Convolutional neural networks : towards less supervision for visual recognition

Overview & Synopsis

Convolutional Neural Networks are flexible learning algorithms for computer vision that scale particularly well with the amount of data that is provided for training them. Although these methods had successful applications already in the ’90s, they were not used in visual recognition pipelines because of their lesser performance on realistic natural images. It is only after the amount of data and the computational power both reached a critical point that these algorithms revealed their potential during the ImageNet challenge of 2012, leading to a paradigm shift in visual recogntion. The first contribution of this thesis is a transfer learning setup with a Convolutional Neural Network for image classification. Using a pre-training procedure, we show that image representations learned in a network generalize to other recognition tasks, and their performance scales up with the amount of data used in pre-training. The second contribution of this thesis is a weakly supervised setup for image classification that can predict the location of objects in complex cluttered scenes, based on a dataset indicating only with the presence or absence of objects in training images. The third contribution of this thesis aims at finding possible paths for progress in unsupervised learning with neural networks. We study the recent trend of Generative Adversarial Networks and propose two-sample tests for evaluating models. We investigate possible links with concepts related to causality, and propose a two-sample test method for the task of causal discovery. Finally, building on a recent connection with optimal transport, we investigate what these generative algorithms are learning from unlabeled data.