  We introduce a differentiable, end-to-end trainable framework for solving
pixel-level grouping problems such as instance segmentation consisting of two
novel components. First, we regress pixels into a hyper-spherical embedding
space so that pixels from the same group have high cosine similarity while
those from different groups have similarity below a specified margin. We
analyze the choice of embedding dimension and margin, relating them to
theoretical results on the problem of distributing points uniformly on the
sphere. Second, to group instances, we utilize a variant of mean-shift
clustering, implemented as a recurrent neural network parameterized by kernel
bandwidth. This recurrent grouping module is differentiable, enjoys convergent
dynamics and probabilistic interpretability. Backpropagating the group-weighted
loss through this module allows learning to focus on only correcting embedding
errors that won't be resolved during subsequent clustering. Our framework,
while conceptually simple and theoretically abundant, is also practically
effective and computationally efficient. We demonstrate substantial
improvements over state-of-the-art instance segmentation for object proposal
generation, as well as demonstrating the benefits of grouping loss for
classification tasks such as boundary detection and semantic segmentation.
