Daily CVPR - Monday

The perceptual organization workshop was a lot of fun today, with great talks and lively discussion. The theme this year was feedback mechanisms. One of the main points we talked about was, for which tasks is feedback necessary, or at least benefits us the most. Deva Ramanan reminded us of the distinction between “vision at a glance” and “vision with scrutiny”, suggesting that feedback should be more useful for the latter. Other speakers mentioned that feedback might be especially useful for tasks like fine-grained recognition, high- resolution segmentation, instance segmentation, question- answering, and robotic control. We also heard interesting perspectives from brain scientists Bruno Olshausen and Daniel Kersten, who gave ample evidence that feedback is a major factor in biological computation, extending all the way back to early visual cortex, occurring extremely quickly (~5ms loops between V1 and V2), and also existing between motor and vision regions. Another primary topic was networks that perform iterative refinement. Viren Jain talked about recursive architectures that gradually refine 3D segmentation maps of brain tissue. Jitendra Malik told us about iterative error feedback for segmentation and pose estimation. Piotr Dollar, also used feedback for refinement, demonstrating great results on instance segmentation. One intriguing view on feedback came from Deva and Bruno, who framed vision as an inference problem, with feedback emerging as a natural result of inference in latent variable models. Viren Jain also commented on this view, describing how feedback falls naturally out of variational inference. Finally, feedback isn’t always necessary. Thomas Brox showed us that feedforward models still have a lot of juice, demonstrating impressive feedforward networks for view synthesis and optical flow. “ One intriguing view on feedback came from Deva and Bruno, who framed vision as an inference problem, with feedback emerging as a natural result of inference in latent variable models ” 4 CVPR Daily: Monday Workshop Perceptual Organization in Computer Vision: The Role of Feedback in Recognition and Reorganization Katerina Fragkiadaki, João Carreira, Phillip Isola