Paper:
Learning Affinity via Spatial Propagation Networks
In this paper, we propose spatial propagation networks for learning the affinity matrix for vision tasks. We show that by constructing a row/column linear propagation model, the spatially varying transformation matrix exactly constitutes an affinity matrix that models dense, global pairwise relationships of an image. Specifically, we develop a three-way connection for the linear propagation model, which (a) formulates a sparse transformation matrix, where all elements can be outputs from a deep CNN, but (b) results in a dense affinity matrix that effectively models any task-specific pairwise similarity matrix. Instead of designing the similarity kernels according to image features of two points, we can directly output all the similarities in a purely data-driven manner. The spatial propagation network is a generic framework that can be applied to many affinity-related tasks, such as image matting, segmentation and colorization, to name a few. Essentially, the model can learn semantically-aware affinity values for high-level vision tasks due to the powerful learning capability of deep CNNs. We validate the framework on the task of refinement of image segmentation boundaries. Experiments on the HELEN face parsing and PASCAL VOC-2012 semantic segmentation tasks show that the spatial propagation network provides a general, effective and efficient solution for generating high-quality segmentation results.

Review:
The paper describes a method for learning pairwise affinities for recurrent label refinement in deep networks. A typical application is as follows: a feature map is produced by a convolutional network and is then refined by additional layers that in effect pass messages between pixels. The weights for such message passing are often set using hand-defined feature spaces (although prior work on learning such weights exists, see below). The submission describes a formulation for learning such weights.
The paper has a number of issues that lead me to recommend rejection:
1. The general problem tackled in this paper -- refining poorly localized segmentation boundaries -- has been tackled in many publications. Two representative approaches are: (a) add layers that model mean field inference in a dense CRF and train them jointly with the initial segmentation network (as in [1,13,30]); (b) add a convolutional refinement module, such as the context module in [Multi-Scale Context Aggregation by Dilated Convolutions, ICLR 2016], also trained jointly with the segmentation network. The submission should provide controlled experiments that compare the presented approach to this prior work, but it doesn't. An attempt is made in Table 1, but it is deeply flawed. As far as I can tell, the dense CRF is not trained end-to-end with the segmentation network, as commonly done in the literature, such as [1,13,30]. And the context module (the ICLR 2016 work referred to above) is not compared to at all, even though it was developed for this specific purpose and is known to yield good results. (In fact, the ICLR 2016 paper reports refinement results on the VOC 2012 dataset with the VGG network that are better than the SPN results in Table 1 (IoU of 73.9 in the "Front + Large + RNN" condition in Table 3 of the ICLR 2016 paper). And that's a comparatively old work by now.)
2. There is other related work in the literature that specifically addresses learning affinities for label refinement. This work is closely related but is not cited, discussed, or compared to:
   -Semantic Segmentation with Boundary Neural Fields. Gedas Bertasius, Jianbo Shi and Lorenzo Torresani. CVPR 2016
   - Convolutional Random Walk Networks for Semantic Image Segmentation. Gedas Bertasius, Lorenzo Torresani, Stella X. Yu, Jianbo Shi. CVPR 2017
   - Learning Dense Convolutional Embeddings for Semantic Segmentation. Adam W. Harley, Konstantinos G. Derpanis, Iasonas Kokkinos. ICLR Workshop 2016
3. The results on VOC 2012 are well below the current state of the art, which stands at 86% IoU (compared to 79.8% in the submission). One could argue that the authors are more interested in evaluating the contribution of their refinement approach when added to some baseline segmentation networks, but (a) such controlled evaluation was not done properly (see point (1) above); and (b) the authors' combined approach is quite elaborate, so it would be hard to claim that it is somehow much simpler than state-of-the-art networks that dominate the leaderboard. With this level of complexity, it is reasonable to ask for state-of-the-art performance.
Minor comment:
- Since the dense CRF seems to play an important role in the submission, as a baseline that is repeatedly compared against, the submission should cite the dense CRF paper: [Efficient Inference in Fully Connected CRFs with Gaussian Edge Potentials, NIPS 2011].