Deep Learning on Active Sonar Data Using Bayesian Optimization for Hyperparameter Tuning

Henrik Berg, Karl Thomas Hjelmervik

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Auto-TLDR; Bayesian Optimization for Sonar Operations in Littoral Environments

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Sonar operations in littoral environments may be challenging due to an increased probability of false alarms. Machine learning can be used to train classifiers that are able to filter out most of the false alarms automatically, however, this is a time consuming process, with many hyperparameters that need to be tuned in order to yield useful results. In this paper, Bayesian optimization is used to search for good values for some of the hyperparameters, like topology and training parameters, resulting in performance superior to earlier trial-and-error based training. Additionally, we analyze some of the parameters involved in the Bayesian optimization, as well as the resulting hyperparameter values.

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Auto-TLDR; Parametric Variational Autoencoder-based Human Target Detection and Localization for Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave Radar

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This paper presents a parametric variational autoencoder-based human target detection and localization framework working directly with the raw analog-to-digital converter data from the frequency modulated continuous wave radar. We propose a parametrically constrained variational autoencoder, with residual and skip connections, capable of generating the clustered and localized target detections on the range-angle image. Furthermore, to circumvent the problem of training the proposed neural network on all possible scenarios using real radar data, we propose domain adaptation strategies whereby we first train the neural network using ray tracing based model data and then adapt the network to work on real sensor data. This strategy ensures better generalization and scalability of the proposed neural network even though it is trained with limited radar data. We demonstrate the superior detection and localization performance of our proposed solution compared to the conventional signal processing pipeline and earlier state-of-art deep U-Net architecture with range-doppler images as inputs.

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.

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.

Modulation Pattern Detection Using Complex Convolutions in Deep Learning

Jakob Krzyston, Rajib Bhattacharjea, Andrew Stark

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Auto-TLDR; Complex Convolutional Neural Networks for Modulation Pattern Classification

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Telecommunications relies on transmitting and receiving signals containing specific modulation patterns in both the real and complex domains. Classifying modulation patterns is difficult because noise and poor signal to noise ratio (SNR) obfuscate the `input' signal. Although deep learning approaches have shown great promise over statistical methods in this problem space, deep learning frameworks have been developed to deal with exclusively real-valued data and are unable to compute convolutions for complex-valued data. In previous work, we have shown that CNNs using complex convolutions are able to classify modulation patterns by up to 35\% more accurately than comparable CNN architectures. In this paper, we demonstrate that enabling complex convolutions in CNNs are (1) up to 50\% better at recognizing modulation patterns in complex signals with high SNR when trained on low SNR data, and (2) up to 12\% better at recognizing modulation patterns in complex signals with low SNR when trained on high SNR data. Additionally, we compare the features learned in each experiment by visualizing the inputs that results in one-hot modulation pattern classification for each network.

A Close Look at Deep Learning with Small Data

Lorenzo Brigato, Luca Iocchi

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Auto-TLDR; Low-Complex Neural Networks for Small Data Conditions

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In this work, we perform a wide variety of experiments with different Deep Learning architectures in small data conditions. We show that model complexity is a critical factor when only a few samples per class are available. Differently from the literature, we improve the state of the art using low complexity models. We show that standard convolutional neural networks with relatively few parameters are effective in this scenario. In many of our experiments, low complexity models outperform state-of-the-art architectures. Moreover, we propose a novel network that uses an unsupervised loss to regularize its training. Such architecture either improves the results either performs comparably well to low capacity networks. Surprisingly, experiments show that the dynamic data augmentation pipeline is not beneficial in this particular domain. Statically augmenting the dataset might be a promising research direction while dropout maintains its role as a good regularizer.

Trainable Spectrally Initializable Matrix Transformations in Convolutional Neural Networks

Michele Alberti, Angela Botros, Schuetz Narayan, Rolf Ingold, Marcus Liwicki, Mathias Seuret

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Auto-TLDR; Trainable and Spectrally Initializable Matrix Transformations for Neural Networks

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In this work, we introduce a new architectural component to Neural Networks (NN), i.e., trainable and spectrally initializable matrix transformations on feature maps. While previous literature has already demonstrated the possibility of adding static spectral transformations as feature processors, our focus is on more general trainable transforms. We study the transforms in various architectural configurations on four datasets of different nature: from medical (ColorectalHist, HAM10000) and natural (Flowers) images to historical documents (CB55). With rigorous experiments that control for the number of parameters and randomness, we show that networks utilizing the introduced matrix transformations outperform vanilla neural networks. The observed accuracy increases appreciably across all datasets. In addition, we show that the benefit of spectral initialization leads to significantly faster convergence, as opposed to randomly initialized matrix transformations. The transformations are implemented as auto-differentiable PyTorch modules that can be incorporated into any neural network architecture. The entire code base is open-source.

Improving Gravitational Wave Detection with 2D Convolutional Neural Networks

Siyu Fan, Yisen Wang, Yuan Luo, Alexander Michael Schmitt, Shenghua Yu

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Auto-TLDR; Two-dimensional Convolutional Neural Networks for Gravitational Wave Detection from Time Series with Background Noise

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Sensitive gravitational wave (GW) detectors such as that of Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) realize the direct observation of GW signals that confirm Einstein's general theory of relativity. However, it remains challenges to quickly detect faint GW signals from a large number of time series with background noise under unknown probability distributions. Traditional methods such as matched-filtering in general assume Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) and are far from being real-time due to its high computational complexity. To avoid these weaknesses, one-dimensional (1D) Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are introduced to achieve fast online detection in milliseconds but do not have enough consideration on the trade-off between the frequency and time features, which will be revisited in this paper through data pre-processing and subsequent two-dimensional (2D) CNNs during offline training to improve the online detection sensitivity. In this work, the input data is pre-processed to form a 2D spectrum by Short-time Fourier transform (STFT), where frequency features are extracted without learning. Then, carrying out two 1D convolutions across time and frequency axes respectively, and concatenating the time-amplitude and frequency-amplitude feature maps with equal proportion subsequently, the frequency and time features are treated equally as the input of our following two-dimensional CNNs. The simulation of our above ideas works on a generated data set with uniformly varying SNR (2-17), which combines the GW signal generated by PYCBC and the background noise sampled directly from LIGO. Satisfying the real-time online detection requirement without noise distribution assumption, the experiments of this paper demonstrate better performance in average compared to that of 1D CNNs, especially in the cases of lower SNR (4-9).

Prediction of Obstructive Coronary Artery Disease from Myocardial Perfusion Scintigraphy using Deep Neural Networks

Ida Arvidsson, Niels Christian Overgaard, Miguel Ochoa Figueroa, Jeronimo Rose, Anette Davidsson, Kalle Åström, Anders Heyden

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Auto-TLDR; A Deep Learning Algorithm for Multi-label Classification of Myocardial Perfusion Scintigraphy for Stable Ischemic Heart Disease

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For diagnosis and risk assessment in patients with stable ischemic heart disease, myocardial perfusion scintigraphy is one of the most common cardiological examinations performed today. There are however many motivations for why an artificial intelligence algorithm would provide useful input to this task. For example to reduce the subjectiveness and save time for the nuclear medicine physicians working with this time consuming task. In this work we have developed a deep learning algorithm for multi-label classification based on a modified convolutional neural network to estimate probability of obstructive coronary artery disease in the left anterior artery, left circumflex artery and right coronary artery. The prediction is based on data from myocardial perfusion scintigraphy studies conducted in a dedicated Cadmium-Zinc-Telluride cardio camera (D-SPECT Spectrum Dynamics). Data from 588 patients was available, with stress images in both upright and supine position, as well as a number of auxiliary parameters such as angina symptoms and BMI. The data was used to train and evaluate the algorithm using 5-fold cross-validation. We achieve state-of-the-art results for this task with an area under the receiver operating characteristics curve of 0.89 as average on per-vessel level and 0.94 on per-patient level.

Uncertainty Guided Recognition of Tiny Craters on the Moon

Thorsten Wilhelm, Christian Wöhler

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Auto-TLDR; Accurately Detecting Tiny Craters in Remote Sensed Images Using Deep Neural Networks

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Accurately detecting craters in remotely sensed images is an important task when analysing the properties of planetary bodies. Commonly, only large craters in the range of several kilometres are detected. In this work we provide the first example of automatically detecting tiny craters in the range of several meters with the help of a deep neural network by using only a small set of annotated craters. Additionally, we propose a novel way to group overlapping detections and replace the commonly used non-maximum suppression with a probabilistic treatment. As a result, we receive valuable uncertainty estimates of the detections and the aggregated detections are shown to be vastly superior.

A Comparison of Neural Network Approaches for Melanoma Classification

Maria Frasca, Michele Nappi, Michele Risi, Genoveffa Tortora, Alessia Auriemma Citarella

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Auto-TLDR; Classification of Melanoma Using Deep Neural Network Methodologies

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Melanoma is the deadliest form of skin cancer and it is diagnosed mainly visually, starting from initial clinical screening and followed by dermoscopic analysis, biopsy and histopathological examination. A dermatologist’s recognition of melanoma may be subject to errors and may take some time to diagnose it. In this regard, deep learning can be useful in the study and classification of skin cancer. In particular, by classifying images with Deep Neural Network methodologies, it is possible to obtain comparable or even superior results compared to those of dermatologists. In this paper, we propose a methodology for the classification of melanoma by adopting different deep learning techniques applied to a common dataset, composed of images from the ISIC dataset and consisting of different types of skin diseases, including melanoma on which we applied a specific pre-processing phase. In particular, a comparison of the results is performed in order to select the best effective neural network to be applied to the problem of recognition and classification of melanoma. Moreover, we also evaluate the impact of the pre- processing phase on the final classification. Different metrics such as accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity have been selected to assess the goodness of the adopted neural networks and compare them also with the manual classification of dermatologists.

Which are the factors affecting the performance of audio surveillance systems?

Antonio Greco, Antonio Roberto, Alessia Saggese, Mario Vento

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Auto-TLDR; Sound Event Recognition Using Convolutional Neural Networks and Visual Representations on MIVIA Audio Events

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Sound event recognition systems are rapidly becoming part of our life, since they can be profitably used in several vertical markets, ranging from audio security applications to scene classification and multi-modal analysis in social robotics. In the last years, a not negligible part of the scientific community started to apply Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to image-based representations of the audio stream, due to their successful adoption in almost all the computer vision tasks. In this paper, we carry out a detailed benchmark of various widely used CNN architectures and visual representations on a popular dataset, namely the MIVIA Audio Events database. Our analysis is aimed at understanding how these factors affect the sound event recognition performance with a particular focus on the false positive rate, very relevant in audio surveillance solutions. In fact, although most of the proposed solutions achieve a high recognition rate, the capability of distinguishing the events-of-interest from the background is often not yet sufficient for real systems, and prevent its usage in real applications. Our comprehensive experimental analysis investigates this aspect and allows to identify useful design guidelines for increasing the specificity of sound event recognition systems.

Self-Supervised Learning for Astronomical Image Classification

Ana Martinazzo, Mateus Espadoto, Nina S. T. Hirata

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Auto-TLDR; Unlabeled Astronomical Images for Deep Neural Network Pre-training

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In Astronomy, a huge amount of image data is generated daily by photometric surveys, which scan the sky to collect data from stars, galaxies and other celestial objects. In this paper, we propose a technique to leverage unlabeled astronomical images to pre-train deep convolutional neural networks, in order to learn a domain-specific feature extractor which improves the results of machine learning techniques in setups with small amounts of labeled data available. We show that our technique produces results which are in many cases better than using ImageNet pre-training.

Documents Counterfeit Detection through a Deep Learning Approach

Darwin Danilo Saire Pilco, Salvatore Tabbone

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Auto-TLDR; End-to-End Learning for Counterfeit Documents Detection using Deep Neural Network

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The main topic of this work is on the detection of counterfeit documents and especially banknotes. We propose an end-to-end learning model using a deep learning approach based on Adapnet++ which manages feature extraction at multiple scale levels using several residual units. Unlike previous models based on regions of interest (ROI) and high-resolution documents, our network is feed with simple input images (i.e., a single patch) and we do not need high resolution images. Besides, discriminative regions can be visualized at different scales. Our network learns by itself which regions of interest predict the better results. Experimental results show that we are competitive compared with the state-of-the-art and our deep neural network has good ability to generalize and can be applied to other kind of documents like identity or administrative one.

Understanding Integrated Gradients with SmoothTaylor for Deep Neural Network Attribution

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

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

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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.

Location Prediction in Real Homes of Older Adults based on K-Means in Low-Resolution Depth Videos

Simon Simonsson, Flávia Dias Casagrande, Evi Zouganeli

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Auto-TLDR; Semi-supervised Learning for Location Recognition and Prediction in Smart Homes using Depth Video Cameras

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In this paper we propose a novel method for location recognition and prediction in smart homes based on semi-supervised learning. We use data collected from low-resolution depth video cameras installed in four apartments with older adults over 70 years of age, and collected during a period of one to seven weeks. The location of the person in the depth images is detected by a person detection algorithm adapted from YOLO (You Only Look Once). The locations extracted from the videos are then clustered using K-means clustering. Sequence prediction algorithms are used to predict the next cluster (location) based on the previous clusters (locations). The accuracy of predicting the next location is up to 91%, a significant improvement compared to the case where binary sensors are placed in the apartment based on human intuition. The paper presents an analysis on the effect of the memory length (i.e. the number of previous clusters used to predict the next one), and on the amount of recorded data required to converge.

Fine-Tuning Convolutional Neural Networks: A Comprehensive Guide and Benchmark Analysis for Glaucoma Screening

Amed Mvoulana, Rostom Kachouri, Mohamed Akil

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Auto-TLDR; Fine-tuning Convolutional Neural Networks for Glaucoma Screening

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This work aimed at giving a comprehensive and in-detailed guide on the route to fine-tuning Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for glaucoma screening. Transfer learning consists in a promising alternative to train CNNs from stratch, to avoid the huge data and resources requirements. After a thorough study of five state-of-the-art CNNs architectures, a complete and well-explained strategy for fine-tuning these networks is proposed, using hyperparameter grid-searching and two-phase training approach. Excellent performance is reached on model evaluation, with a 0.9772 AUROC validation rate, giving arise to reliable glaucoma diagosis-help systems. Also, a benchmark analysis is conducted across all fine-tuned models, studying them according to performance indices such as model complexity and size, AUROC density and inference time. This in-depth analysis allows a rigorous comparison between model characteristics, and is useful for giving practioners important trademarks for prospective applications and deployments.

Operation and Topology Aware Fast Differentiable Architecture Search

Shahid Siddiqui, Christos Kyrkou, Theocharis Theocharides

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Auto-TLDR; EDARTS: Efficient Differentiable Architecture Search with Efficient Optimization

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Differentiable architecture search (DARTS) has gained significant attention amongst neural architecture search approaches due to its effectiveness in finding competitive network architectures with reasonable computational complexity. DARTS' search space however is designed such that even a randomly picked architecture is very competitive and due to the complexity of search architectural building block or cell, it is unclear whether these are certain operations or the cell topology that contributes most to achieving higher final accuracy. In this work, we dissect the DARTS's search space as to understand which components are most effective in producing better architectures. Our experiments show that: (1) Good architectures can be found regardless of the search network depth; (2) Seperable convolution is the most effective operation in the search space; and (3) The cell topology also has substantial effect on the accuracy. Based on these insights, we propose an efficient search approach based referred to as eDARTS, that searches on a pre-specified cell with a good topology with increased attention to important operations using a shallow supernet. Moreover, we propose some optimizations for eDARTS which significantly speed up the search as well as alleviate the well known skip connection aggregation problem of DARTS. eDARTS achieves an error rate of 2.53% on CIFAR-10 using a 3.1M parameters model; while the search cost is less than 30 minutes.

Boundary Optimised Samples Training for Detecting Out-Of-Distribution Images

Luca Marson, Vladimir Li, Atsuto Maki

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Auto-TLDR; Boundary Optimised Samples for Out-of-Distribution Input Detection in Deep Convolutional Networks

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This paper presents a new approach to the problem of detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs in image classifications with deep convolutional networks. We leverage so-called boundary samples to enforce low confidence (maximum softmax probabilities) for inputs far away from the training data. In particular, we propose the boundary optimised samples (named BoS) training algorithm for generating them. Unlike existing approaches, it does not require extra generative adversarial network, but achieves the goal by simply back propagating the gradient of an appropriately designed loss function to the input samples. At the end of the BoS training, all the boundary samples are in principle located on a specific level hypersurface with respect to the designed loss. Our contributions are i) the BoS training as an efficient alternative to generate boundary samples, ii) a robust algorithm therewith to enforce low confidence for OOD samples, and iii) experiments demonstrating improved OOD detection over the baseline. We show the performance using standard datasets for training and different test sets including Fashion MNIST, EMNIST, SVHN, and CIFAR-100, preceded by evaluations with a synthetic 2-dimensional dataset that provide an insight for the new procedure.

Comparison of Deep Learning and Hand Crafted Features for Mining Simulation Data

Theodoros Georgiou, Sebastian Schmitt, Thomas Baeck, Nan Pu, Wei Chen, Michael Lew

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Auto-TLDR; Automated Data Analysis of Flow Fields in Computational Fluid Dynamics Simulations

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Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations are a very important tool for many industrial applications, such as aerodynamic optimization of engineering designs like cars shapes, airplanes parts etc. The output of such simulations, in particular the calculated flow fields, are usually very complex and hard to interpret for realistic three-dimensional real-world applications, especially if time-dependent simulations are investigated. Automated data analysis methods are warranted but a non-trivial obstacle is given by the very large dimensionality of the data. A flow field typically consists of six measurement values for each point of the computational grid in 3D space and time (velocity vector values, turbulent kinetic energy, pressure and viscosity). In this paper we address the task of extracting meaningful results in an automated manner from such high dimensional data sets. We propose deep learning methods which are capable of processing such data and which can be trained to solve relevant tasks on simulation data, i.e. predicting drag and lift forces applied on an airfoil. We also propose an adaptation of the classical hand crafted features known from computer vision to address the same problem and compare a large variety of descriptors and detectors. Finally, we compile a large dataset of 2D simulations of the flow field around airfoils which contains 16000 flow fields with which we tested and compared approaches. Our results show that the deep learning-based methods, as well as hand crafted feature based approaches, are well-capable to accurately describe the content of the CFD simulation output on the proposed dataset.

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.

Automatic Semantic Segmentation of Structural Elements related to the Spinal Cord in the Lumbar Region by Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Jhon Jairo Sáenz Gamboa, Maria De La Iglesia-Vaya, Jon Ander Gómez

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Auto-TLDR; Semantic Segmentation of Lumbar Spine Using Convolutional Neural Networks

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This work addresses the problem of automatically segmenting the MR images corresponding to the lumbar spine. The purpose is to detect and delimit the different structural elements like vertebrae, intervertebral discs, nerves, blood vessels, etc. This task is known as semantic segmentation. The approach proposed in this work is based on convolutional neural networks whose output is a mask where each pixel from the input image is classified into one of the possible classes. Classes were defined by radiologists and correspond to structural elements and tissues. The proposed network architectures are variants of the U-Net. Several complementary blocks were used to define the variants: spatial attention models, deep supervision and multi-kernels at input, this last block type is based on the idea of inception. Those architectures which got the best results are described in this paper, and their results are discussed. Two of the proposed architectures outperform the standard U-Net used as baseline.

Recursive Convolutional Neural Networks for Epigenomics

Aikaterini Symeonidi, Anguelos Nicolaou, Frank Johannes, Vincent Christlein

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Auto-TLDR; Recursive Convolutional Neural Networks for Epigenomic Data Analysis

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Deep learning for epigenomic data analysis has demonstrated to be very promising for analysis of genomic and epigenomic data. In this paper we introduce the use of Recursive Convolutional Neural Networks (RCNN) as tool for epigenomic data analysis. We focus on the task of predicting gene expression from the intensity of histone modifications. The proposed RCNN architecture can be applied on data of an arbitrary size and has a single meta-parameter that quantifies the models capacity making it flexible for experimenting. The proposed architecture outperforms state-of-the-art systems while having several orders of magnitude fewer parameters.

BAT Optimized CNN Model Identifies Water Stress in Chickpea Plant Shoot Images

Shiva Azimi, Taranjit Kaur, Tapan Gandhi

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Auto-TLDR; BAT Optimized ResNet-18 for Stress Classification of chickpea shoot images under water deficiency

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Stress due to water deficiency in plants can significantly lower the agricultural yield. It can affect many visible plant traits such as size and surface area, the number of leaves and their color, etc. In recent years, computer vision-based plant phenomics has emerged as a promising tool for plant research and management. Such techniques have the advantage of being non-destructive, non-evasive, fast, and offer high levels of automation. Pulses like chickpeas play an important role in ensuring food security in poor countries owing to their high protein and nutrition content. In the present work, we have built a dataset comprising of two varieties of chickpea plant shoot images under different moisture stress conditions. Specifically, we propose a BAT optimized ResNet-18 model for classifying stress induced by water deficiency using chickpea shoot images. BAT algorithm identifies the optimal value of the mini-batch size to be used for training rather than employing the traditional manual approach of trial and error. Experimentation on two crop varieties (JG and Pusa) reveals that BAT optimized approach achieves an accuracy of 96% and 91% for JG and Pusa varieties that is better than the traditional method by 4%. The experimental results are also compared with state of the art CNN models like Alexnet, GoogleNet, and ResNet-50. The comparison results demonstrate that the proposed BAT optimized ResNet-18 model achieves higher performance than the comparison counterparts.

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.

Speeding-Up Pruning for Artificial Neural Networks: Introducing Accelerated Iterative Magnitude Pruning

Marco Zullich, Eric Medvet, Felice Andrea Pellegrino, Alessio Ansuini

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Auto-TLDR; Iterative Pruning of Artificial Neural Networks with Overparametrization

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In recent years, Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) pruning has become the focal point of many researches, due to the extreme overparametrization of such models. This has urged the scientific world to investigate methods for the simplification of the structure of weights in ANNs, mainly in an effort to reduce time for both training and inference. Frankle and Carbin and later Renda, Frankle, and Carbin introduced and refined an iterative pruning method which is able to effectively prune the network of a great portion of its parameters with little to no loss in performance. On the downside, this method requires a large amount of time for its application, since, for each iteration, the network has to be trained for (almost) the same amount of epochs of the unpruned network. In this work, we show that, for a limited setting, if targeting high overall sparsity rates, this time can be effectively reduced for each iteration, save for the last one, by more than 50%, while yielding a final product (i.e., final pruned network) whose performance is comparable to the ANN obtained using the existing method.

Automatic Tuberculosis Detection Using Chest X-Ray Analysis with Position Enhanced Structural Information

Hermann Jepdjio Nkouanga, Szilard Vajda

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Auto-TLDR; Automatic Chest X-ray Screening for Tuberculosis in Rural Population using Localized Region on Interest

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For Tuberculosis (TB) detection beside the more expensive diagnosis solutions such as culture or sputum smear analysis one could consider the automatic analysis of the chest X-ray (CXR). This could mimic the lung region reading by the radiologist and it could provide a cheap solution to analyze and diagnose pulmonary abnormalities such as TB which often co- occurs with HIV. This software based pulmonary screening can be a reliable and affordable solution for rural population in different parts of the world such as India, Africa, etc. Our fully automatic system is processing the incoming CXR image by applying image processing techniques to detect the region on interest (ROI) followed by a computationally cheap feature extraction involving edge detection using Laplacian of Gaussian which we enrich by counting the local distribution of the intensities. The choice to ”zoom in” the ROI and look for abnormalities locally is motivated by the fact that some pulmonary abnormalities are localized in specific regions of the lungs. Later on the classifiers can decide about the normal or abnormal nature of each lung X-ray. Our goal is to find a simple feature, instead of a combination of several ones, -proposed and promoted in recent years’ literature, which can properly describe the different pathological alterations in the lungs. Our experiments report results on two publicly available data collections1, namely the Shenzhen and the Montgomery collection. For performance evaluation, measures such as area under the curve (AUC), and accuracy (ACC) were considered, achieving AUC = 0.81 (ACC = 83.33%) and AUC = 0.96 (ACC = 96.35%) for the Montgomery and Schenzen collections, respectively. Several comparisons are also provided to other state- of-the-art systems reported recently in the field.

MaxDropout: Deep Neural Network Regularization Based on Maximum Output Values

Claudio Filipi Gonçalves Santos, Danilo Colombo, Mateus Roder, Joao Paulo Papa

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Auto-TLDR; MaxDropout: A Regularizer for Deep Neural Networks

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Different techniques have emerged in the deep learning scenario, such as Convolutional Neural Networks, Deep Belief Networks, and Long Short-Term Memory Networks, to cite a few. In lockstep, regularization methods, which aim to prevent overfitting by penalizing the weight connections, or turning off some units, have been widely studied either. In this paper, we present a novel approach called MaxDropout, a regularizer for deep neural network models that works in a supervised fashion by removing (shutting off) the prominent neurons (i.e., most active) in each hidden layer. The model forces fewer activated units to learn more representative information, thus providing sparsity. Regarding the experiments, we show that it is possible to improve existing neural networks and provide better results in neural networks when Dropout is replaced by MaxDropout. The proposed method was evaluated in image classification, achieving comparable results to existing regularizers, such as Cutout and RandomErasing, also improving the accuracy of neural networks that uses Dropout by replacing the existing layer by MaxDropout.

Influence of Event Duration on Automatic Wheeze Classification

Bruno M Rocha, Diogo Pessoa, Alda Marques, Paulo Carvalho, Rui Pedro Paiva

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Auto-TLDR; Experimental Design of the Non-wheeze Class for Wheeze Classification

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Patients with respiratory conditions typically exhibit adventitious respiratory sounds, such as wheezes. Wheeze events have variable duration. In this work we studied the influence of event duration on wheeze classification, namely how the creation of the non-wheeze class affected the classifiers' performance. First, we evaluated several classifiers on an open access respiratory sound database, with the best one reaching sensitivity and specificity values of 98% and 95%, respectively. Then, by changing one parameter in the design of the non-wheeze class, i.e., event duration, the best classifier only reached sensitivity and specificity values of 53% and 75%, respectively. These results demonstrate the importance of experimental design on the assessment of wheeze classification algorithms' performance.

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

Wolfgang Fuhl, Yao Rong, Enkelejda Kasneci

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

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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.

Improving Model Accuracy for Imbalanced Image Classification Tasks by Adding a Final Batch Normalization Layer: An Empirical Study

Veysel Kocaman, Ofer M. Shir, Thomas Baeck

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Auto-TLDR; Exploiting Batch Normalization before the Output Layer in Deep Learning for Minority Class Detection in Imbalanced Data Sets

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Some real-world domains, such as Agriculture and Healthcare, comprise early-stage disease indications whose recording constitutes a rare event, and yet, whose precise detection at that stage is critical. In this type of highly imbalanced classification problems, which encompass complex features, deep learning (DL) is much needed because of its strong detection capabilities. At the same time, DL is observed in practice to favor majority over minority classes and consequently suffer from inaccurate detection of the targeted early-stage indications. To simulate such scenarios, we artificially generate skewness (99% vs. 1%) for certain plant types out of the PlantVillage dataset as a basis for classification of scarce visual cues through transfer learning. By randomly and unevenly picking healthy and unhealthy samples from certain plant types to form a training set, we consider a base experiment as fine-tuning ResNet34 and VGG19 architectures and then testing the model performance on a balanced dataset of healthy and unhealthy images. We empirically observe that the initial F1 test score jumps from 0.29 to 0.95 for the minority class upon adding a final Batch Normalization (BN) layer just before the output layer in VGG19. We demonstrate that utilizing an additional BN layer before the output layer in modern CNN architectures has a considerable impact in terms of minimizing the training time and testing error for minority classes in highly imbalanced data sets. Moreover, when the final BN is employed, trying to minimize validation and training losses may not be an optimal way for getting a high F1 test score for minority classes in anomaly detection problems. That is, the network might perform better even if it is not ‘confident’ enough while making a prediction; leading to another discussion about why softmax output is not a good uncertainty measure for DL models.

Wireless Localisation in WiFi Using Novel Deep Architectures

Peizheng Li, Han Cui, Aftab Khan, Usman Raza, Robert Piechocki, Angela Doufexi, Tim Farnham

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Auto-TLDR; Deep Neural Network for Indoor Localisation of WiFi Devices in Indoor Environments

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This paper studies the indoor localisation of WiFi devices based on a commodity chipset and standard channel sounding. First, we present a novel shallow neural network (SNN) in which features are extracted from the channel state information (CSI) corresponding to WiFi subcarriers received on different antennas and used to train the model. The single layer architecture of this localisation neural network makes it lightweight and easy-to-deploy on devices with stringent constraints on computational resources. We further investigate for localisation the use of deep learning models and design novel architectures for convolutional neural network (CNN) and long-short term memory (LSTM). We extensively evaluate these localisation algorithms for continuous tracking in indoor environments. Experimental results prove that even an SNN model, after a careful handcrafted feature extraction, can achieve accurate localisation. Meanwhile, using a well-organised architecture, the neural network models can be trained directly with raw data from the CSI and localisation features can be automatically extracted to achieve accurate position estimates. We also found that the performance of neural network-based methods are directly affected by the number of anchor access points (APs) regardless of their structure. With three APs, all neural network models proposed in this paper can obtain localisation accuracy of around 0.5 metres. In addition the proposed deep NN architecture reduces the data pre-processing time by 6.5 hours compared with a shallow NN using the data collected in our testbed. In the deployment phase, the inference time is also significantly reduced to 0.1 ms per sample. We also demonstrate the generalisation capability of the proposed method by evaluating models using different target movement characteristics to the ones in which they were trained.

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.

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.

AdaFilter: Adaptive Filter Design with Local Image Basis Decomposition for Optimizing Image Recognition Preprocessing

Aiga Suzuki, Keiichi Ito, Takahide Ibe, Nobuyuki Otsu

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Auto-TLDR; Optimal Preprocessing Filtering for Pattern Recognition Using Higher-Order Local Auto-Correlation

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Image preprocessing is an important process during pattern recognition which increases the recognition performance. Linear convolution filtering is a primary preprocessing method used to enhance particular local patterns of the image which are essential for recognizing the images. However, because of the vast search space of the preprocessing filter, almost no earlier studies have tackled the problem of identifying an optimal preprocessing filter that yields effective features for input images. This paper proposes a novel design method for the optimal preprocessing filter corresponding to a given task. Our method calculates local image bases of the training dataset and represents the optimal filter as a linear combination of these local image bases with the optimized coefficients to maximize the expected generalization performance. Thereby, the optimization problem of the preprocessing filter is converted to a lower-dimensional optimization problem. Our proposed method combined with a higher-order local auto-correlation (HLAC) feature extraction exhibited the best performance both in the anomaly detection task with the conventional pattern recognition algorithm and in the classification task using the deep convolutional neural network compared with typical preprocessing filters.

Feature Engineering and Stacked Echo State Networks for Musical Onset Detection

Peter Steiner, Azarakhsh Jalalvand, Simon Stone, Peter Birkholz

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Auto-TLDR; Echo State Networks for Onset Detection in Music Analysis

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In music analysis, one of the most fundamental tasks is note onset detection - detecting the beginning of new note events. As the target function of onset detection is related to other tasks, such as beat tracking or tempo estimation, onset detection is the basis for such related tasks. Furthermore, it can help to improve Automatic Music Transcription (AMT). Typically, different approaches for onset detection follow a similar outline: An audio signal is transformed into an Onset Detection Function (ODF), which should have rather low values (i.e. close to zero) for most of the time but with pronounced peaks at onset times, which can then be extracted by applying peak picking algorithms on the ODF. In the recent years, several kinds of neural networks were used successfully to compute the ODF from feature vectors. Currently, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) define the state of the art. In this paper, we build up on an alternative approach to obtain a ODF by Echo State Networks (ESNs), which have achieved comparable results to CNNs in several tasks, such as speech and image recognition. In contrast to the typical iterative training procedures of deep learning architectures, such as CNNs or networks consisting of Long-Short-Term Memory Cells (LSTMs), in ESNs only a very small part of the weights is easily trained in one shot using linear regression. By comparing the performance of several feature extraction methods, pre-processing steps and introducing a new way to stack ESNs, we expand our previous approach to achieve results that fall between a bidirectional LSTM network and a CNN with relative improvements of 1.8% and -1.4%, respectively. For the evaluation, we used exactly the same 8-fold cross validation setup as for the reference results.

Improving Batch Normalization with Skewness Reduction for Deep Neural Networks

Pak Lun Kevin Ding, Martin Sarah, Baoxin Li

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Auto-TLDR; Batch Normalization with Skewness Reduction

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Batch Normalization (BN) is a well-known technique used in training deep neural networks. The main idea behind batch normalization is to normalize the features of the layers ($i.e.$, transforming them to have a mean equal to zero and a variance equal to one). Such a procedure encourages the optimization landscape of the loss function to be smoother, and improve the learning of the networks for both speed and performance. In this paper, we demonstrate that the performance of the network can be improved, if the distributions of the features of the output in the same layer are similar. As normalizing based on mean and variance does not necessarily make the features to have the same distribution, we propose a new normalization scheme: Batch Normalization with Skewness Reduction (BNSR). Comparing with other normalization approaches, BNSR transforms not just only the mean and variance, but also the skewness of the data. By tackling this property of a distribution, we are able to make the output distributions of the layers to be further similar. The nonlinearity of BNSR may further improve the expressiveness of the underlying network. Comparisons with other normalization schemes are tested on the CIFAR-100 and ImageNet datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can outperform other state-of-the-arts that are not equipped with BNSR.

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.

Mean Decision Rules Method with Smart Sampling for Fast Large-Scale Binary SVM Classification

Alexandra Makarova, Mikhail Kurbakov, Valentina Sulimova

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Auto-TLDR; Improving Mean Decision Rule for Large-Scale Binary SVM Problems

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This paper relies on the Mean Decision Rule (MDR) method for solving large-scale binary SVM problems. It consists in taking small random samples of the full dataset and separate training for each of them with consecutive averaging the respective individual decision rules to obtain a final one. This paper proposes two new approaches to improve it. The first proposed approach is a new sampling technique that exploits SVM and MDR properties to fast form so called smart samples by selecting only the objects, that are candidates to be the support ones. The proposed technique essentially increases MDR convergence and allows to reach the highest quality in less time. In the case of kernel-based MDR (KMDR) the proposed sampling technique allows additionally to reduce the number of support objects in the final decision rule and, as a result, to decrease the recognition time. The second proposed approach is a new data strategy to accelerate random access to large datasets stored in the traditional libsvm format. The proposed strategy allows to quickly extract random subsets of objects from a file and load them into RAM, and is it also suitable for any sampling-based methods, including stochastic gradient methods. Joint using of the proposed approaches with (K)MDR allows to obtain the best (or near the best) decision of large-scale binary SVM problems faster, compared to the existing SVM solvers.

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".

Not All Domains Are Equally Complex: Adaptive Multi-Domain Learning

Ali Senhaji, Jenni Karoliina Raitoharju, Moncef Gabbouj, Alexandros Iosifidis

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Auto-TLDR; Adaptive Parameterization for Multi-Domain Learning

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Deep learning approaches are highly specialized and require training separate models for different tasks. Multi-domain learning looks at ways to learn a multitude of different tasks, each coming from a different domain, at once. The most common approach in multi-domain learning is to form a domain agnostic model, the parameters of which are shared among all domains, and learn a small number of extra domain-specific parameters for each individual new domain. However, different domains come with different levels of difficulty; parameterizing the models of all domains using an augmented version of the domain agnostic model leads to unnecessarily inefficient solutions, especially for easy to solve tasks. We propose an adaptive parameterization approach to deep neural networks for multi-domain learning. The proposed approach performs on par with the original approach while reducing by far the number of parameters, leading to efficient multi-domain learning solutions.

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.

ESResNet: Environmental Sound Classification Based on Visual Domain Models

Andrey Guzhov, Federico Raue, Jörn Hees, Andreas Dengel

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Auto-TLDR; Environmental Sound Classification with Short-Time Fourier Transform Spectrograms

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Environmental Sound Classification (ESC) is an active research area in the audio domain and has seen a lot of progress in the past years. However, many of the existing approaches achieve high accuracy by relying on domain-specific features and architectures, making it harder to benefit from advances in other fields (e.g., the image domain). Additionally, some of the past successes have been attributed to a discrepancy of how results are evaluated (i.e., on unofficial splits of the UrbanSound8K (US8K) dataset), distorting the overall progression of the field. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we present a model that is inherently compatible with mono and stereo sound inputs. Our model is based on simple log-power Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) spectrograms and combines them with several well-known approaches from the image domain (i.e., ResNet, Siamese-like networks and attention). We investigate the influence of cross-domain pre-training, architectural changes, and evaluate our model on standard datasets. We find that our model out-performs all previously known approaches in a fair comparison by achieving accuracies of 97.0 % (ESC-10), 91.5 % (ESC-50) and 84.2 % / 85.4 % (US8K mono / stereo). Second, we provide a comprehensive overview of the actual state of the field, by differentiating several previously reported results on the US8K dataset between official or unofficial splits. For better reproducibility, our code (including any re-implementations) is made available.

Explainable Online Validation of Machine Learning Models for Practical Applications

Wolfgang Fuhl, Yao Rong, Thomas Motz, Michael Scheidt, Andreas Markus Hartel, Andreas Koch, Enkelejda Kasneci

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Auto-TLDR; A Reformulation of Regression and Classification for Machine Learning Algorithm Validation

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We present a reformulation of the regression and classification, which aims to validate the result of a machine learning algorithm. Our reformulation simplifies the original problem and validates the result of the machine learning algorithm using the training data. Since the validation of machine learning algorithms must always be explainable, we perform our experiments with the kNN algorithm as well as with an algorithm based on conditional probabilities, which is proposed in this work. For the evaluation of our approach, three publicly available data sets were used and three classification and two regression problems were evaluated. The presented algorithm based on conditional probabilities is also online capable and requires only a fraction of memory compared to the kNN algorithm.

Regularized Flexible Activation Function Combinations for Deep Neural Networks

Renlong Jie, Junbin Gao, Andrey Vasnev, Minh-Ngoc Tran

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Auto-TLDR; Flexible Activation in Deep Neural Networks using ReLU and ELUs

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Activation in deep neural networks is fundamental to achieving non-linear mappings. Traditional studies mainly focus on finding fixed activations for a particular set of learning tasks or model architectures. The research on flexible activation is quite limited in both designing philosophy and application scenarios. In this study, three principles of choosing flexible activation components are proposed and a general combined form of flexible activation functions is implemented. Based on this, a novel family of flexible activation functions that can replace sigmoid or tanh in LSTM cells are implemented, as well as a new family by combining ReLU and ELUs. Also, two new regularisation terms based on assumptions as prior knowledge are introduced. It has been shown that LSTM models with proposed flexible activations P-Sig-Ramp provide significant improvements in time series forecasting, while the proposed P-E2-ReLU achieves better and more stable performance on lossy image compression tasks with convolutional auto-encoders. In addition, the proposed regularization terms improve the convergence,performance and stability of the models with flexible activation functions. The code for this paper is available at https://github.com/9NXJRDDRQK/Flexible Activation.

Investigating and Exploiting Image Resolution for Transfer Learning-Based Skin Lesion Classification

Amirreza Mahbod, Gerald Schaefer, Chunliang Wang, Rupert Ecker, Georg Dorffner, Isabella Ellinger

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Auto-TLDR; Fine-tuned Neural Networks for Skin Lesion Classification Using Dermoscopic Images

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Skin cancer is among the most common cancer types. Dermoscopic image analysis improves the diagnostic accuracy for detection of malignant melanoma and other pigmented skin lesions when compared to unaided visual inspection. Hence, computer-based methods to support medical experts in the diagnostic procedure are of great interest. Fine-tuning pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has been shown to work well for skin lesion classification. Pre-trained CNNs are usually trained with natural images of a fixed image size which is typically significantly smaller than captured skin lesion images and consequently dermoscopic images are downsampled for fine-tuning. However, useful medical information may be lost during this transformation. In this paper, we explore the effect of input image size on skin lesion classification performance of fine-tuned CNNs. For this, we resize dermoscopic images to different resolutions, ranging from 64x64 to 768x768 pixels and investigate the resulting classification performance of three well-established CNNs, namely DenseNet-121, ResNet-18, and ResNet-50. Our results show that using very small images (of size 64x64 pixels) degrades the classification performance, while images of size 128x128 pixels and above support good performance with larger image sizes leading to slightly improved classification. We further propose a novel fusion approach based on a three-level ensemble strategy that exploits multiple fine-tuned networks trained with dermoscopic images at various sizes. When applied on the ISIC 2017 skin lesion classification challenge, our fusion approach yields an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 89.2% and 96.6% for melanoma classification and seborrheic keratosis classification, respectively, outperforming state-of-the-art algorithms.

Phase Retrieval Using Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks

Tobias Uelwer, Alexander Oberstraß, Stefan Harmeling

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Auto-TLDR; Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks for Phase Retrieval

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In this paper, we propose the application of conditional generative adversarial networks to solve various phase retrieval problems. We show that including knowledge of the measurement process at training time leads to an optimization at test time that is more robust to initialization than existing approaches involving generative models. In addition, conditioning the generator network on the measurements enables us to achieve much more detailed results. We empirically demonstrate that these advantages provide meaningful solutions to the Fourier and the compressive phase retrieval problem and that our method outperforms well-established projection-based methods as well as existing methods that are based on neural networks. Like other deep learning methods, our approach is very robust to noise and can therefore be very useful for real-world applications.

Evaluation of Anomaly Detection Algorithms for the Real-World Applications

Marija Ivanovska, Domen Tabernik, Danijel Skocaj, Janez Pers

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Auto-TLDR; Evaluating Anomaly Detection Algorithms for Practical Applications

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Anomaly detection in complex data structures is oneof the most challenging problems in computer vision. In manyreal-world problems, for example in the quality control in modernmanufacturing, the anomalous samples are usually rare, resultingin (highly) imbalanced datasets. However, in current researchpractice, these scenarios are rarely modeled, and as a conse-quence, evaluation of anomaly detection algorithms often do notreproduce results that are useful for practical applications. First,even in case of highly unbalanced input data, anomaly detectionalgorithms are expected to significantly reduce the proportionof anomalous samples, detecting ”almost all” anomalous samples(with exact specifications depending on the target customer). Thisplaces high importance on only the small part of the ROC curve,possibly rendering the standard metrics such as AUC (AreaUnder Curve) and AP (Average Precision) useless. Second, thetarget of automatic anomaly detection in practical applicationsis significant reduction in manual work required, and standardmetrics are poor predictor of this feature. Finally, the evaluationmay produce erratic results for different randomly initializedtraining runs of the neural network, producing evaluation resultsthat may not reproduce well in practice. In this paper, we presentan evaluation methodology that avoids these pitfalls.

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.