WebSeg
In this paper, we improve semantic segmentation by automatically learning from Flickr images associated with a particular keyword, without relying on any explicit user annotations, thus substantially alleviating the dependence on accurate annotations when compared to previous weakly supervised methods. To solve such a challenging problem, we leverage several low-level cues (such as saliency, edges, etc.) to help generate a proxy ground truth. Due to the diversity of web-crawled images, we anticipate a large amount of ‘label noise’ in which other objects might be present. We design an online noise filtering scheme which is able to deal with this label noise, especially in cluttered images. We use this filtering strategy as an auxiliary module to help assist the segmentation network in learning cleaner proxy annotations. Extensive experiments on the popular PASCAL VOC 2012 semantic segmentation benchmark show surprising good results in both our WebSeg (mIoU = 57.0%) and weakly supervised (mIoU = 63.3%) settings. …

Decreasing-Trend-Nature (DTN)
We propose a novel diminishing learning rate scheme, coined Decreasing-Trend-Nature (DTN), which allows us to prove fast convergence of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithm to a first-order stationary point for smooth general convex and some class of nonconvex including neural network applications for classification problems. We are the first to prove that SGD with diminishing learning rate achieves a convergence rate of $\mathcal{O}(1/t)$ for these problems. Our theory applies to neural network applications for classification problems in a straightforward way. …

Super-Resolution Erlangen Database (SupER)
Capturing ground truth data to benchmark super-resolution (SR) is challenging. Therefore, current quantitative studies are mainly evaluated on simulated data artificially sampled from ground truth images. We argue that such evaluations overestimate the actual performance of SR methods compared to their behavior on real images. To bridge this simulated-to-real gap, we introduce the Super-Resolution Erlangen (SupER) database, the first comprehensive laboratory SR database of all-real acquisitions with pixel-wise ground truth. It consists of more than 80k images of 14 scenes combining different facets: CMOS sensor noise, real sampling at four resolution levels, nine scene motion types, two photometric conditions, and lossy video coding at five levels. As such, the database exceeds existing benchmarks by an order of magnitude in quality and quantity. This paper also benchmarks 19 popular single-image and multi-frame algorithms on our data. The benchmark comprises a quantitative study by exploiting ground truth data and qualitative evaluations in a large-scale observer study. We also rigorously investigate agreements between both evaluations from a statistical perspective. One interesting result is that top-performing methods on simulated data may be surpassed by others on real data. Our insights can spur further algorithm development, and the publicy available dataset can foster future evaluations. …