DEDICATION

This doctoral dissertation is dedicated to my ever supportive parents, loving wife and daughter. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am very fortunate to work closely with both Professor Silvio Savarese and Pro-fessor Fei-Fei Li. They are both brilliant scientists and incredibly knowledgeable mentors. Through the course of my PhD, they have helped me evolve from a clueless student to a confident researcher. I truly appreciate their guidances and encour-agements. They have also taught my a lot on how to effectively communicate with other researchers: polishing research papers, and making presentation crystal clear and intuitive to follow. Most importantly, I kept on being amazed by their insights on high-impact future research directions, even after 5 years of study with them. I am also very lucky to study in both Princeton university and university of Michi-gan. At Princeton university, I have met many great professors. I want to thank them for teaching me the fundamental knowledge of machine learning and compute