Open Access

Diffracted waves carry high resolution information that can help interpreting fine structural details at a scale smaller than the seismic wavelength. Because of the low signal-to-noise ratio of diffracted waves, it is challenging to preserve them during processing and to identify them in the final data. It is, therefore, a traditional approach to pick manually the diffractions. However, such task is tedious and often prohibitive, thus, current attention is given to domain adaptation. Those methods aim to transfer knowledge from a labeled domain to train the model, and then infer on the real unlabeled data. In this regard, it is common practice to create a synthetic labeled training dataset, followed by testing on unlabeled real data. Unfortunately, such procedure may fail due to the existing gap between the synthetic and the real distribution since quite often synthetic data oversimplifies the problem, and consequently the transfer learning becomes a hard and non-trivial procedure. Furthermore, deep neural networks are characterized by their high sensitivity towards cross-domain distribution shift. In this work, we present deep learning model that builds a bridge between both distributions creating a semi-synthetic datatset that fills in the gap between synthetic and real domains. More specifically, our proposal is a feed-forward, fully convolutional neural network for imageto-image translation that allows to insert synthetic diffractions while preserving the original reflection signal. A series of experiments validate that our approach produces convincing seismic data containing the desired synthetic diffractions.

Most machine learning methods require careful selection of hyper-parameters in order to train a high performing model with good generalization abilities. Hence, several automatic selection algorithms have been introduced to overcome tedious manual (try and error) tuning of these parameters. Due to its very high sample efficiency, Bayesian Optimization over a Gaussian Processes modeling of the parameter space has become the method of choice. Unfortunately, this approach suffers from a cubic compute complexity due to underlying Cholesky factorization, which makes it very hard to be scaled beyond a small number of sampling steps. In this paper, we present a novel, highly accurate approximation of the underlying Gaussian Process. Reducing its computational complexity from cubic to quadratic allows an efficient strong scaling of Bayesian Optimization while outperforming the previous approach regarding optimization accuracy. First experiments show speedups of a factor of 162 in single node and further speed up by a factor of 5 in a parallel environment.

Recent deep learning based approaches have shown remarkable success on object segmentation tasks. However, there is still room for further improvement. Inspired by generative adversarial networks, we present a generic end-to-end adversarial approach, which can be combined with a wide range of existing semantic segmentation networks to improve their segmentation performance. The key element of our method is to replace the commonly used binary adversarial loss with a high resolution pixel-wise loss. In addition, we train our generator employing stochastic weight averaging fashion, which further enhances the predicted output label maps leading to state-of-the-art results. We show, that this combination of pixel-wise adversarial training and weight averaging leads to significant and consistent gains in segmentation performance, compared to the baseline models.

Recent studies have shown remarkable success in image-to-image translation for attribute transfer applications. However, most of existing approaches are based on deep learning and require an abundant amount of labeled data to produce good results, therefore limiting their applicability. In the same vein, recent advances in meta-learning have led to successful implementations with limited available data, allowing so-called few-shot learning. In this paper, we address this limitation of supervised methods, by proposing a novel approach based on GANs. These are trained in a meta-training manner, which allows them to perform image-to-image translations using just a few labeled samples from a new target class. This work empirically demonstrates the potential of training a GAN for few shot image-to-image translation on hair color attribute synthesis tasks, opening the door to further research on generative transfer learning.

Over the last decade, the development of deep image classification networks has mostly been driven by the search for the best performance in terms of classification accuracy on standardized benchmarks like ImageNet. More recently, this focus has been expanded by the notion of model robustness, \ie the generalization abilities of models towards previously unseen changes in the data distribution. While new benchmarks, like ImageNet-C, have been introduced to measure robustness properties, we argue that fixed testsets are only able to capture a small portion of possible data variations and are thus limited and prone to generate new overfitted solutions. To overcome these drawbacks, we suggest to estimate the robustness of a model directly from the structure of its learned feature-space. We introduce robustness indicators which are obtained via unsupervised clustering of latent representations from a trained classifier and show very high correlations to the model performance on corrupted test data.

Despite the success of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in many computer vision and image analysis tasks, they remain vulnerable against so-called adversarial attacks: Small, crafted perturbations in the input images can lead to false predictions. A possible defense is to detect adversarial examples. In this work, we show how analysis in the Fourier domain of input images and feature maps can be used to distinguish benign test samples from adversarial images. We propose two novel detection methods: Our first method employs the magnitude spectrum of the input images to detect an adversarial attack. This simple and robust classifier can successfully detect adversarial perturbations of three commonly used attack methods. The second method builds upon the first and additionally extracts the phase of Fourier coefficients of feature-maps at different layers of the network. With this extension, we are able to improve adversarial detection rates compared to state-of-the-art detectors on five different attack methods. The code for the methods proposed in the paper is available at github.com/paulaharder/SpectralAdversarialDefense

Generative adversarial networks are the state of the art approach towards learned synthetic image generation. Although early successes were mostly unsupervised, bit by bit, this trend has been superseded by approaches based on labelled data. These supervised methods allow a much finer-grained control of the output image, offering more flexibility and stability. Nevertheless, the main drawback of such models is the necessity of annotated data. In this work, we introduce an novel framework that benefits from two popular learning techniques, adversarial training and representation learning, and takes a step towards unsupervised conditional GANs. In particular, our approach exploits the structure of a latent space (learned by the representation learning) and employs it to condition the generative model. In this way, we break the traditional dependency between condition and label, substituting the latter by unsupervised features coming from the latent space. Finally, we show that this new technique is able to produce samples on demand keeping the quality of its supervised counterpart.

The term attribute transfer refers to the tasks of altering images in such a way, that the semantic interpretation of a given input image is shifted towards an intended direction, which is quantified by semantic attributes. Prominent example applications are photo realistic changes of facial features and expressions, like changing the hair color, adding a smile, enlarging the nose or altering the entire context of a scene, like transforming a summer landscape into a winter panorama. Recent advances in attribute transfer are mostly based on generative deep neural networks, using various techniques to manipulate images in the latent space of the generator. In this paper, we present a novel method for the common sub-task of local attribute transfers, where only parts of a face have to be altered in order to achieve semantic changes (e.g. removing a mustache). In contrast to previous methods, where such local changes have been implemented by generating new (global) images, we propose to formulate local attribute transfers as an inpainting problem. Removing and regenerating only parts of images, our Attribute Transfer Inpainting Generative Adversarial Network (ATI-GAN) is able to utilize local context information to focus on the attributes while keeping the background unmodified resulting in visually sound results.

In this preliminary report, we present a simple but very effective technique to stabilize the training of CNN based GANs. Motivated by recently published methods using frequency decomposition of convolutions (e.g. Octave Convolutions), we propose a novel convolution scheme to stabilize the training and reduce the likelihood of a mode collapse. The basic idea of our approach is to split convolutional filters into additive high and low frequency parts, while shifting weight updates from low to high during the training. Intuitively, this method forces GANs to learn low frequency coarse image structures before descending into fine (high frequency) details. Our approach is orthogonal and complementary to existing stabilization methods and can simply plugged into any CNN based GAN architecture. First experiments on the CelebA dataset show the effectiveness of the proposed method.