ICPR2020 Paper Browser

Paper download is intended for registered attendees only, and is subjected to the IEEE Copyright Policy. Any other use is strongly forbidden.

Auto Encoding Explanatory Examples with Stochastic Paths

Cesar Ali Ojeda Marin, Ramses J. Sanchez, Kostadin Cvejoski, Bogdan Georgiev

Auto-TLDR; Semantic Stochastic Path: Explaining a Classifier's Decision Making Process using latent codes

Abstract Slides Poster

In this paper we ask for the main factors that determine a classifier's decision making process and uncover such factors by studying latent codes produced by auto-encoding frameworks. To deliver an explanation of a classifier's behaviour, we propose a method that provides series of examples highlighting semantic differences between the classifier's decisions. These examples are generated through interpolations in latent space. We introduce and formalize the notion of a semantic stochastic path, as a suitable stochastic process defined in feature (data) space via latent code interpolations. We then introduce the concept of semantic Lagrangians as a way to incorporate the desired classifier's behaviour and find that the solution of the associated variational problem allows for highlighting differences in the classifier decision. Very importantly, within our framework the classifier is used as a black-box, and only its evaluation is required.

Similar papers

Interpolation in Auto Encoders with Bridge Processes

Carl Ringqvist, Henrik Hult, Judith Butepage, Hedvig Kjellstrom

Auto-TLDR; Stochastic interpolations from auto encoders trained on flattened sequences

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Auto encoding models have been extensively studied in recent years. They provide an efficient framework for sample generation, as well as for analysing feature learning. Furthermore, they are efficient in performing interpolations between data-points in semantically meaningful ways. In this paper, we introduce a method for generating sequence samples from auto encoders trained on flattened sequences (e.g video sample from auto encoders trained to generate a video frame); as well as a canonical, dimension independent method for generating stochastic interpolations. The distribution of interpolation paths is represented as the distribution of a bridge process constructed from an artificial random data generating process in the latent space, having the prior distribution as its invariant distribution.

Switching Dynamical Systems with Deep Neural Networks

Cesar Ali Ojeda Marin, Kostadin Cvejoski, Bogdan Georgiev, Ramses J. Sanchez

Auto-TLDR; Variational RNN for Switching Dynamics

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

The problem of uncovering different dynamicalregimes is of pivotal importance in time series analysis. Switchingdynamical systems provide a solution for modeling physical phe-nomena whose time series data exhibit different dynamical modes.In this work we propose a novel variational RNN model forswitching dynamics allowing for both non-Markovian and non-linear dynamical behavior between and within dynamic modes.Attention mechanisms are provided to inform the switchingdistribution. We evaluate our model on synthetic and empiricaldatasets of diverse nature and successfully uncover differentdynamical regimes and predict the switching dynamics.

Variational Inference with Latent Space Quantization for Adversarial Resilience

Vinay Kyatham, Deepak Mishra, Prathosh A.P.

Auto-TLDR; A Generalized Defense Mechanism for Adversarial Attacks on Data Manifolds

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Despite their tremendous success in modelling highdimensional data manifolds, deep neural networks suffer from the threat of adversarial attacks - Existence of perceptually valid input-like samples obtained through careful perturbation that lead to degradation in the performance of the underlying model. Major concerns with existing defense mechanisms include non-generalizability across different attacks, models and large inference time. In this paper, we propose a generalized defense mechanism capitalizing on the expressive power of regularized latent space based generative models. We design an adversarial filter, devoid of access to classifier and adversaries, which makes it usable in tandem with any classifier. The basic idea is to learn a Lipschitz constrained mapping from the data manifold, incorporating adversarial perturbations, to a quantized latent space and re-map it to the true data manifold. Specifically, we simultaneously auto-encode the data manifold and its perturbations implicitly through the perturbations of the regularized and quantized generative latent space, realized using variational inference. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed formulation in providing resilience against multiple attack types (black and white box) and methods, while being almost real-time. Our experiments show that the proposed method surpasses the stateof-the-art techniques in several cases.

AVAE: Adversarial Variational Auto Encoder

Antoine Plumerault, Hervé Le Borgne, Celine Hudelot

Auto-TLDR; Combining VAE and GAN for Realistic Image Generation

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Among the wide variety of image generative models, two models stand out: Variational Auto Encoders (VAE) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). GANs can produce realistic images, but they suffer from mode collapse and do not provide simple ways to get the latent representation of an image. On the other hand, VAEs do not have these problems, but they often generate images less realistic than GANs. In this article, we explain that this lack of realism is partially due to a common underestimation of the natural image manifold dimensionality. To solve this issue we introduce a new framework that combines VAE and GAN in a novel and complementary way to produce an auto-encoding model that keeps VAEs properties while generating images of GAN-quality. We evaluate our approach both qualitatively and quantitatively on five image datasets.

Understanding Integrated Gradients with SmoothTaylor for Deep Neural Network Attribution

Gary Shing Wee Goh, Sebastian Lapuschkin, Leander Weber, Wojciech Samek, Alexander Binder

Auto-TLDR; SmoothGrad: bridging Integrated Gradients and SmoothGrad from the Taylor's theorem perspective

Abstract Slides Similar

Integrated Gradients as an attribution method for deep neural network models offers simple implementability. However, it suffers from noisiness of explanations which affects the ease of interpretability. The SmoothGrad technique is proposed to solve the noisiness issue and smoothen the attribution maps of any gradient-based attribution method. In this paper, we present SmoothTaylor as a novel theoretical concept bridging Integrated Gradients and SmoothGrad, from the Taylor's theorem perspective. We apply the methods to the image classification problem, using the ILSVRC2012 ImageNet object recognition dataset, and a couple of pretrained image models to generate attribution maps. These attribution maps are empirically evaluated using quantitative measures for sensitivity and noise level. We further propose adaptive noising to optimize for the noise scale hyperparameter value. From our experiments, we find that the SmoothTaylor approach together with adaptive noising is able to generate better quality saliency maps with lesser noise and higher sensitivity to the relevant points in the input space as compared to Integrated Gradients.

Disentangled Representation Learning for Controllable Image Synthesis: An Information-Theoretic Perspective

Shichang Tang, Xu Zhou, Xuming He, Yi Ma

Auto-TLDR; Controllable Image Synthesis in Deep Generative Models using Variational Auto-Encoder

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

In this paper, we look into the problem of disentangled representation learning and controllable image synthesis in a deep generative model. We develop an encoder-decoder architecture for a variant of the Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) with two latent codes $z_1$ and $z_2$. Our framework uses $z_2$ to capture specified factors of variation while $z_1$ captures the complementary factors of variation. To this end, we analyze the learning problem from the perspective of multivariate mutual information, derive optimizable lower bounds of the conditional mutual information in the image synthesis processes and incorporate them into the training objective. We validate our method empirically on the Color MNIST dataset and the CelebA dataset by showing controllable image syntheses. Our proposed paradigm is simple yet effective and is applicable to many situations, including those where there is not an explicit factorization of features available, or where the features are non-categorical.

A Joint Representation Learning and Feature Modeling Approach for One-Class Recognition

Pramuditha Perera, Vishal Patel

Auto-TLDR; Combining Generative Features and One-Class Classification for Effective One-class Recognition

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

One-class recognition is traditionally approached either as a representation learning problem or a feature modelling problem. In this work, we argue that both of these approaches have their own limitations; and a more effective solution can be obtained by combining the two. The proposed approach is based on the combination of a generative framework and a one-class classification method. First, we learn generative features using the one-class data with a generative framework. We augment the learned features with the corresponding reconstruction errors to obtain augmented features. Then, we qualitatively identify a suitable feature distribution that reduces the redundancy in the chosen classifier space. Finally, we force the augmented features to take the form of this distribution using an adversarial framework. We test the effectiveness of the proposed method on three one-class classification tasks and obtain state-of-the-art results.

Killing Four Birds with One Gaussian Process: The Relation between Different Test-Time Attacks

Kathrin Grosse, Michael Thomas Smith, Michael Backes

Auto-TLDR; Security of Gaussian Process Classifiers against Attack Algorithms

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

In machine learning (ML) security, attacks like evasion, model stealing or membership inference are generally studied in individually. Previous work has also shown a relationship between some attacks and decision function curvature of the targeted model. Consequently, we study an ML model allowing direct control over the decision surface curvature: Gaussian Process classifiers (GPCs). For evasion, we find that changing GPC's curvature to be robust against one attack algorithm boils down to enabling a different norm or attack algorithm to succeed. This is backed up by our formal analysis showing that static security guarantees are opposed to learning. Concerning intellectual property, we show formally that lazy learning does not necessarily leak all information when applied. In practice, often a seemingly secure curvature can be found. For example, we are able to secure GPC against empirical membership inference by proper configuration. In this configuration, however, the GPC's hyper-parameters are leaked, e.g. model reverse engineering succeeds. We conclude that attacks on classification should not be studied in isolation, but in relation to each other.

Combining Similarity and Adversarial Learning to Generate Visual Explanation: Application to Medical Image Classification

Martin Charachon, Roberto Roberto Ardon, Celine Hudelot, Paul-Henry Cournède, Camille Ruppli

Auto-TLDR; Explaining Black-Box Machine Learning Models with Visual Explanation

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Recently, due to their success and increasing applications, explaining the decision of black-box machine learning models has become a critical task. It is particularly the case in sensitive domains such as medical image interpretation. Various explanation approaches have been proposed in the literature, among which perturbation based approaches are very promising. Within this class of methods, we leverage a learning framework to produce our visual explanations method. From a given classifier, we train two generators to produce from an input image the so called similar and adversarial images. The similar (resp. adversarial) image shall be classified as (resp. not as) the input image. We show that visual explanation, outperforming state of the art methods, can be derived from these. Our method is model-agnostic and, at test time, only requires a single forward pass to generate explanation. Therefore, the proposed approach is adapted for real-time systems such as medical image analysis. Finally, we show that random geometric augmentations applied on the original image acts as a regularization that improves all state of the art explanation methods. We validate our approach on a large chest X-ray database.

A Generalizable Saliency Map-Based Interpretation of Model Outcome

Shailja Thakur, Sebastian Fischmeister

Auto-TLDR; Interpretability of Deep Neural Networks Using Salient Input and Output

Abstract Poster Similar

One of the significant challenges of deep neural networks is that the complex nature of the network prevents human comprehension of the outcome of the network. Consequently, the applicability of complex machine learning models is limited in the safety-critical domains, which incurs risk to life and property. To fully exploit the capabilities of complex neural networks, we propose a non-intrusive interpretability technique that uses the input and output of the model to generate a saliency map. The method works by empirically optimizing a randomly initialized input mask by localizing and weighing individual pixels according to their sensitivity towards the target class. Our experiments show that the proposed model interpretability approach performs better than the existing saliency map-based approaches methods at localizing the relevant input pixels. Furthermore, to obtain a global perspective on the target-specific explanation, we propose a saliency map reconstruction approach to generate acceptable variations of the salient inputs from the space of input data distribution for which the model outcome remains unaltered. Experiments show that our interpretability method can reconstruct the salient part of the input with a classification accuracy of 89%.

A Multilinear Sampling Algorithm to Estimate Shapley Values

Ramin Okhrati, Aldo Lipani

Auto-TLDR; A sampling method for Shapley values for multilayer Perceptrons

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Shapley values are great analytical tools in game theory to measure the importance of a player in a game. Due to their axiomatic and desirable properties such as efficiency, they have become popular for feature importance analysis in data science and machine learning. However, the time complexity to compute Shapley values based on the original formula is exponential, and as the number of features increases, this becomes infeasible. Castro et al. [1] developed a sampling algorithm, to estimate Shapley values. In this work, we propose a new sampling method based on a multilinear extension technique as applied in game theory. The aim is to provide a more efficient (sampling) method for estimating Shapley values. Our method is applicable to any machine learning model, in particular for either multiclass classifications or regression problems. We apply the method to estimate Shapley values for multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs) and through experimentation on two datasets, we demonstrate that our method provides more accurate estimations of the Shapley values by reducing the variance of the sampling statistics

Mutual Information Based Method for Unsupervised Disentanglement of Video Representation

Aditya Sreekar P, Ujjwal Tiwari, Anoop Namboodiri

Auto-TLDR; MIPAE: Mutual Information Predictive Auto-Encoder for Video Prediction

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Video Prediction is an interesting and challenging task of predicting future frames from a given set context frames that belong to a video sequence. Video prediction models have found prospective applications in Maneuver Planning, Health care, Autonomous Navigation and Simulation. One of the major challenges in future frame generation is due to the high dimensional nature of visual data. In this work, we propose Mutual Information Predictive Auto-Encoder (MIPAE) framework, that reduces the task of predicting high dimensional video frames by factorising video representations into content and low dimensional pose latent variables that are easy to predict. A standard LSTM network is used to predict these low dimensional pose representations. Content and the predicted pose representations are decoded to generate future frames. Our approach leverages the temporal structure of the latent generative factors of a video and a novel mutual information loss to learn disentangled video representations. We also propose a metric based on mutual information gap (MIG) to quantitatively access the effectiveness of disentanglement on DSprites and MPI3D-real datasets. MIG scores corroborate with the visual superiority of frames predicted by MIPAE. We also compare our method quantitatively on evaluation metrics LPIPS, SSIM and PSNR.

Reducing the Variance of Variational Estimates of Mutual Information by Limiting the Critic's Hypothesis Space to RKHS

Aditya Sreekar P, Ujjwal Tiwari, Anoop Namboodiri

Auto-TLDR; Mutual Information Estimation from Variational Lower Bounds Using a Critic's Hypothesis Space

Abstract Slides Similar

Mutual information (MI) is an information-theoretic measure of dependency between two random variables. Several methods to estimate MI, from samples of two random variables with unknown underlying probability distributions have been proposed in the literature. Recent methods realize parametric probability distributions or critic as a neural network to approximate unknown density ratios. The approximated density ratios are used to estimate different variational lower bounds of MI. While these methods provide reliable estimation when the true MI is low, they produce high variance estimates in cases of high MI. We argue that the high variance characteristic is due to the uncontrolled complexity of the critic's hypothesis space. In support of this argument, we use the data-driven Rademacher complexity of the hypothesis space associated with the critic's architecture to analyse generalization error bound of variational lower bound estimates of MI. In the proposed work, we show that it is possible to negate the high variance characteristics of these estimators by constraining the critic's hypothesis space to Reproducing Hilbert Kernel Space (RKHS), which corresponds to a kernel learned using Automated Spectral Kernel Learning (ASKL). By analysing the aforementioned generalization error bounds, we augment the overall optimisation objective with effective regularisation term. We empirically demonstrate the efficacy of this regularization in enforcing proper bias variance tradeoff on four variational lower bounds, namely NWJ, MINE, JS and SMILE.

Improving Explainability of Integrated Gradients with Guided Non-Linearity

Hyuk Jin Kwon, Hyung Il Koo, Nam Ik Cho

Auto-TLDR; Guided Non-linearity for Attribution in Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Along with the performance improvements of neural network models, developing methods that enable the explanation of their behavior is a significant research topic. For convolutional neural networks, the explainability is usually achieved with attribution (heatmap) that visualizes pixel-level importance or contribution of input to its corresponding result. This attribution should reflect the relation (dependency) between inputs and outputs, which has been studied with a variety of methods, e.g., derivative of an output with respect to an input pixel value, a weighted sum of gradients, amount of output changes to input perturbations, and so on. In this paper, we present a new method that improves the measure of attribution, and incorporates it into the integrated gradients method. To be precise, rather than using the conventional chain-rule, we propose a method called guided non-linearity that propagates gradients more effectively through non-linear units (e.g., ReLU and max-pool) so that only positive gradients backpropagate through non-linear units. Our method is inspired by the mechanism of action potential generation in postsynaptic neurons, where the firing of action potentials depends on the sum of excitatory (EPSP) and inhibitory postsynaptic potentials (IPSP). We believe that paths consisting of EPSP-giving-neurons faithfully reflect the contribution of inputs to the output, and we make gradients flow only along those paths (i.e., paths of positive chain reactions). Experiments with 5 deep neural networks have shown that the proposed method outperforms others in terms of the deletion metrics, and yields fine-grained and more human-interpretable attribution.

Kernel-Based LIME with Feature Dependency Sampling

Sheng Shi, Yangzhou Du, Fan Wei

Auto-TLDR; Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanation with Feature Dependency Sampling

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

While deep learning makes significant achievements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), the lack of transparency has limited its broad application in various vertical domains. Explainability is not only a gateway between AI and society, but also a powerful feature to detect flaw of the models and bias of the data. Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanation (LIME) is a widely-accepted technique that explains the predictions of any classifier faithfully by learning an interpretable model locally around the predicted instance. However, the sampling operation in the standard implementation of LIME is defective. Perturbed samples are generated from a uniform distribution, ignoring the complicated correlation between features. Moreover, as the local decision boundary is non-linear for most complex networks, linear approximation may produce serious errors. This paper proposes an high-interpretability and high-fidelity local explanation method, known as Kernel-based LIME with Feature Dependency Sampling (KLFDS). Given an instance being explained, KLFDS enhances interpretability by feature sampling with intrinsic dependency. Besides, KLFDS improves the local explanation fidelity by approximating nonlinear boundary of local decision. We evaluate our method with image classification tasks and results show that KLFDS's explanation of the back-box model achieves much better performance than original LIME in terms of interpretability and fidelity.

Probabilistic Word Embeddings in Kinematic Space

Adarsh Jamadandi, Rishabh Tigadoli, Ramesh Ashok Tabib, Uma Mudenagudi

Auto-TLDR; Kinematic Space for Hierarchical Representation Learning

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

In this paper, we propose a method for learning representations in the space of Gaussian-like distribution defined on a novel geometrical space called Kinematic space. The utility of non-Euclidean geometry for deep representation learning has gained traction, specifically different models of hyperbolic geometry such as Poincar\'{e} and Lorentz models have proven useful for learning hierarchical representations. Going beyond manifolds with constant curvature, albeit has better representation capacity might lead to unhanding of computationally tractable tools like Riemannian optimization methods. Here, we explore a pseudo-Riemannian auxiliary Lorentzian space called Kinematic space and provide a principled approach for constructing a Gaussian-like distribution, which is compatible with gradient-based learning methods, to formulate a probabilistic word embedding framework. Contrary to, mapping lexically distributed representations to a single point vector in Euclidean space, we advocate for mapping entities to density-based representations, as it provides explicit control over the uncertainty in representations. We test our framework by embedding WordNet-Noun hierarchy, a large lexical database, our experiments report strong consistent improvements in Mean Rank and Mean Average Precision (MAP) values compared to probabilistic word embedding frameworks defined on Euclidean and hyperbolic spaces. Our framework reports a significant 83.140\% improvement in Mean Rank compared to Euclidean version and an improvement of 79.416\% over hyperbolic version. Our work serves as an evidence for the utility of novel geometrical spaces for learning hierarchical representations.

Separation of Aleatoric and Epistemic Uncertainty in Deterministic Deep Neural Networks

Denis Huseljic, Bernhard Sick, Marek Herde, Daniel Kottke

Auto-TLDR; AE-DNN: Modeling Uncertainty in Deep Neural Networks

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Despite the success of deep neural networks (DNN) in many applications, their ability to model uncertainty is still significantly limited. For example, in safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving, it is crucial to obtain a prediction that reflects different types of uncertainty to address life-threatening situations appropriately. In such cases, it is essential to be aware of the risk (i.e., aleatoric uncertainty) and the reliability (i.e., epistemic uncertainty) that comes with a prediction. We present AE-DNN, a model allowing the separation of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty while maintaining a proper generalization capability. AE-DNN is based on deterministic DNN, which can determine the respective uncertainty measures in a single forward pass. In analyses with synthetic and image data, we show that our method improves the modeling of epistemic uncertainty while providing an intuitively understandable separation of risk and reliability.

Explainable Feature Embedding Using Convolutional Neural Networks for Pathological Image Analysis

Kazuki Uehara, Masahiro Murakawa, Hirokazu Nosato, Hidenori Sakanashi

Auto-TLDR; Explainable Diagnosis Using Convolutional Neural Networks for Pathological Image Analysis

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

The development of computer-assisted diagnosis (CAD) algorithms for pathological image analysis constitutes an important research topic. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been used in several studies for the development of CAD algorithms. Such systems are required to be not only accurate but also explainable for their decisions, to ensure reliability. However, a limitation of using CNNs is that the basis of the decisions made by them are incomprehensible to humans. Thus, in this paper, we present an explainable diagnosis method, which comprises of two CNNs for different rolls. This method allows us to interpret the basis of the decisions made by CNN from two perspectives, namely statistics and visualization. For the statistical explanation, the method constructs a dictionary of representative pathological features. It performs diagnoses based on the occurrence and importance of learned features referred from its dictionary. To construct the dictionary, we introduce a vector quantization scheme for CNN. For the visual interpretation, the method provides images of learned features embedded in a high-dimensional feature space as an index of the dictionary by generating them using a conditional autoregressive model. The experimental results showed that the proposed network learned pathological features, which contributed to the diagnosis and yielded an area under the receiver operating curve (AUC) of approximately 0.93 for detecting atypical tissues in pathological images of the uterine cervix. Moreover, the proposed method demonstrated that it could provide visually interpretable images to show the rationales behind its decisions. Thus, the proposed method can serve as a valuable tool for pathological image analysis in terms of both its accuracy and explainability.

MFPP: Morphological Fragmental Perturbation Pyramid for Black-Box Model Explanations

Qing Yang, Xia Zhu, Jong-Kae Fwu, Yun Ye, Ganmei You, Yuan Zhu

Auto-TLDR; Morphological Fragmental Perturbation Pyramid for Explainable Deep Neural Network

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have recently been applied and used in many advanced and diverse tasks, such as medical diagnosis, automatic driving, etc. Due to the lack of transparency of the deep models, DNNs are often criticized for their prediction that cannot be explainable by human. In this paper, we propose a novel Morphological Fragmental Perturbation Pyramid (MFPP) method to solve the Explainable AI problem. In particular, we focus on the black-box scheme, which can identify the input area responsible for the output of the DNN without having to understand the internal architecture of the DNN. In the MFPP method, we divide the input image into multi-scale fragments and randomly mask out fragments as perturbation to generate a saliency map, which indicates the significance of each pixel for the prediction result of the black box model. Compared with the existing input sampling perturbation method, the pyramid structure fragment has proved to be more effective. It can better explore the morphological information of the input image to match its semantic information, and does not need any value inside the DNN. We qualitatively and quantitatively prove that MFPP meets and exceeds the performance of state-of-the-art (SOTA) black-box interpretation method on multiple DNN models and datasets.

GAN-Based Gaussian Mixture Model Responsibility Learning

Wanming Huang, Yi Da Xu, Shuai Jiang, Xuan Liang, Ian Oppermann

Auto-TLDR; Posterior Consistency Module for Gaussian Mixture Model

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Mixture Model (MM) is a probabilistic framework allows us to define dataset containing $K$ different modes. When each of the modes is associated with a Gaussian distribution, we refer to it as Gaussian MM or GMM. Given a data point $x$, a GMM may assume the existence of a random index $k \in \{1, \dots , K \}$ identifying which Gaussian the particular data is associated with. In a traditional GMM paradigm, it is straightforward to compute in closed-form, the conditional likelihood $p(x |k, \theta)$ as well as the responsibility probability $p(k|x, \theta)$ describing the distribution weights for each data. Computing the responsibility allows us to retrieve many important statistics of the overall dataset, including the weights of each of the modes/clusters. Modern large data-sets are often containing multiple unlabelled modes, such as paintings dataset may contain several styles; fashion images containing several unlabelled categories. In its raw representation, the Euclidean distances between the data (e.g., images) do not allow them to form mixtures naturally, nor it's feasible to compute responsibility distribution analytically, making GMM unable to apply. In this paper, we utilize the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) framework to achieve a plausible alternative method to compute these probabilities. The key insight is that we compute them at the data's latent space $z$ instead of $x$. However, this process of $z \rightarrow x$ is irreversible under GAN which renders the computation of responsibility $p(k|x, \theta)$ infeasible. Our paper proposed a novel method to solve it by using a so-called Posterior Consistency Module (PCM). PCM acts like a GAN, except its Generator $C_{\text{PCM}}$ does not output the data, but instead it outputs a distribution to approximate $p(k|x, \theta)$. The entire network is trained in an ``end-to-end'' fashion. Trough these techniques, it allows us to model the dataset of very complex structure using GMM and subsequently to discover interesting properties of an unsupervised dataset, including its segments, as well as generating new ``out-distribution" data by smooth linear interpolation across any combinations of the modes in a completely unsupervised manner.

Towards Explaining Adversarial Examples Phenomenon in Artificial Neural Networks

Ramin Barati, Reza Safabakhsh, Mohammad Rahmati

Auto-TLDR; Convolutional Neural Networks and Adversarial Training from the Perspective of convergence

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

In this paper, we study the adversarial examples existence and adversarial training from the standpoint of convergence and provide evidence that pointwise convergence in ANNs can explain these observations. The main contribution of our proposal is that it relates the objective of the evasion attacks and adversarial training with concepts already defined in learning theory. Also, we extend and unify some of the other proposals in the literature and provide alternative explanations on the observations made in those proposals. Through different experiments, we demonstrate that the framework is valuable in the study of the phenomenon and is applicable to real-world problems.

Beyond Cross-Entropy: Learning Highly Separable Feature Distributions for Robust and Accurate Classification

Arslan Ali, Andrea Migliorati, Tiziano Bianchi, Enrico Magli

Auto-TLDR; Gaussian class-conditional simplex loss for adversarial robust multiclass classifiers

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Deep learning has shown outstanding performance in several applications including image classification. However, deep classifiers are known to be highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks, in that a minor perturbation of the input can easily lead to an error. Providing robustness to adversarial attacks is a very challenging task especially in problems involving a large number of classes, as it typically comes at the expense of an accuracy decrease. In this work, we propose the Gaussian class-conditional simplex (GCCS) loss: a novel approach for training deep robust multiclass classifiers that provides adversarial robustness while at the same time achieving or even surpassing the classification accuracy of state-of-the-art methods. Differently from other frameworks, the proposed method learns a mapping of the input classes onto target distributions in a latent space such that the classes are linearly separable. Instead of maximizing the likelihood of target labels for individual samples, our objective function pushes the network to produce feature distributions yielding high inter-class separation. The mean values of the distributions are centered on the vertices of a simplex such that each class is at the same distance from every other class. We show that the regularization of the latent space based on our approach yields excellent classification accuracy and inherently provides robustness to multiple adversarial attacks, both targeted and untargeted, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches over challenging datasets.

Generative Latent Implicit Conditional Optimization When Learning from Small Sample

Idan Azuri, Daphna Weinshall

Auto-TLDR; GLICO: Generative Latent Implicit Conditional Optimization for Small Sample Learning

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

We revisit the long-standing problem of learning from small sample. The generation of new samples from a small training set of labeled points has attracted increased attention in recent years. In this paper, we propose a novel such method called GLICO (Generative Latent Implicit Conditional Optimization). GLICO learns a mapping from the training examples to a latent space and a generator that generates images from vectors in the latent space. Unlike most recent work, which rely on access to large amounts of unlabeled data, GLICO does not require access to any additional data other than the small set of labeled points. In fact, GLICO learns to synthesize completely new samples for every class using as little as 5 or 10 examples per class, with as few as 10 such classes and no data from unknown classes. GLICO is then used to augment the small training set while training a classifier on the small sample. To this end, our proposed method samples the learned latent space using spherical interpolation (slerp) and generates new examples using the trained generator. Empirical results show that the new sampled set is diverse enough, leading to improvement in image classification in comparison with the state of the art when trained on small samples obtained from CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and CUB-200.

Variational Deep Embedding Clustering by Augmented Mutual Information Maximization

Qiang Ji, Yanfeng Sun, Yongli Hu, Baocai Yin

Auto-TLDR; Clustering by Augmented Mutual Information maximization for Deep Embedding

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Clustering is a crucial but challenging task in pattern analysis and machine learning. Recent many deep clustering methods combining representation learning with cluster techniques emerged. These deep clustering methods mainly focus on the correlation among samples and ignore the relationship between samples and their representations. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end clustering framework, namely variational deep embedding clustering by augmented mutual information maximization (VCAMI). From the perspective of VAE, we prove that minimizing reconstruction loss is equivalent to maximizing the mutual information of the input and its latent representation. This provides a theoretical guarantee for us to directly maximize the mutual information instead of minimizing reconstruction loss. Therefore we proposed the augmented mutual information which highlights the uniqueness of the representations while discovering invariant information among similar samples. Extensive experiments on several challenging image datasets show that the VCAMI achieves good performance. we achieve state-of-the-art results for clustering on MNIST (99.5%) and CIFAR-10 (65.4%) to the best of our knowledge.

Adversarial Encoder-Multi-Task-Decoder for Multi-Stage Processes

Andre Mendes, Julian Togelius, Leandro Dos Santos Coelho

Auto-TLDR; Multi-Task Learning and Semi-Supervised Learning for Multi-Stage Processes

Abstract Similar

In multi-stage processes, decisions occur in an ordered sequence of stages. Early stages usually have more observations with general information (easier/cheaper to collect), while later stages have fewer observations but more specific data. This situation can be represented by a dual funnel structure, in which the sample size decreases from one stage to the other while the information increases. Training classifiers in this scenario is challenging since information in the early stages may not contain distinct patterns to learn (underfitting). In contrast, the small sample size in later stages can cause overfitting. We address both cases by introducing a framework that combines adversarial autoencoders (AAE), multi-task learning (MTL), and multi-label semi-supervised learning (MLSSL). We improve the decoder of the AAE with an MTL component so it can jointly reconstruct the original input and use feature nets to predict the features for the next stages. We also introduce a sequence constraint in the output of an MLSSL classifier to guarantee the sequential pattern in the predictions. Using real-world data from different domains (selection process, medical diagnosis), we show that our approach outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.

Verifying the Causes of Adversarial Examples

Honglin Li, Yifei Fan, Frieder Ganz, Tony Yezzi, Payam Barnaghi

Auto-TLDR; Exploring the Causes of Adversarial Examples in Neural Networks

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

The robustness of neural networks is challenged by adversarial examples that contain almost imperceptible perturbations to inputs which mislead a classifier to incorrect outputs in high confidence. Limited by the extreme difficulty in examining a high-dimensional image space thoroughly, research on explaining and justifying the causes of adversarial examples falls behind studies on attacks and defenses. In this paper, we present a collection of potential causes of adversarial examples and verify (or partially verify) them through carefully-designed controlled experiments. The major causes of adversarial examples include model linearity, one-sum constraint, and geometry of the categories. To control the effect of those causes, multiple techniques are applied such as $L_2$ normalization, replacement of loss functions, construction of reference datasets, and novel models using multi-layer perceptron probabilistic neural networks (MLP-PNN) and density estimation (DE). Our experiment results show that geometric factors tend to be more direct causes and statistical factors magnify the phenomenon, especially for assigning high prediction confidence. We hope this paper will inspire more studies to rigorously investigate the root causes of adversarial examples, which in turn provide useful guidance on designing more robust models.

Local Facial Attribute Transfer through Inpainting

Ricard Durall, Franz-Josef Pfreundt, Janis Keuper

Auto-TLDR; Attribute Transfer Inpainting Generative Adversarial Network

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

The term attribute transfer refers to the tasks of altering images in such a way, that the semantic interpretation of a given input image is shifted towards an intended direction, which is quantified by semantic attributes. Prominent example applications are photo realistic changes of facial features and expressions, like changing the hair color, adding a smile, enlarging the nose or altering the entire context of a scene, like transforming a summer landscape into a winter panorama. Recent advances in attribute transfer are mostly based on generative deep neural networks, using various techniques to manipulate images in the latent space of the generator. In this paper, we present a novel method for the common sub-task of local attribute transfers, where only parts of a face have to be altered in order to achieve semantic changes (e.g. removing a mustache). In contrast to previous methods, where such local changes have been implemented by generating new (global) images, we propose to formulate local attribute transfers as an inpainting problem. Removing and regenerating only parts of images, our Attribute Transfer Inpainting Generative Adversarial Network (ATI-GAN) is able to utilize local context information to focus on the attributes while keeping the background unmodified resulting in visually sound results.

Adversarially Training for Audio Classifiers

Raymel Alfonso Sallo, Mohammad Esmaeilpour, Patrick Cardinal

Auto-TLDR; Adversarially Training for Robust Neural Networks against Adversarial Attacks

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

In this paper, we investigate the potential effect of the adversarially training on the robustness of six advanced deep neural networks against a variety of targeted and non-targeted adversarial attacks. We firstly show that, the ResNet-56 model trained on the 2D representation of the discrete wavelet transform appended with the tonnetz chromagram outperforms other models in terms of recognition accuracy. Then we demonstrate the positive impact of adversarially training on this model as well as other deep architectures against six types of attack algorithms (white and black-box) with the cost of the reduced recognition accuracy and limited adversarial perturbation. We run our experiments on two benchmarking environmental sound datasets and show that without any imposed limitations on the budget allocations for the adversary, the fooling rate of the adversarially trained models can exceed 90%. In other words, adversarial attacks exist in any scales, but they might require higher adversarial perturbations compared to non-adversarially trained models.

DAG-Net: Double Attentive Graph Neural Network for Trajectory Forecasting

Alessio Monti, Alessia Bertugli, Simone Calderara, Rita Cucchiara

Auto-TLDR; Recurrent Generative Model for Multi-modal Human Motion Behaviour in Urban Environments

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Understanding human motion behaviour is a critical task for several possible applications like self-driving cars or social robots, and in general for all those settings where an autonomous agent has to navigate inside a human-centric environment. This is non-trivial because human motion is inherently multi-modal: given a history of human motion paths, there are many plausible ways by which people could move in the future. Additionally, people activities are often driven by goals, e.g. reaching particular locations or interacting with the environment. We address both the aforementioned aspects by proposing a new recurrent generative model that considers both single agents’ future goals and interactions between different agents. The model exploits a double attention-based graph neural network to collect information about the mutual influences among different agents and integrates it with data about agents’ possible future objectives. Our proposal is general enough to be applied in different scenarios: the model achieves state-of-the-art results in both urban environments and also in sports applications.

Color, Edge, and Pixel-Wise Explanation of Predictions Based onInterpretable Neural Network Model

Jay Hoon Jung, Youngmin Kwon

Auto-TLDR; Explainable Deep Neural Network with Edge Detecting Filters

Abstract Poster Similar

We design an interpretable network model by introducing explainable components into a Deep Neural Network (DNN). We substituted the first kernels of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and a ResNet-50 with the well-known edge detecting filters such as Sobel, Prewitt, and other filters. Each filters' relative importance scores are measured with a variant of Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) method proposed by Bach et al. Since the effects of the edge detecting filters are well understood, our model provides three different scores to explain individual predictions: the scores with respect to (1) colors, (2) edge filters, and (3) pixels of the image. Our method provides more tools to analyze the predictions by highlighting the location of important edges and colors in the images. Furthermore, the general features of a category can be shown in our scores as well as individual predictions. At the same time, the model does not degrade performances on MNIST, Fruit360 and ImageNet datasets.

Attack-Agnostic Adversarial Detection on Medical Data Using Explainable Machine Learning

Matthew Watson, Noura Al Moubayed

Auto-TLDR; Explainability-based Detection of Adversarial Samples on EHR and Chest X-Ray Data

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Explainable machine learning has become increasingly prevalent, especially in healthcare where explainable models are vital for ethical and trusted automated decision making. Work on the susceptibility of deep learning models to adversarial attacks has shown the ease of designing samples to mislead a model into making incorrect predictions. In this work, we propose an explainability-based method for the accurate detection of adversarial samples on two datasets with different complexity and properties: Electronic Health Record (EHR) and chest X-ray (CXR) data. On the MIMIC-III and Henan-Renmin EHR datasets, we report a detection accuracy of 77% against the Longitudinal Adversarial Attack. On the MIMIC-CXR dataset, we achieve an accuracy of 88%; significantly improving on the state of the art of adversarial detection in both datasets by over 10% in all settings. We propose an anomaly detection based method using explainability techniques to detect adversarial samples which is able to generalise to different attack methods without a need for retraining.

Discriminative Multi-Level Reconstruction under Compact Latent Space for One-Class Novelty Detection

Jaewoo Park, Yoon Gyo Jung, Andrew Teoh

Auto-TLDR; Discriminative Compact AE for One-Class novelty detection and Adversarial Example Detection

Abstract Slides Similar

In one-class novelty detection, a model learns solely on the in-class data to single out out-class instances. Autoencoder (AE) variants aim to compactly model the in-class data to reconstruct it exclusively, thus differentiating the in-class from out-class by the reconstruction error. However, compact modeling in an improper way might collapse the latent representations of the in-class data and thus their reconstruction, which would lead to performance deterioration. Moreover, to properly measure the reconstruction error of high-dimensional data, a metric is required that captures high-level semantics of the data. To this end, we propose Discriminative Compact AE (DCAE) that learns both compact and collapse-free latent representations of the in-class data, thereby reconstructing them both finely and exclusively. In DCAE, (a) we force a compact latent space to bijectively represent the in-class data by reconstructing them through internal discriminative layers of generative adversarial nets. (b) Based on the deep encoder's vulnerability to open set risk, out-class instances are encoded into the same compact latent space and reconstructed poorly without sacrificing the quality of in-class data reconstruction. (c) In inference, the reconstruction error is measured by a novel metric that computes the dissimilarity between a query and its reconstruction based on the class semantics captured by the internal discriminator. Extensive experiments on public image datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed model on both novelty and adversarial example detection, delivering state-of-the-art performance.

Pretraining Image Encoders without Reconstruction Via Feature Prediction Loss

Gustav Grund Pihlgren, Fredrik Sandin, Marcus Liwicki

Auto-TLDR; Feature Prediction Loss for Autoencoder-based Pretraining of Image Encoders

Abstract Similar

This work investigates three methods for calculating loss for autoencoder-based pretraining of image encoders: The commonly used reconstruction loss, the more recently introduced deep perceptual similarity loss, and a feature prediction loss proposed here; the latter turning out to be the most efficient choice. Standard auto-encoder pretraining for deep learning tasks is done by comparing the input image and the reconstructed image. Recent work shows that predictions based on embeddings generated by image autoencoders can be improved by training with perceptual loss, i.e., by adding a loss network after the decoding step. So far the autoencoders trained with loss networks implemented an explicit comparison of the original and reconstructed images using the loss network. However, given such a loss network we show that there is no need for the time-consuming task of decoding the entire image. Instead, we propose to decode the features of the loss network, hence the name ``feature prediction loss''. To evaluate this method we perform experiments on three standard publicly available datasets (LunarLander-v2, STL-10, and SVHN) and compare six different procedures for training image encoders (pixel-wise, perceptual similarity, and feature prediction losses; combined with two variations of image and feature encoding/decoding). The embedding-based prediction results show that encoders trained with feature prediction loss is as good or better than those trained with the other two losses. Additionally, the encoder is significantly faster to train using feature prediction loss in comparison to the other losses. The method implementation used in this work is available online: https://github.com/guspih/Perceptual-Autoencoders

Variational Capsule Encoder

Harish Raviprakash, Syed Anwar, Ulas Bagci

Auto-TLDR; Bayesian Capsule Networks for Representation Learning in latent space

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

We propose a novel capsule network based variational encoder architecture, called Bayesian capsules (B-Caps), to modulate the mean and standard deviation of the sampling distribution in the latent space. We hypothesize that this approach can learn a better representation of features in the latent space than traditional approaches. Our hypothesis was tested by using the learned latent variables for image reconstruction task, where for MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets, different classes were separated successfully in the latent space using our proposed model. Our experimental results have shown improved reconstruction and classification performances for both datasets adding credence to our hypothesis. We also showed that by increasing the latent space dimension, the proposed B-Caps was able to learn a better representation when compared to the traditional variational auto-encoders (VAE). Hence our results indicate the strength of capsule networks in representation learning which has never been examined under the VAE settings before.

On-Manifold Adversarial Data Augmentation Improves Uncertainty Calibration

Kanil Patel, William Beluch, Dan Zhang, Michael Pfeiffer, Bin Yang

Auto-TLDR; On-Manifold Adversarial Data Augmentation for Uncertainty Estimation

Abstract Slides Similar

Uncertainty estimates help to identify ambiguous, novel, or anomalous inputs, but the reliable quantification of uncertainty has proven to be challenging for modern deep networks. To improve uncertainty estimation, we propose On-Manifold Adversarial Data Augmentation or OMADA, which specifically attempts to generate challenging examples by following an on-manifold adversarial attack path in the latent space of an autoencoder that closely approximates the decision boundaries between classes. On a variety of datasets and for multiple network architectures, OMADA consistently yields more accurate and better calibrated classifiers than baseline models, and outperforms competing approaches such as Mixup, as well as achieving similar performance to (at times better than) post-processing calibration methods such as temperature scaling. Variants of OMADA can employ different sampling schemes for ambiguous on-manifold examples based on the entropy of their estimated soft labels, which exhibit specific strengths for generalization, calibration of predicted uncertainty, or detection of out-of-distribution inputs.

Learning Interpretable Representation for 3D Point Clouds

Feng-Guang Su, Ci-Siang Lin, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang

Auto-TLDR; Disentangling Body-type and Pose Information from 3D Point Clouds Using Adversarial Learning

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Point clouds have emerged as a popular representation of 3D visual data. With a set of unordered 3D points, one typically needs to transform them into latent representation before further classification and segmentation tasks. However, one cannot easily interpret such encoded latent representation. To address this issue, we propose a unique deep learning framework for disentangling body-type and pose information from 3D point clouds. Extending from autoenoder, we advance adversarial learning a selected feature type, while classification and data recovery can be additionally observed. Our experiments confirm that our model can be successfully applied to perform a wide range of 3D applications like shape synthesis, action translation, shape/action interpolation, and synchronization.

Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Raw Eye Tracking Data Segmentation, Generation, and Reconstruction

Wolfgang Fuhl, Yao Rong, Enkelejda Kasneci

Auto-TLDR; Semantic Segmentation of Eye Tracking Data with Fully Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

In this paper, we use fully convolutional neural networks for the semantic segmentation of eye tracking data. We also use these networks for reconstruction, and in conjunction with a variational auto-encoder to generate eye movement data. The first improvement of our approach is that no input window is necessary, due to the use of fully convolutional networks and therefore any input size can be processed directly. The second improvement is that the used and generated data is raw eye tracking data (position X, Y and time) without preprocessing. This is achieved by pre-initializing the filters in the first layer and by building the input tensor along the z axis. We evaluated our approach on three publicly available datasets and compare the results to the state of the art.

An Invariance-Guided Stability Criterion for Time Series Clustering Validation

Florent Forest, Alex Mourer, Mustapha Lebbah, Hanane Azzag, Jérôme Lacaille

Auto-TLDR; An invariance-guided method for clustering model selection in time series data

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Time series clustering is a challenging task due to the specificities of this type of data. Temporal correlation and invariance to transformations such as shifting, warping or noise prevent the use of standard data mining methods. Time series clustering has been mostly studied under the angle of finding efficient algorithms and distance metrics adapted to the specific nature of time series data. Much less attention has been devoted to the general problem of model selection. Clustering stability has emerged as a universal and model-agnostic principle for clustering model selection. This principle can be stated as follows: an algorithm should find a structure in the data that is resilient to perturbation by sampling or noise. We propose to apply stability analysis to time series by leveraging prior knowledge on the nature and invariances of the data. These invariances determine the perturbation process used to assess stability. Based on a recently introduced criterion combining between-cluster and within-cluster stability, we propose an invariance-guided method for model selection, applicable to a wide range of clustering algorithms. Experiments conducted on artificial and benchmark data sets demonstrate the ability of our criterion to discover structure and select the correct number of clusters, whenever data invariances are known beforehand.

Local Clustering with Mean Teacher for Semi-Supervised Learning

Zexi Chen, Benjamin Dutton, Bharathkumar Ramachandra, Tianfu Wu, Ranga Raju Vatsavai

Auto-TLDR; Local Clustering for Semi-supervised Learning

Abstract Slides Similar

The Mean Teacher (MT) model of Tarvainen and Valpola has shown favorable performance on several semi-supervised benchmark datasets. MT maintains a teacher model's weights as the exponential moving average of a student model's weights and minimizes the divergence between their probability predictions under diverse perturbations of the inputs. However, MT is known to suffer from confirmation bias, that is, reinforcing incorrect teacher model predictions. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective method called Local Clustering (LC) to mitigate the effect of confirmation bias. In MT, each data point is considered independent of other points during training; however, data points are likely to be close to each other in feature space if they share similar features. Motivated by this, we cluster data points locally by minimizing the pairwise distance between neighboring data points in feature space. Combined with a standard classification cross-entropy objective on labeled data points, the misclassified unlabeled data points are pulled towards high-density regions of their correct class with the help of their neighbors, thus improving model performance. We demonstrate on semi-supervised benchmark datasets SVHN and CIFAR-10 that adding our LC loss to MT yields significant improvements compared to MT and performance comparable to the state of the art in semi-supervised learning.

Explain2Attack: Text Adversarial Attacks via Cross-Domain Interpretability

Mahmoud Hossam, Le Trung, He Zhao, Dinh Phung

Auto-TLDR; Transfer2Attack: A Black-box Adversarial Attack on Text Classification

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Training robust deep learning models is a critical challenge for downstream tasks. Research has shown that common down-stream models can be easily fooled with adversarial inputs that look like the training data, but slightly perturbed, in a way imperceptible to humans. Understanding the behavior of natural language models under these attacks is crucial to better defend these models against such attacks. In the black-box attack setting, where no access to model parameters is available, the attacker can only query the output information from the targeted model to craft a successful attack. Current black-box state-of-the-art models are costly in both computational complexity and number of queries needed to craft successful adversarial examples. For real world scenarios, the number of queries is critical, where less queries are desired to avoid suspicion towards an attacking agent. In this paper, we propose Transfer2Attack, a black-box adversarial attack on text classification task, that employs cross-domain interpretability to reduce target model queries during attack. We show that our framework either achieves or out-performs attack rates of the state-of-the-art models, yet with lower queries cost and higher efficiency.

Combining GANs and AutoEncoders for Efficient Anomaly Detection

Fabio Carrara, Giuseppe Amato, Luca Brombin, Fabrizio Falchi, Claudio Gennaro

Auto-TLDR; CBIGAN: Anomaly Detection in Images with Consistency Constrained BiGAN

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

In this work, we propose CBiGAN --- a novel method for anomaly detection in images, where a consistency constraint is introduced as a regularization term in both the encoder and decoder of a BiGAN. Our model exhibits fairly good modeling power and reconstruction consistency capability. We evaluate the proposed method on MVTec AD --- a real-world benchmark for unsupervised anomaly detection on high-resolution images --- and compare against standard baselines and state-of-the-art approaches. Experiments show that the proposed method improves the performance of BiGAN formulations by a large margin and performs comparably to expensive state-of-the-art iterative methods while reducing the computational cost. We also observe that our model is particularly effective in texture-type anomaly detection, as it sets a new state of the art in this category. The code will be publicly released.

3CS Algorithm for Efficient Gaussian Process Model Retrieval

Fabian Berns, Kjeld Schmidt, Ingolf Bracht, Christian Beecks

Auto-TLDR; Efficient retrieval of Gaussian Process Models for large-scale data using divide-&-conquer-based approach

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Gaussian Process Models (GPMs) have been applied for various pattern recognition tasks due to their analytical tractability, ability to quantify uncertainty for their own results as well as to subsume prominent other regression techniques. Despite these promising prospects their super-quadratic computation time complexity for model selection and evaluation impedes its broader application for more than a few thousand data points. Although there have been many proposals towards Gaussian Processes for large-scale data, those only offer a linearly scaling improvement to a cubical scaling problem. In particular, solutions like the Nystrom approximation or sparse matrices are only taking fractions of the given data into account and subsequently lead to inaccurate models. In this paper, we thus propose a divide-&-conquer-based approach, that allows to efficiently retrieve GPMs for large-scale data. The resulting model is composed of independent pattern representations for non-overlapping segments of the given data and consequently reduces computation time significantly. Our performance analysis indicates that our proposal is able to outperform state-of-the-art algorithms for GPM retrieval with respect to the qualities of efficiency and accuracy.

Contextual Classification Using Self-Supervised Auxiliary Models for Deep Neural Networks

Sebastian Palacio, Philipp Engler, Jörn Hees, Andreas Dengel

Auto-TLDR; Self-Supervised Autogenous Learning for Deep Neural Networks

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Classification problems solved with deep neural networks (DNNs) typically rely on a closed world paradigm, and optimize over a single objective (e.g., minimization of the cross- entropy loss). This setup dismisses all kinds of supporting signals that can be used to reinforce the existence or absence of particular patterns. The increasing need for models that are interpretable by design makes the inclusion of said contextual signals a crucial necessity. To this end, we introduce the notion of Self-Supervised Autogenous Learning (SSAL). A SSAL objective is realized through one or more additional targets that are derived from the original supervised classification task, following architectural principles found in multi-task learning. SSAL branches impose low-level priors into the optimization process (e.g., grouping). The ability of using SSAL branches during inference, allow models to converge faster, focusing on a richer set of class-relevant features. We equip state-of-the-art DNNs with SSAL objectives and report consistent improvements for all of them on CIFAR100 and Imagenet. We show that SSAL models outperform similar state-of-the-art methods focused on contextual loss functions, auxiliary branches and hierarchical priors.

Semantics-Guided Representation Learning with Applications to Visual Synthesis

Jia-Wei Yan, Ci-Siang Lin, Fu-En Yang, Yu-Jhe Li, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang

Auto-TLDR; Learning Interpretable and Interpolatable Latent Representations for Visual Synthesis

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Learning interpretable and interpolatable latent representations has been an emerging research direction, allowing researchers to understand and utilize the derived latent space for further applications such as visual synthesis or recognition. While most existing approaches derive an interpolatable latent space and induces smooth transition in image appearance, it is still not clear how to observe desirable representations which would contain semantic information of interest. In this paper, we aim to learn meaningful representations and simultaneously perform semantic-oriented and visually-smooth interpolation. To this end, we propose an angular triplet-neighbor loss (ATNL) that enables learning a latent representation whose distribution matches the semantic information of interest. With the latent space guided by ATNL, we further utilize spherical semantic interpolation for generating semantic warping of images, allowing synthesis of desirable visual data. Experiments on MNIST and CMU Multi-PIE datasets qualitatively and quantitatively verify the effectiveness of our method.

Learning Stable Deep Predictive Coding Networks with Weight Norm Supervision

Guo Ruohao

Auto-TLDR; Stability of Predictive Coding Network with Weight Norm Supervision

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Predictive Coding Network (PCN) is an important neural network inspired by visual processing models in neuroscience. It combines the feedforward and feedback processing and has the architecture of recurrent neural networks (RNNs). This type of network is usually trained with backpropagation through time (BPTT). With infinite recurrent steps, PCN is a dynamic system. However, as one of the most important properties, stability is rarely studied in this type of network. Inspired by reservoir computing, we investigate the stability of hierarchical RNNs from the perspective of dynamic systems, and propose a sufficient condition for their echo state property (ESP). Our study shows the global stability is determined by stability of the local layers and the feedback between neighboring layers. Based on it, we further propose Weight Norm Supervision, a new algorithm that controls the stability of PCN dynamics by imposing different weight norm constraints on different parts of the network. We compare our approach with other training methods in terms of stability and prediction capability. The experiments show that our algorithm learns stable PCNs with a reliable prediction precision in the most effective and controllable way.

Feature-Aware Unsupervised Learning with Joint Variational Attention and Automatic Clustering

Wang Ru, Lin Li, Peipei Wang, Liu Peiyu

Auto-TLDR; Deep Variational Attention Encoder-Decoder for Clustering

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Deep clustering aims to cluster unlabeled real-world samples by mining deep feature representation. Most of existing methods remain challenging when handling high-dimensional data and simultaneously exploring the complementarity of deep feature representation and clustering. In this paper, we propose a novel Deep Variational Attention Encoder-decoder for Clustering (DVAEC). Our DVAEC improves the representation learning ability by fusing variational attention. Specifically, we design a feature-aware automatic clustering module to mitigate the unreliability of similarity calculation and guide network learning. Besides, to further boost the performance of deep clustering from a global perspective, we define a joint optimization objective to promote feature representation learning and automatic clustering synergistically. Extensive experimental results show the promising performance achieved by our DVAEC on six datasets comparing with several popular baseline clustering methods.

Dimensionality Reduction for Data Visualization and Linear Classification, and the Trade-Off between Robustness and Classification Accuracy

Martin Becker, Jens Lippel, Thomas Zielke

Auto-TLDR; Robustness Assessment of Deep Autoencoder for Data Visualization using Scatter Plots

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

This paper has three intertwined goals. The first is to introduce a new similarity measure for scatter plots. It uses Delaunay triangulations to compare two scatter plots regarding their relative positioning of clusters. The second is to apply this measure for the robustness assessment of a recent deep neural network (DNN) approach to dimensionality reduction (DR) for data visualization. It uses a nonlinear generalization of Fisher's linear discriminant analysis (LDA) as the encoder network of a deep autoencoder (DAE). The DAE's decoder network acts as a regularizer. The third goal is to look at different variants of the DNN: ones that promise robustness and ones that promise high classification accuracies. This is to study the trade-off between these two objectives -- our results support the recent claim that robustness may be at odds with accuracy; however, results that are balanced regarding both objectives are achievable. We see a restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) pretraining and the DAE based regularization as important building blocks for achieving balanced results. As a means of assessing the robustness of DR methods, we propose a measure that is based on our similarity measure for scatter plots. The robustness measure comes with a superimposition view of Delaunay triangulations, which allows a fast comparison of results from multiple DR methods.

Zoom-CAM: Generating Fine-Grained Pixel Annotations from Image Labels

Xiangwei Shi, Seyran Khademi, Yunqiang Li, Jan Van Gemert

Auto-TLDR; Zoom-CAM for Weakly Supervised Object Localization and Segmentation

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Current weakly supervised object localization and segmentation rely on class-discriminative visualization techniques for convolutional neural networks (CNN) to generate pseudo-labels for pixel-level training. However, visualization methods, including CAM and Grad-CAM, focus on most discriminative object parts summarized in the last convolutional layer, missing the complete pixel mapping in intermediate layers. We propose Zoom-CAM: going beyond the last lowest resolution layer by integrating the importance maps over all activations in intermediate layers. Zoom-CAM captures fine-grained small-scale objects for various discriminative class instances, which are commonly missed by the baseline visualization methods. We focus on generating pixel-level pseudo-labels from class labels. The quality of our pseudo-labels evaluated on the ImageNet localization task exhibits more than 2.8% improvement on top-1 error. For weakly supervised semantic segmentation our generated pseudo-labels improve a state of the art model by 1.1%.