusion on the task of volumetric fusion. Further, we demonstrate state-of-the-art 3D shape completion results.

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avg Riegler, G., Ulusoy, A. O., Bischof, H., Geiger, A. OctNetFusion: Learning Depth Fusion from Data International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV) 2017, International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV), October 2017 (conference)

pdf Video 1 Video 2 Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Direct Visual Odometry for a Fisheye-Stereo Camera

Liu, P., Heng, L., Sattler, T., Geiger, A., Pollefeys, M.

In Proceedings IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), September 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract

We present a direct visual odometry algorithm for a fisheye-stereo camera. Our algorithm performs simultaneous camera motion estimation and semi-dense reconstruction. The pipeline consists of two threads: a tracking thread and a mapping thread. In the tracking thread, we estimate the camera pose via semi-dense direct image alignment. To have a wider field of view (FoV) which is important for robotic perception, we use fisheye images directly without converting them to conventional pinhole images which come with a limited FoV. To address the epipolar curve problem, plane-sweeping stereo is used for stereo matching and depth initialization. Multiple depth hypotheses are tracked for selected pixels to better capture the uncertainty characteristics of stereo matching. Temporal motion stereo is then used to refine the depth and remove false positive depth hypotheses. Our implementation runs at an average of 20 Hz on a low-end PC. We run experiments in outdoor environments to validate our algorithm, and discuss the experimental results. We experimentally show that we are able to estimate 6D poses with low drift, and at the same time, do semi-dense 3D reconstruction with high accuracy.

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avg Liu, P., Heng, L., Sattler, T., Geiger, A., Pollefeys, M. Direct Visual Odometry for a Fisheye-Stereo Camera In Proceedings IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), September 2017 (inproceedings)

Augmented Reality Meets Deep Learning for Car Instance Segmentation in Urban Scenes

Alhaija, H. A., Mustikovela, S. K., Mescheder, L., Geiger, A., Rother, C.

In Proceedings of the British Machine Vision Conference 2017, Proceedings of the British Machine Vision Conference, September 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract

The success of deep learning in computer vision is based on the availability of large annotated datasets. To lower the need for hand labeled images, virtually rendered 3D worlds have recently gained popularity. Unfortunately, creating realistic 3D content is challenging on its own and requires significant human effort. In this work, we propose an alternative paradigm which combines real and synthetic data for learning semantic instance segmentation models. Exploiting the fact that not all aspects of the scene are equally important for this task, we propose to augment real-world imagery with virtual objects of the target category. Capturing real-world images at large scale is easy and cheap, and directly provides real background appearances without the need for creating complex 3D models of the environment. We present an efficient procedure to augment these images with virtual objects. This allows us to create realistic composite images which exhibit both realistic background appearance as well as a large number of complex object arrangements. In contrast to modeling complete 3D environments, our data augmentation approach requires only a few user interactions in combination with 3D shapes of the target object category. We demonstrate the utility of the proposed approach for training a state-of-the-art high-capacity deep model for semantic instance segmentation. In particular, we consider the task of segmenting car instances on the KITTI dataset which we have annotated with pixel-accurate ground truth. Our experiments demonstrate that models trained on augmented imagery generalize better than those trained on synthetic data or models trained on limited amounts of annotated real data.

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avg Alhaija, H. A., Mustikovela, S. K., Mescheder, L., Geiger, A., Rother, C. Augmented Reality Meets Deep Learning for Car Instance Segmentation in Urban Scenes In Proceedings of the British Machine Vision Conference 2017, Proceedings of the British Machine Vision Conference, September 2017 (inproceedings)

pdf suppmat Project Page arxiv-version Project Page [BibTex]

Adversarial Variational Bayes: Unifying Variational Autoencoders and Generative Adversarial Networks

Mescheder, L., Nowozin, S., Geiger, A.

In Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning, 70, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, (Editors: Doina Precup, Yee Whye Teh), PMLR, International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), August 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are expressive latent variable models that can be used to learn complex probability distributions from training data. However, the quality of the resulting model crucially relies on the expressiveness of the inference model. We introduce Adversarial Variational Bayes (AVB), a technique for training Variational Autoencoders with arbitrarily expressive inference models. We achieve this by introducing an auxiliary discriminative network that allows to rephrase the maximum-likelihood-problem as a two-player game, hence establishing a principled connection between VAEs and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). We show that in the nonparametric limit our method yields an exact maximum-likelihood assignment for the parameters of the generative model, as well as the exact posterior distribution over the latent variables given an observation. Contrary to competing approaches which combine VAEs with GANs, our approach has a clear theoretical justification, retains most advantages of standard Variational Autoencoders and is easy to implement.

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avg Mescheder, L., Nowozin, S., Geiger, A. Adversarial Variational Bayes: Unifying Variational Autoencoders and Generative Adversarial Networks In Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning, 70, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, (Editors: Doina Precup, Yee Whye Teh), PMLR, International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), August 2017 (inproceedings)

pdf suppmat Project Page arxiv-version Project Page [BibTex]

Coupling Adaptive Batch Sizes with Learning Rates

Balles, L., Romero, J., Hennig, P.

In Proceedings Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) 2017, pages: 410-419, (Editors: Gal Elidan and Kristian Kersting), Association for Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (AUAI), Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), August 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Mini-batch stochastic gradient descent and variants thereof have become standard for large-scale empirical risk minimization like the training of neural networks. These methods are usually used with a constant batch size chosen by simple empirical inspection. The batch size significantly influences the behavior of the stochastic optimization algorithm, though, since it determines the variance of the gradient estimates. This variance also changes over the optimization process; when using a constant batch size, stability and convergence is thus often enforced by means of a (manually tuned) decreasing learning rate schedule. We propose a practical method for dynamic batch size adaptation. It estimates the variance of the stochastic gradients and adapts the batch size to decrease the variance proportionally to the value of the objective function, removing the need for the aforementioned learning rate decrease. In contrast to recent related work, our algorithm couples the batch size to the learning rate, directly reflecting the known relationship between the two. On three image classification benchmarks, our batch size adaptation yields faster optimization convergence, while simultaneously simplifying learning rate tuning. A TensorFlow implementation is available.

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Code link (url) Project Page [BibTex]

ps pn Balles, L., Romero, J., Hennig, P. Coupling Adaptive Batch Sizes with Learning Rates In Proceedings Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) 2017, pages: 410-419, (Editors: Gal Elidan and Kristian Kersting), Association for Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (AUAI), Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), August 2017 (inproceedings)

Code link (url) Project Page [BibTex]

Slow Flow: Exploiting High-Speed Cameras for Accurate and Diverse Optical Flow Reference Data

Janai, J., Güney, F., Wulff, J., Black, M., Geiger, A.

In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, pages: 1406-1416, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), July 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Existing optical flow datasets are limited in size and variability due to the difficulty of capturing dense ground truth. In this paper, we tackle this problem by tracking pixels through densely sampled space-time volumes recorded with a high-speed video camera. Our model exploits the linearity of small motions and reasons about occlusions from multiple frames. Using our technique, we are able to establish accurate reference flow fields outside the laboratory in natural environments. Besides, we show how our predictions can be used to augment the input images with realistic motion blur. We demonstrate the quality of the produced flow fields on synthetic and real-world datasets. Finally, we collect a novel challenging optical flow dataset by applying our technique on data from a high-speed camera and analyze the performance of the state-of-the-art in optical flow under various levels of motion blur.

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pdf suppmat Project page Video DOI Project Page [BibTex]

avg ps Janai, J., Güney, F., Wulff, J., Black, M., Geiger, A. Slow Flow: Exploiting High-Speed Cameras for Accurate and Diverse Optical Flow Reference Data In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, pages: 1406-1416, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), July 2017 (inproceedings)

pdf suppmat Project page Video DOI Project Page [BibTex]

OctNet: Learning Deep 3D Representations at High Resolutions

Riegler, G., Ulusoy, O., Geiger, A.

In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), July 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract

We present OctNet, a representation for deep learning with sparse 3D data. In contrast to existing models, our representation enables 3D convolutional networks which are both deep and high resolution. Towards this goal, we exploit the sparsity in the input data to hierarchically partition the space using a set of unbalanced octrees where each leaf node stores a pooled feature representation. This allows to focus memory allocation and computation to the relevant dense regions and enables deeper networks without compromising resolution. We demonstrate the utility of our OctNet representation by analyzing the impact of resolution on several 3D tasks including 3D object classification, orientation estimation and point cloud labeling.

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pdf suppmat Project Page Video Project Page [BibTex]

avg ps Riegler, G., Ulusoy, O., Geiger, A. OctNet: Learning Deep 3D Representations at High Resolutions In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), July 2017 (inproceedings)

pdf suppmat Project Page Video Project Page [BibTex]

A Multi-View Stereo Benchmark with High-Resolution Images and Multi-Camera Videos

Schöps, T., Schönberger, J. L., Galliani, S., Sattler, T., Schindler, K., Pollefeys, M., Geiger, A.

Abstract

Motivated by the limitations of existing multi-view stereo benchmarks, we present a novel dataset for this task. Towards this goal, we recorded a variety of indoor and outdoor scenes using a high-precision laser scanner and captured both high-resolution DSLR imagery as well as synchronized low-resolution stereo videos with varying fields-of-view. To align the images with the laser scans, we propose a robust technique which minimizes photometric errors conditioned on the geometry. In contrast to previous datasets, our benchmark provides novel challenges and covers a diverse set of viewpoints and scene types, ranging from natural scenes to man-made indoor and outdoor environments. Furthermore, we provide data at significantly higher temporal and spatial resolution. Our benchmark is the first to cover the important use case of hand-held mobile devices while also providing high-resolution DSLR camera images. We make our datasets and an online evaluation server available at http://www.eth3d.net.

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avg Schöps, T., Schönberger, J. L., Galliani, S., Sattler, T., Schindler, K., Pollefeys, M., Geiger, A. A Multi-View Stereo Benchmark with High-Resolution Images and Multi-Camera Videos In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), July 2017 (inproceedings)

Toroidal Constraints for Two Point Localization Under High Outlier Ratios

Camposeco, F., Sattler, T., Cohen, A., Geiger, A., Pollefeys, M.

Abstract

Localizing a query image against a 3D model at large scale is a hard problem, since 2D-3D matches become more and more ambiguous as the model size increases. This creates a need for pose estimation strategies that can handle very low inlier ratios. In this paper, we draw new insights on the geometric information available from the 2D-3D matching process. As modern descriptors are not invariant against large variations in viewpoint, we are able to find the rays in space used to triangulate a given point that are closest to a query descriptor. It is well known that two correspondences constrain the camera to lie on the surface of a torus. Adding the knowledge of direction of triangulation, we are able to approximate the position of the camera from \emphtwo matches alone. We derive a geometric solver that can compute this position in under 1 microsecond. Using this solver, we propose a simple yet powerful outlier filter which scales quadratically in the number of matches. We validate the accuracy of our solver and demonstrate the usefulness of our method in real world settings.

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pdf suppmat Project Page pdf Project Page [BibTex]

avg Camposeco, F., Sattler, T., Cohen, A., Geiger, A., Pollefeys, M. Toroidal Constraints for Two Point Localization Under High Outlier Ratios In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), July 2017 (inproceedings)

Dynamic Time-of-Flight

Schober, M., Adam, A., Yair, O., Mazor, S., Nowozin, S.

Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, pages: 170-179, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), July 2017 (conference)

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ei pn Schober, M., Adam, A., Yair, O., Mazor, S., Nowozin, S. Dynamic Time-of-Flight Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, pages: 170-179, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), July 2017 (conference)

YouTube pdf suppmat Project Page [BibTex]

Semantic Multi-view Stereo: Jointly Estimating Objects and Voxels

Ulusoy, A. O., Black, M. J., Geiger, A.

Abstract

Dense 3D reconstruction from RGB images is a highly ill-posed problem due to occlusions, textureless or reflective surfaces, as well as other challenges. We propose object-level shape priors to address these ambiguities. Towards this goal, we formulate a probabilistic model that integrates multi-view image evidence with 3D shape information from multiple objects. Inference in this model yields a dense 3D reconstruction of the scene as well as the existence and precise 3D pose of the objects in it. Our approach is able to recover fine details not captured in the input shapes while defaulting to the input models in occluded regions where image evidence is weak. Due to its probabilistic nature, the approach is able to cope with the approximate geometry of the 3D models as well as input shapes that are not present in the scene. We evaluate the approach quantitatively on several challenging indoor and outdoor datasets.

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avg ps Ulusoy, A. O., Black, M. J., Geiger, A. Semantic Multi-view Stereo: Jointly Estimating Objects and Voxels In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), July 2017 (inproceedings)

YouTube pdf suppmat Project Page [BibTex]

Virtual vs. Real: Trading Off Simulations and Physical Experiments in Reinforcement Learning with Bayesian Optimization

Marco, A., Berkenkamp, F., Hennig, P., Schoellig, A. P., Krause, A., Schaal, S., Trimpe, S.

In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pages: 1557-1563, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2017 (inproceedings)

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PDF arXiv ICRA 2017 Spotlight presentation Virtual vs. Real - Video explanation DOI Project Page [BibTex]

am ics pn Marco, A., Berkenkamp, F., Hennig, P., Schoellig, A. P., Krause, A., Schaal, S., Trimpe, S. Virtual vs. Real: Trading Off Simulations and Physical Experiments in Reinforcement Learning with Bayesian Optimization In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pages: 1557-1563, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2017 (inproceedings)

PDF arXiv ICRA 2017 Spotlight presentation Virtual vs. Real - Video explanation DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Fast Bayesian Optimization of Machine Learning Hyperparameters on Large Datasets

Klein, A., Falkner, S., Bartels, S., Hennig, P., Hutter, F.

Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS 2017), 54, pages: 528-536, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, (Editors: Sign, Aarti and Zhu, Jerry), PMLR, April 2017 (conference)

pdf link (url) Project Page [BibTex]

pn Klein, A., Falkner, S., Bartels, S., Hennig, P., Hutter, F. Fast Bayesian Optimization of Machine Learning Hyperparameters on Large Datasets Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS 2017), 54, pages: 528-536, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, (Editors: Sign, Aarti and Zhu, Jerry), PMLR, April 2017 (conference)

pdf link (url) Project Page [BibTex]

Early Stopping Without a Validation Set

Mahsereci, M., Balles, L., Lassner, C., Hennig, P.

arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.09580, 2017 (article)

Abstract

Early stopping is a widely used technique to prevent poor generalization performance when training an over-expressive model by means of gradient-based optimization. To find a good point to halt the optimizer, a common practice is to split the dataset into a training and a smaller validation set to obtain an ongoing estimate of the generalization performance. In this paper we propose a novel early stopping criterion which is based on fast-to-compute, local statistics of the computed gradients and entirely removes the need for a held-out validation set. Our experiments show that this is a viable approach in the setting of least-squares and logistic regression as well as neural networks.

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link (url) Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

ps pn Mahsereci, M., Balles, L., Lassner, C., Hennig, P. Early Stopping Without a Validation Set arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.09580, 2017 (article)

link (url) Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Krylov Subspace Recycling for Fast Iterative Least-Squares in Machine Learning

Roos, F. D., Hennig, P.

arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.00241, 2017 (article)

Abstract

Solving symmetric positive definite linear problems is a fundamental computational task in machine learning. The exact solution, famously, is cubicly expensive in the size of the matrix. To alleviate this problem, several linear-time approximations, such as spectral and inducing-point methods, have been suggested and are now in wide use. These are low-rank approximations that choose the low-rank space a priori and do not refine it over time. While this allows linear cost in the data-set size, it also causes a finite, uncorrected approximation error. Authors from numerical linear algebra have explored ways to iteratively refine such low-rank approximations, at a cost of a small number of matrix-vector multiplications. This idea is particularly interesting in the many situations in machine learning where one has to solve a sequence of related symmetric positive definite linear problems. From the machine learning perspective, such deflation methods can be interpreted as transfer learning of a low-rank approximation across a time-series of numerical tasks. We study the use of such methods for our field. Our empirical results show that, on regression and classification problems of intermediate size, this approach can interpolate between low computational cost and numerical precision.

pn Roos, F. D., Hennig, P. Krylov Subspace Recycling for Fast Iterative Least-Squares in Machine Learning arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.00241, 2017 (article)

Convergence Analysis of Deterministic Kernel-Based Quadrature Rules in Misspecified Settings

Kanagawa, M., Sriperumbudur, B. K., Fukumizu, K.

Arxiv e-prints, arXiv:1709.00147v1 [math.NA], 2017 (article)

Abstract

This paper presents convergence analysis of kernel-based quadrature rules in misspecified settings, focusing on deterministic quadrature in Sobolev spaces. In particular, we deal with misspecified settings where a test integrand is less smooth than a Sobolev RKHS based on which a quadrature rule is constructed. We provide convergence guarantees based on two different assumptions on a quadrature rule: one on quadrature weights, and the other on design points. More precisely, we show that convergence rates can be derived (i) if the sum of absolute weights remains constant (or does not increase quickly), or (ii) if the minimum distance between distance design points does not decrease very quickly. As a consequence of the latter result, we derive a rate of convergence for Bayesian quadrature in misspecified settings. We reveal a condition on design points to make Bayesian quadrature robust to misspecification, and show that, under this condition, it may adaptively achieve the optimal rate of convergence in the Sobolev space of a lesser order (i.e., of the unknown smoothness of a test integrand), under a slightly stronger regularity condition on the integrand.

arXiv [BibTex]

pn Kanagawa, M., Sriperumbudur, B. K., Fukumizu, K. Convergence Analysis of Deterministic Kernel-Based Quadrature Rules in Misspecified Settings Arxiv e-prints, arXiv:1709.00147v1 [math.NA], 2017 (article)

arXiv [BibTex]

Nonparametric Disturbance Correction and Nonlinear Dual Control

Klenske, E. D.

(24098), ETH Zurich, 2017 (phdthesis)

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ei pn sf Klenske, E. D. Nonparametric Disturbance Correction and Nonlinear Dual Control (24098), ETH Zurich, 2017 (phdthesis)

Rubenstein, P. K., Tolstikhin, I., Hennig, P., Schölkopf, B.

Probabilistic Active Learning of Functions in Structural Causal Models

2017 (misc)

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Arxiv [BibTex]

ei pn Rubenstein, P. K., Tolstikhin, I., Hennig, P., Schölkopf, B. Probabilistic Active Learning of Functions in Structural Causal Models 2017 (misc)

Arxiv [BibTex]

New Directions for Learning with Kernels and Gaussian Processes (Dagstuhl Seminar 16481)

Gretton, A., Hennig, P., Rasmussen, C., Schölkopf, B.

Dagstuhl Reports, 6(11):142-167, 2017 (book)

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ei pn Gretton, A., Hennig, P., Rasmussen, C., Schölkopf, B. New Directions for Learning with Kernels and Gaussian Processes (Dagstuhl Seminar 16481) Dagstuhl Reports, 6(11):142-167, 2017 (book)

Undulatory Swimming Performance and Body Stiffness Modulation in a Soft Robotic Fish-like Physical Model

Jusufi, A., Vogt, D., Wood, R., Lauder, G.

Soft Robotics, 2017 (article)

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bio Jusufi, A., Vogt, D., Wood, R., Lauder, G. Undulatory Swimming Performance and Body Stiffness Modulation in a Soft Robotic Fish-like Physical Model Soft Robotics, 2017 (article)

pdf Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Computer Vision for Autonomous Vehicles: Problems, Datasets and State-of-the-Art

Janai, J., Güney, F., Behl, A., Geiger, A.

Arxiv, 2017 (article)

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed amazing progress in AI related fields such as computer vision, machine learning and autonomous vehicles. As with any rapidly growing field, however, it becomes increasingly difficult to stay up-to-date or enter the field as a beginner. While several topic specific survey papers have been written, to date no general survey on problems, datasets and methods in computer vision for autonomous vehicles exists. This paper attempts to narrow this gap by providing a state-of-the-art survey on this topic. Our survey includes both the historically most relevant literature as well as the current state-of-the-art on several specific topics, including recognition, reconstruction, motion estimation, tracking, scene understanding and end-to-end learning. Towards this goal, we first provide a taxonomy to classify each approach and then analyze the performance of the state-of-the-art on several challenging benchmarking datasets including KITTI, ISPRS, MOT and Cityscapes. Besides, we discuss open problems and current research challenges. To ease accessibility and accommodate missing references, we will also provide an interactive platform which allows to navigate topics and methods, and provides additional information and project links for each paper.

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avg Janai, J., Güney, F., Behl, A., Geiger, A. Computer Vision for Autonomous Vehicles: Problems, Datasets and State-of-the-Art Arxiv, 2017 (article)

pdf Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Efficiency of analytical and sampling-based uncertainty propagation in intensity-modulated proton therapy

Wahl, N., Hennig, P., Wieser, H. P., Bangert, M.

Physics in Medicine & Biology, 62(14):5790-5807, 2017 (article)

Abstract

The sensitivity of intensity-modulated proton therapy (IMPT) treatment plans to uncertainties can be quantified and mitigated with robust/min-max and stochastic/probabilistic treatment analysis and optimization techniques. Those methods usually rely on sparse random, importance, or worst-case sampling. Inevitably, this imposes a trade-off between computational speed and accuracy of the uncertainty propagation. Here, we investigate analytical probabilistic modeling (APM) as an alternative for uncertainty propagation and minimization in IMPT that does not rely on scenario sampling. APM propagates probability distributions over range and setup uncertainties via a Gaussian pencil-beam approximation into moments of the probability distributions over the resulting dose in closed form. It supports arbitrary correlation models and allows for efficient incorporation of fractionation effects regarding random and systematic errors. We evaluate the trade-off between run-time and accuracy of APM uncertainty computations on three patient datasets. Results are compared against reference computations facilitating importance and random sampling. Two approximation techniques to accelerate uncertainty propagation and minimization based on probabilistic treatment plan optimization are presented. Runtimes are measured on CPU and GPU platforms, dosimetric accuracy is quantified in comparison to a sampling-based benchmark (5000 random samples). APM accurately propagates range and setup uncertainties into dose uncertainties at competitive run-times (GPU ##IMG## [http://ej.iop.org/images/0031-9155/62/14/5790/pmbaa6ec5ieqn001.gif] {$\leqslant {5}$} min). The resulting standard deviation (expectation value) of dose show average global ##IMG## [http://ej.iop.org/images/0031-9155/62/14/5790/pmbaa6ec5ieqn002.gif] {$\gamma_{{3}\% / {3}~{\rm mm}}$} pass rates between 94.2% and 99.9% (98.4% and 100.0%). All investigated importance sampling strategies provided less accuracy at higher run-times considering only a single fraction. Considering fractionation, APM uncertainty propagation and treatment plan optimization was proven to be possible at constant time complexity, while run-times of sampling-based computations are linear in the number of fractions. Using sum sampling within APM, uncertainty propagation can only be accelerated at the cost of reduced accuracy in variance calculations. For probabilistic plan optimization, we were able to approximate the necessary pre-computations within seconds, yielding treatment plans of similar quality as gained from exact uncertainty propagation. APM is suited to enhance the trade-off between speed and accuracy in uncertainty propagation and probabilistic treatment plan optimization, especially in the context of fractionation. This brings fully-fledged APM computations within reach of clinical application.

pn Wahl, N., Hennig, P., Wieser, H. P., Bangert, M. Efficiency of analytical and sampling-based uncertainty propagation in intensity-modulated proton therapy Physics in Medicine & Biology, 62(14):5790-5807, 2017 (article)

Analytical probabilistic modeling of RBE-weighted dose for ion therapy

Wieser, H., Hennig, P., Wahl, N., Bangert, M.

Physics in Medicine and Biology (PMB), 62(23):8959-8982, 2017 (article)

pn Wieser, H., Hennig, P., Wahl, N., Bangert, M. Analytical probabilistic modeling of RBE-weighted dose for ion therapy Physics in Medicine and Biology (PMB), 62(23):8959-8982, 2017 (article)

2013

Understanding High-Level Semantics by Modeling Traffic Patterns

Zhang, H., Geiger, A., Urtasun, R.

In International Conference on Computer Vision, pages: 3056-3063, Sydney, Australia, December 2013 (inproceedings)

Abstract

In this paper, we are interested in understanding the semantics of outdoor scenes in the context of autonomous driving. Towards this goal, we propose a generative model of 3D urban scenes which is able to reason not only about the geometry and objects present in the scene, but also about the high-level semantics in the form of traffic patterns. We found that a small number of patterns is sufficient to model the vast majority of traffic scenes and show how these patterns can be learned. As evidenced by our experiments, this high-level reasoning significantly improves the overall scene estimation as well as the vehicle-to-lane association when compared to state-of-the-art approaches. All data and code will be made available upon publication.

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pdf [BibTex]

2013

avg ps Zhang, H., Geiger, A., Urtasun, R. Understanding High-Level Semantics by Modeling Traffic Patterns In International Conference on Computer Vision, pages: 3056-3063, Sydney, Australia, December 2013 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Camera-specific Image Denoising

Schober, M.

Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany, October 2013 (diplomathesis)

ei pn

ei pn Schober, M. Camera-specific Image Denoising Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany, October 2013 (diplomathesis)

pdf supplementary project page [BibTex]

Vision meets Robotics: The KITTI Dataset

Geiger, A., Lenz, P., Stiller, C., Urtasun, R.

International Journal of Robotics Research, 32(11):1231 - 1237 , Sage Publishing, September 2013 (article)

Abstract

We present a novel dataset captured from a VW station wagon for use in mobile robotics and autonomous driving research. In total, we recorded 6 hours of traffic scenarios at 10-100 Hz using a variety of sensor modalities such as high-resolution color and grayscale stereo cameras, a Velodyne 3D laser scanner and a high-precision GPS/IMU inertial navigation system. The scenarios are diverse, capturing real-world traffic situations and range from freeways over rural areas to inner-city scenes with many static and dynamic objects. Our data is calibrated, synchronized and timestamped, and we provide the rectified and raw image sequences. Our dataset also contains object labels in the form of 3D tracklets and we provide online benchmarks for stereo, optical flow, object detection and other tasks. This paper describes our recording platform, the data format and the utilities that we provide.

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pdf DOI [BibTex]

avg ps Geiger, A., Lenz, P., Stiller, C., Urtasun, R. Vision meets Robotics: The KITTI Dataset International Journal of Robotics Research, 32(11):1231 - 1237 , Sage Publishing, September 2013 (article)

pdf DOI [BibTex]

Lost! Leveraging the Crowd for Probabilistic Visual Self-Localization

(CVPR13 Best Paper Runner-Up)

Brubaker, M. A., Geiger, A., Urtasun, R.

In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2013), pages: 3057-3064, IEEE, Portland, OR, June 2013 (inproceedings)

Abstract

In this paper we propose an affordable solution to self- localization, which utilizes visual odometry and road maps as the only inputs. To this end, we present a probabilis- tic model as well as an efficient approximate inference al- gorithm, which is able to utilize distributed computation to meet the real-time requirements of autonomous systems. Because of the probabilistic nature of the model we are able to cope with uncertainty due to noisy visual odometry and inherent ambiguities in the map ( e.g ., in a Manhattan world). By exploiting freely available, community devel- oped maps and visual odometry measurements, we are able to localize a vehicle up to 3m after only a few seconds of driving on maps which contain more than 2,150km of driv- able roads.

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avg ps Brubaker, M. A., Geiger, A., Urtasun, R. Lost! Leveraging the Crowd for Probabilistic Visual Self-Localization In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2013), pages: 3057-3064, IEEE, Portland, OR, June 2013 (inproceedings)

pdf supplementary project page [BibTex]

Quasi-Newton Methods: A New Direction

Hennig, P., Kiefel, M.

Journal of Machine Learning Research, 14(1):843-865, March 2013 (article)

Abstract

Four decades after their invention, quasi-Newton methods are still state of the art in unconstrained numerical optimization. Although not usually interpreted thus, these are learning algorithms that fit a local quadratic approximation to the objective function. We show that many, including the most popular, quasi-Newton methods can be interpreted as approximations of Bayesian linear regression under varying prior assumptions. This new notion elucidates some shortcomings of classical algorithms, and lights the way to a novel nonparametric quasi-Newton method, which is able to make more efficient use of available information at computational cost similar to its predecessors.

ei ps pn

website+code pdf link (url) [BibTex]

ei ps pn Hennig, P., Kiefel, M. Quasi-Newton Methods: A New Direction Journal of Machine Learning Research, 14(1):843-865, March 2013 (article)

website+code pdf link (url) [BibTex]

The Randomized Dependence Coefficient

Lopez-Paz, D., Hennig, P., Schölkopf, B.

In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26, pages: 1-9, (Editors: C.J.C. Burges, L. Bottou, M. Welling, Z. Ghahramani, and K.Q. Weinberger), 27th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2013 (inproceedings)

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ei pn Lopez-Paz, D., Hennig, P., Schölkopf, B. The Randomized Dependence Coefficient In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26, pages: 1-9, (Editors: C.J.C. Burges, L. Bottou, M. Welling, Z. Ghahramani, and K.Q. Weinberger), 27th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2013 (inproceedings)

Fast Probabilistic Optimization from Noisy Gradients

Hennig, P.

In Proceedings of The 30th International Conference on Machine Learning, JMLR W&CP 28(1), pages: 62–70, (Editors: S Dasgupta and D McAllester), ICML, 2013 (inproceedings)

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ei pn Hennig, P. Fast Probabilistic Optimization from Noisy Gradients In Proceedings of The 30th International Conference on Machine Learning, JMLR W&CP 28(1), pages: 62–70, (Editors: S Dasgupta and D McAllester), ICML, 2013 (inproceedings)

Nonparametric dynamics estimation for time periodic systems

Klenske, E., Zeilinger, M., Schölkopf, B., Hennig, P.

In Proceedings of the 51st Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, pages: 486-493 , 2013 (inproceedings)

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ei pn Klenske, E., Zeilinger, M., Schölkopf, B., Hennig, P. Nonparametric dynamics estimation for time periodic systems In Proceedings of the 51st Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, pages: 486-493 , 2013 (inproceedings)

Lopez-Paz, D., Hennig, P., Schölkopf, B.

The Randomized Dependence Coefficient

Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2013 (poster)

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ei pn Lopez-Paz, D., Hennig, P., Schölkopf, B. The Randomized Dependence Coefficient Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2013 (poster)

Analytical probabilistic modeling for radiation therapy treatment planning

Bangert, M., Hennig, P., Oelfke, U.

Physics in Medicine and Biology, 58(16):5401-5419, 2013 (article)

ei pn

ei pn Bangert, M., Hennig, P., Oelfke, U. Analytical probabilistic modeling for radiation therapy treatment planning Physics in Medicine and Biology, 58(16):5401-5419, 2013 (article)

Analytical probabilistic proton dose calculation and range uncertainties

Bangert, M., Hennig, P., Oelfke, U.

In 17th International Conference on the Use of Computers in Radiation Therapy, pages: 6-11, (Editors: A. Haworth and T. Kron), ICCR, 2013 (inproceedings)

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ei pn Bangert, M., Hennig, P., Oelfke, U. Analytical probabilistic proton dose calculation and range uncertainties In 17th International Conference on the Use of Computers in Radiation Therapy, pages: 6-11, (Editors: A. Haworth and T. Kron), ICCR, 2013 (inproceedings)

Animating Samples from Gaussian Distributions

Hennig, P.

(8), Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen, Germany, 2013 (techreport)

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ei pn Hennig, P. Animating Samples from Gaussian Distributions (8), Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen, Germany, 2013 (techreport)