Recent data-driven approaches to scene interpretation predominantly pose inference as an end-to-end black-box mapping, commonly performed by a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). However, decades of work on perceptual organization in both human and machine vision suggest that there are often intermediate representations that are intrinsic to an inference task, and which provide essential structure to improve generalization. In this work, we explore an approach for injecting prior domain structure into neural network training by supervising hidden layers of a CNN with intermediate concepts that normally are not observed in practice. We formulate a probabilistic framework which formalizes these notions and predicts improved generalization via this deep supervision method. One advantage of this approach is that we are able to train only from synthetic CAD renderings of cluttered scenes, where concept values can be extracted, but apply the results to real images. Our implementation achieves the state-of-the-art performance of 2D/3D keypoint localization and image classification on real image benchmarks including KITTI, PASCALVOC, PASCAL3D+, IKEA, and CIFAR100. We provide additional evidence that our approach outperforms alternative forms of supervision, such as multi-task networks.

Finding a small set of representatives from an unlabeled dataset is a core problem in a broad range of applications such as dataset summarization and information extraction. Classical exemplar selection methods such as $k$ -medoids work under the assumption that the data points are close to a few cluster centroids, and cannot handle the case where data lie close to a union of subspaces. This paper proposes a new exemplar selection model that searches for a subset that best reconstructs all data points as measured by the $\ell _1$ norm of the representation coefficients. Geometrically, this subset best covers all the data points as measured by the Minkowski functional of the subset. To solve our model efficiently, we introduce a farthest first search algorithm that iteratively selects the worst represented point as an exemplar. When the dataset is drawn from a union of independent subspaces, our method is able to select sufficiently many representatives from each subspace. We further develop an exemplar based subspace clustering method that is robust to imbalanced data and efficient for large scale data. Moreover, we show that a classifier trained on the selected exemplars (when they are labeled) can correctly classify the rest of the data points.