[Colloquium] 1/30 Young Researcher Seminar Series: Richard Zhang, Adobe Research

[Mary Marre via Colloquium]

*Young Researcher Seminar Series*

[image: image.png]

*When:  *   Wednesday, January 30th at *11:00 am*

*Where:  *  TTIC, 6045 S. Kenwood Avenue, 5th Floor, Room 526

*Who: *      Richard Zhang, Adobe Research

*Title*:       Image Synthesis for Self-Supervised Visual Representation
Learning

*Abstract*: In recent years, deep convolutional networks have proven to be
extremely adept at discriminative labeling tasks. Not only do networks
solve the direct task, they also learn an effective, general representation
of the visual world. We explore the use of deep networks for image
generation, or synthesis. Generation is challenging, as it is difficult to
characterize the perceptual quality of an image, and often times there is
more than one “correct” answer. However, we show that networks can indeed
perform the graphics task of image generation, and in doing so, learn a
representation of the visual world, even without the need for hand-curated
labels.

We propose BicycleGAN, a general system for image-to-image translation
problems, with the specific aim of capturing the multimodal nature of the
output space. We study image colorization in greater detail and develop
automatic and user-guided approaches. Moreover, colorization, as well as
cross-channel prediction in general, is a simple but powerful pretext task
for self-supervised representation learning. We demonstrate strong transfer
to high-level semantic tasks, such as image classification, and to
low-level human perceptual similarity judgments. For the latter, we collect
a large-scale dataset of human perceptual similarity judgments and find
that our method outperforms traditional metrics such as PSNR and SSIM. We
also discover that many unsupervised and self-supervised representations
transfer strongly, even comparable to fully-supervised methods.

*Bio*: Richard Zhang is a research scientist at Adobe Research, San
Francisco. He recently obtained his PhD in EECS at UC Berkeley, advised by
Professor Alexei A. Efros. His research interests are in computer vision,
deep learning, machine learning, and graphics. He graduated summa cum laude
with BS and MEng degrees from Cornell University in ECE in 2010. He is a
recipient of the 2017 Adobe Research Fellowship.



Host: Greg Shakhnarovich <greg at ttic.edu>

**************************************************************************************************



The TTIC Young Researcher Seminar Series (http://www.ttic.edu/young-
researcher.php) features talks by Ph.D. students and postdocs whose research is
of broad interest to the computer science community. The series provides an
opportunity for early-career researchers to present recent work to and meet
with students and faculty at TTIC and nearby universities.


The seminars are typically held on Wednesdays at 11:00am in TTIC Room 526.

For additional information, please contact Matthew Walter (mwalter at ttic.edu
).





Mary C. Marre
Administrative Assistant
*Toyota Technological Institute*
*6045 S. Kenwood Avenue*
*Room 517*
*Chicago, IL  60637*
*p:(773) 834-1757*
*f: (773) 357-6970*
*mmarre at ttic.edu <mmarre at ttic.edu>*
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