We present a system to infer and execute a human-readable program from a real-world demonstration. The system consists of a series of neural networks to perform perception, program generation, and program execution. Leveraging convolutional pose machines, the perception network reliably detects the bounding cuboids of objects in real images even when severely occluded, after training only on synthetic images using domain randomization. To increase the applicability of the perception network to new scenarios, the network is formulated to predict in image space rather than in world space.

We address the unsupervised learning of several interconnected problems in low-level vision: single view depth prediction, camera motion estimation, optical flow, and segmentation of a video into the static scene and moving regions. Our key insight is that these four fundamental vision problems are coupled through geometric constraints. Consequently, learning to solve them together simplifies the problem because the solutions can reinforce each other. We go beyond previous work by exploiting geometry more explicitly and segmenting the scene into static and moving regions. To that end, we introduce Competitive Collaboration, a framework that facilitates the coordinated training of multiple specialized neural networks to solve complex problems. Competitive Collaboration works much like expectation-maximization, but with neural networks that act as both competitors to explain pixels that correspond to static or moving regions, and as collaborators through a moderator that assigns pixels to be either static or independently moving. Our novel method integrates all these problems in a common framework and simultaneously reasons about the segmentation of the scene into moving objects and the static background, the camera motion, depth of the static scene structure, and the optical flow of moving objects. Our model is trained without any supervision and achieves state-of-the-art performance among joint unsupervised methods on all sub-problems.

We apply basic statistical reasoning to signal reconstruction by machine learning — learning to map corrupted observations to clean signals — with a simple and powerful conclusion: under certain common circumstances, it is possible to learn to restore signals without ever observing clean ones, at performance close or equal to training using clean exemplars. We show applications in photographic noise removal, denoising of synthetic Monte Carlo images, and reconstruction of MRI scans from undersampled inputs, all based on only observing corrupted data.

Unconstrained remote gaze tracking using off-the-shelf cameras is a challenging problem. Recently, promising algorithms for appearance-based gaze estimation using convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been proposed. Improving their robustness to various confounding factors including variable head pose, subject identity, illumination and image quality remain open problems. In this work, we study the effect of variable head pose on machine learning regressors trained to estimate gaze direction.

A high-productivity digital VLSI flow for designing complex SoCs is presented. The flow includes high-level synthesis tools, an object-oriented library of synthesizable SystemC and C++ components, and a modular VLSI physical design approach based on fine-grained globally asynchronous locally synchronous (GALS) clocking. The flow was demonstrated on a 16nm FinFET testchip targeting machine learning and computer vision.

We present a system for training deep neural networks for object detection using synthetic images. To handle the variability in real-world data, the system relies upon the technique of domain randomization, in which the parameters of the simulator—such as lighting, pose, object textures, etc.—are randomized in non-realistic ways to force the neural network to learn the essential features of the object of interest.

We revisit the problem of visual depth estimation in the context of autonomous vehicles. Despite the progress on monocular depth estimation in recent years, we show that the gap between monocular and stereo depth accuracy remains large---a particularly relevant result due to the prevalent reliance upon monocular cameras by vehicles that are expected to be self-driving. We argue that the challenges of removing this gap are significant, owing to fundamental limitations of monocular vision. As a result, we focus our efforts on depth estimation by stereo.

We present a new dataset, called Falling Things (FAT), for advancing the state-of-the-art in object detection and 3D pose estimation in the context of robotics.

We present a network architecture for processing point clouds that directly operates on a collection of points represented as a sparse set of samples in a high-dimensional lattice. Naively applying convolutions on this lattice scales poorly, both in terms of memory and computational cost, as the size of the lattice increases. Instead, our network uses sparse bilateral convolutional layers as building blocks.