Hierarchical Classification with Confidence Using Generalized Logits

James W. Davis, Tong Liang, James Enouen, Roman Ilin

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Auto-TLDR; Generalized Logits for Hierarchical Classification

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We present a bottom-up approach to hierarchical classification based on posteriors conditioned with logits. Beginning with the output logits for a set of terminal labels from a base classifier, an initial hypothesis is repeatedly generalized (softened) to a weaker label until a particular confidence measure is achieved. As conditioning the probabilistic model with the full set of terminal logits quickly becomes intractable for large label sets, we propose an alternative approach employing "generalized logits" spanning relevant hypotheses within the label hierarchy. Experimental results are compared with related methods on multiple datasets and base classifiers. The proposed approach provides an efficient and effective hierarchical classification framework with monotonic, non-decreasing inference behavior.

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Making Every Label Count: Handling Semantic Imprecision by Integrating Domain Knowledge

Clemens-Alexander Brust, Björn Barz, Joachim Denzler

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Auto-TLDR; Class Hierarchies for Imprecise Label Learning and Annotation eXtrapolation

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Noisy data, crawled from the web or supplied by volunteers such as Mechanical Turkers or citizen scientists, is considered an alternative to professionally labeled data. There has been research focused on mitigating the effects of label noise. It is typically modeled as inaccuracy, where the correct label is replaced by an incorrect label from the same set. We consider an additional dimension of label noise: imprecision. For example, a non-breeding snow bunting is labeled as a bird. This label is correct, but not as precise as the task requires. Standard softmax classifiers cannot learn from such a weak label because they consider all classes mutually exclusive, which non-breeding snow bunting and bird are not. We propose CHILLAX (Class Hierarchies for Imprecise Label Learning and Annotation eXtrapolation), a method based on hierarchical classification, to fully utilize labels of any precision. Experiments on noisy variants of NABirds and ILSVRC2012 show that our method outperforms strong baselines by as much as 16.4 percentage points, and the current state of the art by up to 3.9 percentage points.

Verifying the Causes of Adversarial Examples

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

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

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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.

Decision Snippet Features

Pascal Welke, Fouad Alkhoury, Christian Bauckhage, Stefan Wrobel

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Auto-TLDR; Decision Snippet Features for Interpretability

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Decision trees excel at interpretability of their prediction results. To achieve required prediction accuracies, however, often large ensembles of decision trees -- random forests -- are considered, reducing interpretability due to large size. Additionally, their size slows down inference on modern hardware and restricts their applicability in low-memory embedded devices. We introduce \emph{Decision Snippet Features}, which are obtained from small subtrees that appear frequently in trained random forests. We subsequently show that linear models on top of these features achieve comparable and sometimes even better predictive performance than the original random forest, while reducing the model size by up to two orders of magnitude.

On the Minimal Recognizable Image Patch

Mark Fonaryov, Michael Lindenbaum

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Auto-TLDR; MIRC: A Deep Neural Network for Minimal Recognition on Partially Occluded Images

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In contrast to human vision, common recognition algorithms often fail on partially occluded images. We propose characterizing, empirically, the algorithmic limits by finding a minimal recognizable patch (MRP) that is by itself sufficient to recognize the image. A specialized deep network allows us to find the most informative patches of a given size, and serves as an experimental tool. A human vision study recently characterized related (but different) minimally recognizable configurations (MIRCs) [1], for which we specify computational analogues (denoted cMIRCs). The drop in human decision accuracy associated with size reduction of these MIRCs is substantial and sharp. Interestingly, such sharp reductions were also found for the computational versions we specified.

Quasibinary Classifier for Images with Zero and Multiple Labels

Liao Shuai, Efstratios Gavves, Changyong Oh, Cees Snoek

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Auto-TLDR; Quasibinary Classifiers for Zero-label and Multi-label Classification

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The softmax and binary classifier are commonly preferred for image classification applications. However, as softmax is specifically designed for categorical classification, it assumes each image has just one class label. This limits its applicability for problems where the number of labels does not equal one, most notably zero- and multi-label problems. In these challenging settings, binary classifiers are, in theory, better suited. However, as they ignore the correlation between classes, they are not as accurate and scalable in practice. In this paper, we start from the observation that the only difference between binary and softmax classifiers is their normalization function. Specifically, while the binary classifier self-normalizes its score, the softmax classifier combines the scores from all classes before normalization. On the basis of this observation we introduce a normalization function that is learnable, constant, and shared between classes and data points. By doing so, we arrive at a new type of binary classifier that we coin quasibinary classifier. We show in a variety of image classification settings, and on several datasets, that quasibinary classifiers are considerably better in classification settings where regular binary and softmax classifiers suffer, including zero-label and multi-label classification. What is more, we show that quasibinary classifiers yield well-calibrated probabilities allowing for direct and reliable comparisons, not only between classes but also between data points.

Separation of Aleatoric and Epistemic Uncertainty in Deterministic Deep Neural Networks

Denis Huseljic, Bernhard Sick, Marek Herde, Daniel Kottke

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

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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.

P-DIFF: Learning Classifier with Noisy Labels Based on Probability Difference Distributions

Wei Hu, Qihao Zhao, Yangyu Huang, Fan Zhang

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Auto-TLDR; P-DIFF: A Simple and Effective Training Paradigm for Deep Neural Network Classifier with Noisy Labels

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Learning deep neural network (DNN) classifier with noisy labels is a challenging task because the DNN can easily over- fit on these noisy labels due to its high capability. In this paper, we present a very simple but effective training paradigm called P-DIFF, which can train DNN classifiers but obviously alleviate the adverse impact of noisy labels. Our proposed probability difference distribution implicitly reflects the probability of a training sample to be clean, then this probability is employed to re-weight the corresponding sample during the training process. P-DIFF can also achieve good performance even without prior- knowledge on the noise rate of training samples. Experiments on benchmark datasets also demonstrate that P-DIFF is superior to the state-of-the-art sample selection methods.

Learning Natural Thresholds for Image Ranking

Somayeh Keshavarz, Quang Nhat Tran, Richard Souvenir

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Auto-TLDR; Image Representation Learning and Label Discretization for Natural Image Ranking

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For image ranking tasks with naturally continuous output, such as age and scenicness estimation, it is common to discretize the label range and apply methods from (ordered) classification analysis. In this paper, we propose a data-driven approach for simultaneous representation learning and label discretization. Compared to arbitrarily selecting thresholds, we seek to learn thresholds and image representations by minimizing a novel loss function in an end-to-end model. We demonstrate our combined approach on a variety of image ranking tasks and demonstrate that it outperforms task-specific methods. Additionally, our learned partitioning scheme can be transferred to improve methods that rely on discretization.

Probability Guided Maxout

Claudio Ferrari, Stefano Berretti, Alberto Del Bimbo

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Auto-TLDR; Probability Guided Maxout for CNN Training

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In this paper, we propose an original CNN training strategy that brings together ideas from both dropout-like regularization methods and solutions that learn discriminative features. We propose a dropping criterion that, differently from dropout and its variants, is deterministic rather than random. It grounds on the empirical evidence that feature descriptors with larger $L2$-norm and highly-active nodes are strongly correlated to confident class predictions. Thus, our criterion guides towards dropping a percentage of the most active nodes of the descriptors, proportionally to the estimated class probability. We simultaneously train a per-sample scaling factor to balance the expected output across training and inference. This further allows us to keep high the descriptor's L2-norm, which we show enforces confident predictions. The combination of these two strategies resulted in our ``Probability Guided Maxout'' solution that acts as a training regularizer. We prove the above behaviors by reporting extensive image classification results on the CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and Caltech256 datasets.

Iterative Label Improvement: Robust Training by Confidence Based Filtering and Dataset Partitioning

Christian Haase-Schütz, Rainer Stal, Heinz Hertlein, Bernhard Sick

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Auto-TLDR; Meta Training and Labelling for Unlabelled Data

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State-of-the-art, high capacity deep neural networks not only require large amounts of labelled training data, they are also highly susceptible to labelling errors in this data, typically resulting in large efforts and costs and therefore limiting the applicability of deep learning. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel meta training and labelling scheme that is able to use inexpensive unlabelled data by taking advantage of the generalization power of deep neural networks. We show experimentally that by solely relying on one network architecture and our proposed scheme of combining self-training with pseudolabels, both label quality and resulting model accuracy, can be improved significantly. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results, while being architecture agnostic and therefore broadly applicable. Compared to other methods dealing with erroneous labels, our approach does neither require another network to be trained, nor does it necessarily need an additional, highly accurate reference label set. Instead of removing samples from a labelled set, our technique uses additional sensor data without the need for manual labelling. Furthermore, our approach can be used for semi-supervised learning.

Creating Classifier Ensembles through Meta-Heuristic Algorithms for Aerial Scene Classification

Álvaro Roberto Ferreira Jr., Gustavo Gustavo Henrique De Rosa, Joao Paulo Papa, Gustavo Carneiro, Fabio Augusto Faria

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Auto-TLDR; Univariate Marginal Distribution Algorithm for Aerial Scene Classification Using Meta-Heuristic Optimization

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Aerial scene classification is a challenging task to be solved in the remote sensing area, whereas deep learning approaches, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), are being widely employed to overcome such a problem. Nevertheless, it is not straightforward to find single CNN models that can solve all aerial scene classification tasks, allowing the nurturing of a better alternative, which is to fuse CNN-based classifiers into an ensemble. However, an appropriate choice of the classifiers that will belong to the ensemble is a critical factor, as it is unfeasible to employ all the possible classifiers in the literature. Therefore, this work proposes a novel framework based on meta-heuristic optimization for creating optimized-ensembles in the context of aerial scene classification. The experimental results were performed across nine meta-heuristic algorithms and three aerial scene literature datasets, being compared in terms of effectiveness (accuracy), efficiency (execution time), and behavioral performance in different scenarios. Finally, one can observe that the Univariate Marginal Distribution Algorithm (UMDA) overcame popular literature meta-heuristic algorithms, such as Genetic Programming and Particle Swarm Optimization considering the adopted criteria in the performed experiments.

Knowledge Distillation with a Precise Teacher and Prediction with Abstention

Xu Yi, Jian Pu, Hui Zhao

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Auto-TLDR; Knowledge Distillation using Deep gambler loss and selective classification framework

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Knowledge distillation, which aims to train model under the supervision from another large model (teacher model) to the original model (student model), has achieved remarkable results in supervised learning. However, there are two major problems with existing knowledge distillation methods. One is the teacher's supervision is sometimes misleading, and the other is the student's prediction is not accurate enough. To address the first issue, instead of learning a combination of both teachers and ground truth, we apply knowledge adjustment to correct teachers' supervision using ground truth. For the second problem, we use the selective classification framework to train the student model. In particular, the deep gambler loss is adopted to predict with reservation by explicitly introducing the $(m+1)$-th class. We consider two settings of knowledge distillation: (1) distillation across different network structures ({\it AlexNet, ResNet}), and (2) distillation across networks with different depths ({\it ResNet18, ResNet50}) to evaluate the effectiveness of our method. The experimental results on benchmark datasets (i.e., {\it Fashion-MNIST, SVHN, CIFAR10, CIFAR100}) are reported with higher prediction accuracies and lower coverage errors.

Exploiting Knowledge Embedded Soft Labels for Image Recognition

Lixian Yuan, Riquan Chen, Hefeng Wu, Tianshui Chen, Wentao Wang, Pei Chen

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Auto-TLDR; A Soft Label Vector for Image Recognition

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Objects from correlated classes usually share highly similar appearances while objects from uncorrelated classes are very different. Most of current image recognition works treat each class independently, which ignores these class correlations and inevitably leads to sub-optimal performance in many cases. Fortunately, object classes inherently form a hierarchy with different levels of abstraction and this hierarchy encodes rich correlations among different classes. In this work, we utilize a soft label vector that encodes the prior knowledge of class correlations as extra regularization to train the image classifiers. Specifically, for each class, instead of simply using a one-hot vector, we assign a high value to its correlated classes and assign small values to those uncorrelated ones, thus generating knowledge embedded soft labels. We conduct experiments on both general and fine-grained image recognition benchmarks and demonstrate its superiority compared with existing methods.

Overcoming Noisy and Irrelevant Data in Federated Learning

Tiffany Tuor, Shiqiang Wang, Bong Jun Ko, Changchang Liu, Kin K Leung

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Auto-TLDR; Distributedly Selecting Relevant Data for Federated Learning

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Many image and vision applications require a large amount of data for model training. Collecting all such data at a central location can be challenging due to data privacy and communication bandwidth restrictions. Federated learning is an effective way of training a machine learning model in a distributed manner from local data collected by client devices, which does not require exchanging the raw data among clients. A challenge is that among the large variety of data collected at each client, it is likely that only a subset is relevant for a learning task while the rest of data has a negative impact on model training. Therefore, before starting the learning process, it is important to select the subset of data that is relevant to the given federated learning task. In this paper, we propose a method for distributedly selecting relevant data, where we use a benchmark model trained on a small benchmark dataset that is task-specific, to evaluate the relevance of individual data samples at each client and select the data with sufficiently high relevance. Then, each client only uses the selected subset of its data in the federated learning process. The effectiveness of our proposed approach is evaluated on multiple real-world image datasets in a simulated system with a large number of clients, showing up to 25% improvement in model accuracy compared to training with all data.

How to Define a Rejection Class Based on Model Learning?

Sarah Laroui, Xavier Descombes, Aurelia Vernay, Florent Villiers, Francois Villalba, Eric Debreuve

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Auto-TLDR; An innovative learning strategy for supervised classification that is able, by design, to reject a sample as not belonging to any of the known classes

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In supervised classification, the learning process typically trains a classifier to optimize the accuracy of classifying data into the classes that appear in the learning set, and only them. While this framework fits many use cases, there are situations where the learning process is knowingly performed using a learning set that only represents the data that have been observed so far among a virtually unconstrained variety of possible samples. It is then crucial to define a classifier which has the ability to reject a sample, i.e., to classify it into a rejection class that has not been yet defined. Although obvious solutions can add this ability a posteriori to a classifier that has been learned classically, a better approach seems to directly account for this requirement in the classifier design. In this paper, we propose an innovative learning strategy for supervised classification that is able, by design, to reject a sample as not belonging to any of the known classes. For that, we rely on modeling each class as the combination of a probability density function (PDF) and a threshold that is computed with respect to the other classes. Several alternatives are proposed and compared in this framework. A comparison with straightforward approaches is also provided.

Towards Robust Learning with Different Label Noise Distributions

Diego Ortego, Eric Arazo, Paul Albert, Noel E O'Connor, Kevin Mcguinness

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Auto-TLDR; Distribution Robust Pseudo-Labeling with Semi-supervised Learning

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Noisy labels are an unavoidable consequence of labeling processes and detecting them is an important step towards preventing performance degradations in Convolutional Neural Networks. Discarding noisy labels avoids a harmful memorization, while the associated image content can still be exploited in a semi-supervised learning (SSL) setup. Clean samples are usually identified using the small loss trick, i.e. they exhibit a low loss. However, we show that different noise distributions make the application of this trick less straightforward and propose to continuously relabel all images to reveal a discriminative loss against multiple distributions. SSL is then applied twice, once to improve the clean-noisy detection and again for training the final model. We design an experimental setup based on ImageNet32/64 for better understanding the consequences of representation learning with differing label noise distributions and find that non-uniform out-of-distribution noise better resembles real-world noise and that in most cases intermediate features are not affected by label noise corruption. Experiments in CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet32/64 and WebVision (real-world noise) demonstrate that the proposed label noise Distribution Robust Pseudo-Labeling (DRPL) approach gives substantial improvements over recent state-of-the-art. Code will be made available.

Neuron-Based Network Pruning Based on Majority Voting

Ali Alqahtani, Xianghua Xie, Ehab Essa, Mark W. Jones

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Auto-TLDR; Large-Scale Neural Network Pruning using Majority Voting

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The achievement of neural networks in a variety of applications is accompanied by a dramatic increase in computational costs and memory requirements. In this paper, we propose an efficient method to simultaneously identify the critical neurons and prune the model during training without involving any pre-training or fine-tuning procedures. Unlike existing methods, which accomplish this task in a greedy fashion, we propose a majority voting technique to compare the activation values among neurons and assign a voting score to quantitatively evaluate their importance.This mechanism helps to effectively reduce model complexity by eliminating the less influential neurons and aims to determine a subset of the whole model that can represent the reference model with much fewer parameters within the training process. Experimental results show that majority voting efficiently compresses the network with no drop in model accuracy, pruning more than 79\% of the original model parameters on CIFAR10 and more than 91\% of the original parameters on MNIST. Moreover, we show that with our proposed method, sparse models can be further pruned into even smaller models by removing more than 60\% of the parameters, whilst preserving the reference model accuracy.

Hierarchical Routing Mixture of Experts

Wenbo Zhao, Yang Gao, Shahan Ali Memon, Bhiksha Raj, Rita Singh

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Auto-TLDR; A Binary Tree-structured Hierarchical Routing Mixture of Experts for Regression

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In regression tasks the distribution of the data is often too complex to be fitted by a single model. In contrast, partition-based models are developed where data is divided and fitted by local models. These models partition the input space and do not leverage the input-output dependency of multimodal-distributed data, and strong local models are needed to make good predictions. Addressing these problems, we propose a binary tree-structured hierarchical routing mixture of experts (HRME) model that has classifiers as non-leaf node experts and simple regression models as leaf node experts. The classifier nodes jointly soft-partition the input-output space based on the natural separateness of multimodal data. This enables simple leaf experts to be effective for prediction. Further, we develop a probabilistic framework for the HRME model, and propose a recursive Expectation-Maximization (EM) based algorithm to learn both the tree structure and the expert models. Experiments on a collection of regression tasks validate the effectiveness of our method compared to a variety of other regression models.

On Learning Random Forests for Random Forest Clustering

Manuele Bicego, Francisco Escolano

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Auto-TLDR; Learning Random Forests for Clustering

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In this paper we study the poorly investigated problem of learning Random Forests for distance-based Random Forest clustering. We studied both classic schemes as well as alternative approaches, novel in this context. In particular, we investigated the suitability of Gaussian Density Forests, Random Forests specifically designed for density estimation. Further, we introduce a novel variant of Random Forest, based on an effective non parametric by-pass estimator of the Renyi entropy, which can be useful when the parametric assumption is too strict. An empirical evaluation involving different datasets and different RF-clustering strategies confirms that the learning step is crucial for RF-clustering. We also present a set of practical guidelines useful to determine the most suitable variant of RF-clustering according to the problem under examination.

Confidence Calibration for Deep Renal Biopsy Immunofluorescence Image Classification

Federico Pollastri, Juan Maroñas, Federico Bolelli, Giulia Ligabue, Roberto Paredes, Riccardo Magistroni, Costantino Grana

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Auto-TLDR; A Probabilistic Convolutional Neural Network for Immunofluorescence Classification in Renal Biopsy

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With this work we tackle immunofluorescence classification in renal biopsy, employing state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Networks. In this setting, the aim of the probabilistic model is to assist an expert practitioner towards identifying the location pattern of antibody deposits within a glomerulus. Since modern neural networks often provide overconfident outputs, we stress the importance of having a reliable prediction, demonstrating that Temperature Scaling, a recently introduced re-calibration technique, can be successfully applied to immunofluorescence classification in renal biopsy. Experimental results demonstrate that the designed model yields good accuracy on the specific task, and that Temperature Scaling is able to provide reliable probabilities, which are highly valuable for such a task given the low inter-rater agreement.

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

Sebastian Palacio, Philipp Engler, Jörn Hees, Andreas Dengel

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

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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.

Learning Embeddings for Image Clustering: An Empirical Study of Triplet Loss Approaches

Kalun Ho, Janis Keuper, Franz-Josef Pfreundt, Margret Keuper

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Auto-TLDR; Clustering Objectives for K-means and Correlation Clustering Using Triplet Loss

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In this work, we evaluate two different image clustering objectives, k-means clustering and correlation clustering, in the context of Triplet Loss induced feature space embeddings. Specifically, we train a convolutional neural network to learn discriminative features by optimizing two popular versions of the Triplet Loss in order to study their clustering properties under the assumption of noisy labels. Additionally, we propose a new, simple Triplet Loss formulation, which shows desirable properties with respect to formal clustering objectives and outperforms the existing methods. We evaluate all three Triplet loss formulations for K-means and correlation clustering on the CIFAR-10 image classification dataset.

Conditional Multi-Task Learning for Plant Disease Identification

Sue Han Lee, Herve Goëau, Pierre Bonnet, Alexis Joly

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Auto-TLDR; A conditional multi-task learning approach for plant disease identification

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Several recent studies have proposed an automatic plant disease identification system based on deep learning. Although successful, these approaches are generally based on learned classification models with target classes of joint host species-disease pairs that may not allow optimal use of the available information. This is due to the fact that they require distinguishing between similar host species or diseases. In fact, these approaches have limited scalability because the size of a network gradually increases as new classes are added, even if information on host species or diseases is already available. This constraint is all the more important as it can be difficult to collect/establish a specific list of all diseases for each host plant species in an actual application. In this paper, we address the problems by proposing a new conditional multi-task learning (CMTL) approach which allows the distribution of host species and disease characteristics learned simultaneously with a conditional link between them. This conditioning is formed in such a way that the knowledge to infer the prediction of one concept (the diseases) depends on the other concept (the host species), which corresponds to the way plant pathologists used to infer the diseases of the host species. We show that our approach can improve the performance of plant disease identification compared to the usual species-disease pair modeling in the previous studies. Meanwhile, we also compose a new dataset on plant disease identification that could serve as an important benchmark in this field.

Learning to Sort Handwritten Text Lines in Reading Order through Estimated Binary Order Relations

Lorenzo Quirós, Enrique Vidal

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Auto-TLDR; Automatic Reading Order of Text Lines in Handwritten Text Documents

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Recent advances in Handwritten Text Recognition and Document Layout Analysis make it possible to extract information from digitized documents and make them accessible beyond the archive shelves. But the reading order of the elements in those documents still is an open problem that has to be solved in order to provide that information with the correct structure. Most of the studies on the reading order task are rule-base approaches that focus on printed documents, while less attention has been paid to handwritten text documents. In this work we propose a new approach to automatically determine the reading order of text lines in handwritten text documents. The task is approached as a sorting problem where the order-relation operator is learned directly from examples. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on three different datasets.

Bayesian Active Learning for Maximal Information Gain on Model Parameters

Kasra Arnavaz, Aasa Feragen, Oswin Krause, Marco Loog

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Auto-TLDR; Bayesian assumptions for Bayesian classification

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The fact that machine learning models, despite their advancements, are still trained on randomly gathered data is proof that a lasting solution to the problem of optimal data gathering has not yet been found. In this paper, we investigate whether a Bayesian approach to the classification problem can provide assumptions under which one is guaranteed to perform at least as good as random sampling. For a logistic regression model, we show that maximal expected information gain on model parameters is a promising criterion for selecting samples, assuming that our classification model is well-matched to the data. Our derived criterion is closely related to the maximum model change. We experiment with data sets which satisfy this assumption to varying degrees to see how sensitive our performance is to the violation of our assumption in practice.

Weakly Supervised Learning through Rank-Based Contextual Measures

João Gabriel Camacho Presotto, Lucas Pascotti Valem, Nikolas Gomes De Sá, Daniel Carlos Guimaraes Pedronette, Joao Paulo Papa

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Auto-TLDR; Exploiting Unlabeled Data for Weakly Supervised Classification of Multimedia Data

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Machine learning approaches have achieved remarkable advances over the last decades, especially in supervised learning tasks such as classification. Meanwhile, multimedia data and applications experienced an explosive growth, becoming ubiquitous in diverse domains. Due to the huge increase in multimedia data collections and the lack of labeled data in several scenarios, creating methods capable of exploiting the unlabeled data and operating under weakly supervision is imperative. In this work, we propose a rank-based model to exploit contextual information encoded in the unlabeled data in order to perform weakly supervised classification. We employ different rank-based correlation measures for identifying strong similarities relationships and expanding the labeled set in an unsupervised way. Subsequently, the extended labeled set is used by a classifier to achieve better accuracy results. The proposed weakly supervised approach was evaluated on multimedia classification tasks, considering several combinations of rank correlation measures and classifiers. An experimental evaluation was conducted on 4 public image datasets and different features. Very positive gains were achieved in comparison with various semi-supervised and supervised classifiers taken as baselines when considering the same amount of labeled data.

On-Manifold Adversarial Data Augmentation Improves Uncertainty Calibration

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

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

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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.

Rethinking Experience Replay: A Bag of Tricks for Continual Learning

Pietro Buzzega, Matteo Boschini, Angelo Porrello, Simone Calderara

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Auto-TLDR; Experience Replay for Continual Learning: A Practical Approach

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In Continual Learning, a Neural Network is trained on a stream of data whose distribution shifts over time. Under these assumptions, it is especially challenging to improve on classes appearing later in the stream while remaining accurate on previous ones. This is due to the infamous problem of catastrophic forgetting, which causes a quick performance degradation when the classifier focuses on learning new categories. Recent literature proposed various approaches to tackle this issue, often resorting to very sophisticated techniques. In this work, we show that naive rehearsal can be patched to achieve similar performance. We point out some shortcomings that restrain Experience Replay (ER) and propose five tricks to mitigate them. Experiments show that ER, thus enhanced, displays an accuracy gain of 51.2 and 26.9 percentage points on the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets respectively (memory buffer size 1000). As a result, it surpasses current state-of-the-art rehearsal-based methods.

Uncertainty-Sensitive Activity Recognition: A Reliability Benchmark and the CARING Models

Alina Roitberg, Monica Haurilet, Manuel Martinez, Rainer Stiefelhagen

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Auto-TLDR; CARING: Calibrated Action Recognition with Input Guidance

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Beyond assigning the correct class, an activity recognition model should also to be able to determine, how certain it is in its predictions. We present the first study of how well the confidence values of modern action recognition architectures indeed reflect the probability of the correct outcome and propose a learning-based approach for improving it. First, we extend two popular action recognition datasets with a reliability benchmark in form of the expected calibration error and reliability diagrams. Since our evaluation highlights that confidence values of standard action recognition architectures do not represent the uncertainty well, we introduce a new approach which learns to transform the model output into realistic confidence estimates through an additional calibration network. The main idea of our Calibrated Action Recognition with Input Guidance (CARING) model is to learn an optimal scaling parameter depending on the video representation. We compare our model with the native action recognition networks and the temperature scaling approach - a wide spread calibration method utilized in image classification. While temperature scaling alone drastically improves the reliability of the confidence values, our CARING method consistently leads to the best uncertainty estimates in all benchmark settings.

A Detection-Based Approach to Multiview Action Classification in Infants

Carolina Pacheco, Effrosyni Mavroudi, Elena Kokkoni, Herbert Tanner, Rene Vidal

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Auto-TLDR; Multiview Action Classification for Infants in a Pediatric Rehabilitation Environment

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Activity recognition in children and infants is important in applications such as safety monitoring, behavior assessment, and child-robot interaction, among others. However, it differs from activity recognition in adults not only because body poses and proportions are different, but also because of the way in which actions are performed. This paper addresses the problem of infant action classification (up to 2 years old) in challenging conditions. The actions are performed in a pediatric rehabilitation environment in which not only infants but also robots and adults are present, with the infant being one of the smallest actors in the scene. We propose a multiview action classification system based on Faster R-CNN and LSTM networks, which fuses information from different views by using learnable fusion coefficients derived from detection confidence scores. The proposed system is view-independent, learns features that are close to view-invariant, and can handle new or missing views at test time. Our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline model for this dataset by 11.4% in terms of average classification accuracy in four classes (crawl, sit, stand and walk). Moreover, experiments in a extended dataset from 6 subjects (8 to 24 months old) show that the proposed fusion strategy outperforms the best post-processing fusion strategy by 2.5% and 6.8% average classification accuracy in Leave One Super-session Out and Leave One Subject Out cross-validation, respectively.

Stage-Wise Neural Architecture Search

Artur Jordão, Fernando Akio Yamada, Maiko Lie, William Schwartz

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Auto-TLDR; Efficient Neural Architecture Search for Deep Convolutional Networks

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Modern convolutional networks such as ResNet and NASNet have achieved state-of-the-art results in many computer vision applications. These architectures consist of stages, which are sets of layers that operate on representations in the same resolution. It has been demonstrated that increasing the number of layers in each stage improves the prediction ability of the network. However, the resulting architecture becomes computationally expensive in terms of floating point operations, memory requirements and inference time. Thus, significant human effort is necessary to evaluate different trade-offs between depth and performance. To handle this problem, recent works have proposed to automatically design high-performance architectures, mainly by means of neural architecture search (NAS). Current NAS strategies analyze a large set of possible candidate architectures and, hence, require vast computational resources and take many GPUs days. Motivated by this, we propose a NAS approach to efficiently design accurate and low-cost convolutional architectures and demonstrate that an efficient strategy for designing these architectures is to learn the depth stage-by-stage. For this purpose, our approach increases depth incrementally in each stage taking into account its importance, such that stages with low importance are kept shallow while stages with high importance become deeper. We conduct experiments on the CIFAR and different versions of ImageNet datasets, where we show that architectures discovered by our approach achieve better accuracy and efficiency than human-designed architectures. Additionally, we show that architectures discovered on CIFAR-10 can be successfully transferred to large datasets. Compared to previous NAS approaches, our method is substantially more efficient, as it evaluates one order of magnitude fewer models and yields architectures on par with the state-of-the-art.

Improving reliability of attention branch network by introducing uncertainty

Takuya Tsukahara, Tsubasa Hirakawa, Takayoshi Yamashita, Hironobu Fujiyoshi

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Auto-TLDR; Bayesian Attention Branch Network for Convolutional Neural Networks

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Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are being used in various fields related to image recognition and are achieving high recognition accuracy. However, most existing CNNs do not consider uncertainty in their predictions; that is, they do not account for the difficulty of prediction, and the extent to which their predictions are reliable is unclear. This problem is considered to be the cause of erroneous decisions when we use CNNs in practice. By considering the uncertainty of the prediction result, it is thought that recognition accuracy would improve, and erroneous decisions would be suppressed. We propose a Bayesian attention branch network (Bayesian ABN) that incorporates uncertainty into an attention branch network (ABN). The method incorporates a Bayesian neural network (Bayesian NN) into the ABN to account for uncertainty in the prediction result. Also, it outputs prediction results from two branches and chooses the one having the lower uncertainty. In evaluations using standard object recognition datasets, we confirmed that the proposed method improves the accuracy and reliability of CNNs.

On Resource-Efficient Bayesian Network Classifiers and Deep Neural Networks

Wolfgang Roth, Günther Schindler, Holger Fröning, Franz Pernkopf

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Auto-TLDR; Quantization-Aware Bayesian Network Classifiers for Small-Scale Scenarios

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We present two methods to reduce the complexity of Bayesian network (BN) classifiers. First, we introduce quantization-aware training using the straight-through gradient estimator to quantize the parameters of BNs to few bits. Second, we extend a recently proposed differentiable tree-augmented naive Bayes (TAN) structure learning approach to also consider the model size. Both methods are motivated by recent developments in the deep learning community, and they provide effective means to trade off between model size and prediction accuracy, which is demonstrated in extensive experiments. Furthermore, we contrast quantized BN classifiers with quantized deep neural networks (DNNs) for small-scale scenarios which have hardly been investigated in the literature. We show Pareto optimal models with respect to model size, number of operations, and test error and find that both model classes are viable options.

Towards Tackling Multi-Label Imbalances in Remote Sensing Imagery

Dominik Koßmann, Thorsten Wilhelm, Gernot Fink

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Auto-TLDR; Class imbalance in land cover datasets using attribute encoding schemes

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Recent advances in automated image analysis have lead to an increased number of proposed datasets in remote sensing applications. This permits the successful employment of data hungry state-of-the-art deep neural networks. However, the Earth is not covered equally by semantically meaningful classes. Thus, many land cover datasets suffer from a severe class imbalance. We show that by taking appropriate measures, the performance in the minority classes can be improved by up to 30 percent without affecting the performance in the majority classes strongly. Additionally, we investigate the use of an attribute encoding scheme to represent the inherent class hierarchies commonly observed in land cover analysis.

Can Data Placement Be Effective for Neural Networks Classification Tasks? Introducing the Orthogonal Loss

Brais Cancela, Veronica Bolon-Canedo, Amparo Alonso-Betanzos

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Auto-TLDR; Spatial Placement for Neural Network Training Loss Functions

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Traditionally, a Neural Network classification training loss function follows the same principle: minimizing the distance between samples that belong to the same class, while maximizing the distance to the other classes. There are no restrictions on the spatial placement of deep features (last layer input). This paper addresses this issue when dealing with Neural Networks, providing a set of loss functions that are able to train a classifier by forcing the deep features to be projected over a predefined orthogonal basis. Experimental results shows that these `data placement' functions can overcome the training accuracy provided by the classic cross-entropy loss function.

A Fine-Grained Dataset and Its Efficient Semantic Segmentation for Unstructured Driving Scenarios

Kai Andreas Metzger, Peter Mortimer, Hans J "Joe" Wuensche

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Auto-TLDR; TAS500: A Semantic Segmentation Dataset for Autonomous Driving in Unstructured Environments

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Research in autonomous driving for unstructured environments suffers from a lack of semantically labeled datasets compared to its urban counterpart. Urban and unstructured outdoor environments are challenging due to the varying lighting and weather conditions during a day and across seasons. In this paper, we introduce TAS500, a novel semantic segmentation dataset for autonomous driving in unstructured environments. TAS500 offers fine-grained vegetation and terrain classes to learn drivable surfaces and natural obstacles in outdoor scenes effectively. We evaluate the performance of modern semantic segmentation models with an additional focus on their efficiency. Our experiments demonstrate the advantages of fine-grained semantic classes to improve the overall prediction accuracy, especially along the class boundaries. The dataset, code, and pretrained model are available online.

A Novel Random Forest Dissimilarity Measure for Multi-View Learning

Hongliu Cao, Simon Bernard, Robert Sabourin, Laurent Heutte

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Auto-TLDR; Multi-view Learning with Random Forest Relation Measure and Instance Hardness

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Multi-view learning is a learning task in which data is described by several concurrent representations. Its main challenge is most often to exploit the complementarities between these representations to help solve a classification/regression task. This is a challenge that can be met nowadays if there is a large amount of data available for learning. However, this is not necessarily true for all real-world problems, where data are sometimes scarce (e.g. problems related to the medical environment). In these situations, an effective strategy is to use intermediate representations based on the dissimilarities between instances. This work presents new ways of constructing these dissimilarity representations, learning them from data with Random Forest classifiers. More precisely, two methods are proposed, which modify the Random Forest proximity measure, to adapt it to the context of High Dimension Low Sample Size (HDLSS) multi-view classification problems. The second method, based on an Instance Hardness measurement, is significantly more accurate than other state-of-the-art measurements including the original RF Proximity measurement and the Large Margin Nearest Neighbor (LMNN) metric learning measurement.

A Heuristic-Based Decision Tree for Connected Components Labeling of 3D Volumes

Maximilian Söchting, Stefano Allegretti, Federico Bolelli, Costantino Grana

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Auto-TLDR; Entropy Partitioning Decision Tree for Connected Components Labeling

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Connected Components Labeling represents a fundamental step for many Computer Vision and Image Processing pipelines. Since the first appearance of the task in the sixties, many algorithmic solutions to optimize the computational load needed to label an image have been proposed. Among them, block-based scan approaches and decision trees revealed to be some of the most valuable strategies. However, due to the cost of the manual construction of optimal decision trees and the computational limitations of automatic strategies employed in the past, the application of blocks and decision trees has been restricted to small masks, and thus to 2D algorithms. With this paper we present a novel heuristic algorithm based on decision tree learning methodology, called Entropy Partitioning Decision Tree (EPDT). It allows to compute near-optimal decision trees for large scan masks. Experimental results demonstrate that algorithms based on the generated decision trees outperform state-of-the-art competitors.

Accuracy-Perturbation Curves for Evaluation of Adversarial Attack and Defence Methods

Jaka Šircelj, Danijel Skocaj

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Auto-TLDR; Accuracy-perturbation Curve for Robustness Evaluation of Adversarial Examples

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With more research published on adversarial examples, we face a growing need for strong and insightful methods for evaluating the robustness of machine learning solutions against their adversarial threats. Previous work contains problematic and overly simplified evaluation methods, where different methods for generating adversarial examples are compared, even though they produce adversarial examples of differing perturbation magnitudes. This creates a biased evaluation environment, as higher perturbations yield naturally stronger adversarial examples. We propose a novel "accuracy-perturbation curve" that visualizes a classifiers classification accuracy response to adversarial examples of different perturbations. To demonstrate the utility of the curve we perform evaluation of responses of different image classifier architectures to four popular adversarial example methods. We also show how adversarial training improves the robustness of a classifier using the "accuracy-perturbation curve".

Dynamic Multi-Path Neural Network

Yingcheng Su, Yichao Wu, Ken Chen, Ding Liang, Xiaolin Hu

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Auto-TLDR; Dynamic Multi-path Neural Network

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Although deeper and larger neural networks have achieved better performance, due to overwhelming burden on computation, they cannot meet the demands of deployment on resource-limited devices. An effective strategy to address this problem is to make use of dynamic inference mechanism, which changes the inference path for different samples at runtime. Existing methods only reduce the depth by skipping an entire specific layer, which may lose important information in this layer. In this paper, we propose a novel method called Dynamic Multi-path Neural Network (DMNN), which provides more topology choices in terms of both width and depth on the fly. For better modelling the inference path selection, we further introduce previous state and object category information to guide the training process. Compared to previous dynamic inference techniques, the proposed method is more flexible and easier to incorporate into most modern network architectures. Experimental results on ImageNet and CIFAR-100 demonstrate the superiority of our method on both efficiency and classification accuracy.

On the Information of Feature Maps and Pruning of Deep Neural Networks

Mohammadreza Soltani, Suya Wu, Jie Ding, Robert Ravier, Vahid Tarokh

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Auto-TLDR; Compressing Deep Neural Models Using Mutual Information

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A technique for compressing deep neural models achieving competitive performance to state-of-the-art methods is proposed. The approach utilizes the mutual information between the feature maps and the output of the model in order to prune the redundant layers of the network. Extensive numerical experiments on both CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny ImageNet data sets demonstrate that the proposed method can be effective in compressing deep models, both in terms of the numbers of parameters and operations. For instance, by applying the proposed approach to DenseNet model with 0.77 million parameters and 293 million operations for classification of CIFAR-10 data set, a reduction of 62.66% and 41.00% in the number of parameters and the number of operations are respectively achieved, while increasing the test error only by less than 1%.

TreeRNN: Topology-Preserving Deep Graph Embedding and Learning

Yecheng Lyu, Ming Li, Xinming Huang, Ulkuhan Guler, Patrick Schaumont, Ziming Zhang

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Auto-TLDR; TreeRNN: Recurrent Neural Network for General Graph Classification

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General graphs are difficult for learning due to their irregular structures. Existing works employ message passing along graph edges to extract local patterns using customized graph kernels, but few of them are effective for the integration of such local patterns into global features. In contrast, in this paper we study the methods to transfer the graphs into trees so that explicit orders are learned to direct the feature integration from local to global. To this end, we apply the breadth first search (BFS) to construct trees from the graphs, which adds direction to the graph edges from the center node to the peripheral nodes. In addition, we proposed a novel projection scheme that transfer the trees to image representations, which is suitable for conventional convolution neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs). To best learn the patterns from the graph-tree-images, we propose TreeRNN, a 2D RNN architecture that recurrently integrates the image pixels by rows and columns to help classify the graph categories. We evaluate the proposed method on several graph classification datasets, and manage to demonstrate comparable accuracy with the state-of-the-art on MUTAG, PTC-MR and NCI1 datasets.

E-DNAS: Differentiable Neural Architecture Search for Embedded Systems

Javier García López, Antonio Agudo, Francesc Moreno-Noguer

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Auto-TLDR; E-DNAS: Differentiable Architecture Search for Light-Weight Networks for Image Classification

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Designing optimal and light weight networks to fit in resource-limited platforms like mobiles, DSPs or GPUs is a challenging problem with a wide range of interesting applications, {\em e.g.} in embedded systems for autonomous driving. While most approaches are based on manual hyperparameter tuning, there exist a new line of research, the so-called NAS (Neural Architecture Search) methods, that aim to optimize several metrics during the design process, including memory requirements of the network, number of FLOPs, number of MACs (Multiply-ACcumulate operations) or inference latency. However, while NAS methods have shown very promising results, they are still significantly time and cost consuming. In this work we introduce E-DNAS, a differentiable architecture search method, which improves the efficiency of NAS methods in designing light-weight networks for the task of image classification. Concretely, E-DNAS computes, in a differentiable manner, the optimal size of a number of meta-kernels that capture patterns of the input data at different resolutions. We also leverage on the additive property of convolution operations to merge several kernels with different compatible sizes into a single one, reducing thus the number of operations and the time required to estimate the optimal configuration. We evaluate our approach on several datasets to perform classification. We report results in terms of the SoC (System on Chips) metric, typically used in the Texas Instruments TDA2x families for autonomous driving applications. The results show that our approach allows designing low latency architectures significantly faster than state-of-the-art.

Estimation of Abundance and Distribution of SaltMarsh Plants from Images Using Deep Learning

Jayant Parashar, Suchendra Bhandarkar, Jacob Simon, Brian Hopkinson, Steven Pennings

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Auto-TLDR; CNN-based approaches to automated plant identification and localization in salt marsh images

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Recent advances in computer vision and machine learning, most notably deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), are exploited to identify and localize various plant species in salt marsh images. Three different approaches are explored that provide estimations of abundance and spatial distribution at varying levels of granularity in terms of spatial resolution. In the coarsest-grained approach, CNNs are tasked with identifying which of six plant species are present/absent in large patches within the salt marsh images. CNNs with diverse topological properties and attention mechanisms are shown capable of providing accurate estimations with >90 % precision and recall in the case of the more abundant plant species whereas the performance declines for less common plant species. Estimation of percent cover of each plant species is performed at a finer spatial resolution, where smaller image patches are extracted and the CNNs tasked with identifying the plant species or substrate at the center of the image patch. For the percent cover estimation task, the CNNs are observed to exhibit a performance profile similar to that for the presence/absence estimation task, but with an ~ 5-10% reduction in precision and recall. Finally, fine-grained estimation of the spatial distribution of the various plant species is performed via semantic segmentation. The Deeplab-V3 semantic segmentation architecture is observed to provide very accurate estimations for abundant plant species; however,a significant degradation in performance is observed in the case of less abundant plant species and, in extreme cases, rare plant classes are seen to be ignored entirely. Overall, a clear trade-off is observed between the CNN estimation quality and the spatial resolution of the underlying estimation thereby offering guidance for ecological applications of CNN-based approaches to automated plant identification and localization in salt marsh images.

The eXPose Approach to Crosslier Detection

Antonio Barata, Frank Takes, Hendrik Van Den Herik, Cor Veenman

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Auto-TLDR; EXPose: Crosslier Detection Based on Supervised Category Modeling

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Transit of wasteful materials within the European Union is highly regulated through a system of permits. Waste processing costs vary greatly depending on the waste category of a permit. Therefore, companies may have a financial incentive to allege transporting waste with erroneous categorisation. Our goal is to assist inspectors in selecting potentially manipulated permits for further investigation, making their task more effective and efficient. Due to data limitations, a supervised learning approach based on historical cases is not possible. Standard unsupervised approaches, such as outlier detection and data quality-assurance techniques, are not suited since we are interested in targeting non-random modifications in both category and category-correlated features. For this purpose we (1) introduce the concept of crosslier: an anomalous instance of a category which lies across other categories; (2) propose eXPose: a novel approach to crosslier detection based on supervised category modelling; and (3) present the crosslier diagram: a visualisation tool specifically designed for domain experts to easily assess crossliers. We compare eXPose against traditional outlier detection methods in various benchmark datasets with synthetic crossliers and show the superior performance of our method in targeting these instances.

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

Pramuditha Perera, Vishal Patel

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

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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.

Augmented Bi-Path Network for Few-Shot Learning

Baoming Yan, Chen Zhou, Bo Zhao, Kan Guo, Yang Jiang, Xiaobo Li, Zhang Ming, Yizhou Wang

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Auto-TLDR; Augmented Bi-path Network for Few-shot Learning

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Few-shot Learning (FSL) which aims to learn from few labeled training data is becoming a popular research topic, due to the expensive labeling cost in many real-world applications. One kind of successful FSL method learns to compare the testing (query) image and training (support) image by simply concatenating the features of two images and feeding it into the neural network. However, with few labeled data in each class, the neural network has difficulty in learning or comparing the local features of two images. Such simple image-level comparison may cause serious mis-classification. To solve this problem, we propose Augmented Bi-path Network (ABNet) for learning to compare both global and local features on multi-scales. Specifically, the salient patches are extracted and embedded as the local features for every image. Then, the model learns to augment the features for better robustness. Finally, the model learns to compare global and local features separately, \emph{i.e.}, in two paths, before merging the similarities. Extensive experiments show that the proposed ABNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Both quantitative and visual ablation studies are provided to verify that the proposed modules lead to more precise comparison results.

Generalization Comparison of Deep Neural Networks Via Output Sensitivity

Mahsa Forouzesh, Farnood Salehi, Patrick Thiran

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Auto-TLDR; Generalization of Deep Neural Networks using Sensitivity

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Although recent works have brought some insights into the performance improvement of techniques used in state-of-the-art deep-learning models, more work is needed to understand their generalization properties. We shed light on this matter by linking the loss function to the output's sensitivity to its input. We find a rather strong empirical relation between the output sensitivity and the variance in the bias-variance decomposition of the loss function, which hints on using sensitivity as a metric for comparing the generalization performance of networks, without requiring labeled data. We find that sensitivity is decreased by applying popular methods which improve the generalization performance of the model, such as (1) using a deep network rather than a wide one, (2) adding convolutional layers to baseline classifiers instead of adding fully-connected layers, (3) using batch normalization, dropout and max-pooling, and (4) applying parameter initialization techniques.