Asia
Multi-view Vector-valued Manifold Regularization for Multi-label Image Classification
Luo, Yong, Tao, Dacheng, Xu, Chang, Xu, Chao, Liu, Hong, Wen, Yonggang
In computer vision, image datasets used for classification are naturally associated with multiple labels and comprised of multiple views, because each image may contain several objects (e.g. pedestrian, bicycle and tree) and is properly characterized by multiple visual features (e.g. color, texture and shape). Currently available tools ignore either the label relationship or the view complementary. Motivated by the success of the vector-valued function that constructs matrix-valued kernels to explore the multi-label structure in the output space, we introduce multi-view vector-valued manifold regularization (MV$\mathbf{^3}$MR) to integrate multiple features. MV$\mathbf{^3}$MR exploits the complementary property of different features and discovers the intrinsic local geometry of the compact support shared by different features under the theme of manifold regularization. We conducted extensive experiments on two challenging, but popular datasets, PASCAL VOC' 07 (VOC) and MIR Flickr (MIR), and validated the effectiveness of the proposed MV$\mathbf{^3}$MR for image classification.
Multi-View Matrix Completion for Multi-Label Image Classification
Luo, Yong, Liu, Tongliang, Tao, Dacheng, Xu, Chao
There is growing interest in multi-label image classification due to its critical role in web-based image analytics-based applications, such as large-scale image retrieval and browsing. Matrix completion has recently been introduced as a method for transductive (semi-supervised) multi-label classification, and has several distinct advantages, including robustness to missing data and background noise in both feature and label space. However, it is limited by only considering data represented by a single-view feature, which cannot precisely characterize images containing several semantic concepts. To utilize multiple features taken from different views, we have to concatenate the different features as a long vector. But this concatenation is prone to over-fitting and often leads to very high time complexity in MC based image classification. Therefore, we propose to weightedly combine the MC outputs of different views, and present the multi-view matrix completion (MVMC) framework for transductive multi-label image classification. To learn the view combination weights effectively, we apply a cross validation strategy on the labeled set. In the learning process, we adopt the average precision (AP) loss, which is particular suitable for multi-label image classification. A least squares loss formulation is also presented for the sake of efficiency, and the robustness of the algorithm based on the AP loss compared with the other losses is investigated. Experimental evaluation on two real world datasets (PASCAL VOC' 07 and MIR Flickr) demonstrate the effectiveness of MVMC for transductive (semi-supervised) multi-label image classification, and show that MVMC can exploit complementary properties of different features and output-consistent labels for improved multi-label image classification.
Semi-Supervised Few-Shot Learning for Dual Question-Answer Extraction
Wang, Jue, Chen, Ke, Shou, Lidan, Wu, Sai, Mehrotra, Sharad
This paper addresses the problem of key phrase extraction from sentences. Existing state-of-the-art supervised methods require large amounts of annotated data to achieve good performance and generalization. Collecting labeled data is, however, often expensive. In this paper, we redefine the problem as question-answer extraction, and present SAMIE: Self-Asking Model for Information Ixtraction, a semi-supervised model which dually learns to ask and to answer questions by itself. Briefly, given a sentence $s$ and an answer $a$, the model needs to choose the most appropriate question $\hat q$; meanwhile, for the given sentence $s$ and same question $\hat q$ selected in the previous step, the model will predict an answer $\hat a$. The model can support few-shot learning with very limited supervision. It can also be used to perform clustering analysis when no supervision is provided. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms typical supervised methods especially when given little labeled data.
Weakly Supervised Person Re-identification: Cost-effective Learning with A New Benchmark
Wang, Guangrun, Wang, Guangcong, Zhang, Xujie, Lai, Jianhuang, Lin, Liang
Person re-identification (ReID) benefits greatly from the accurate annotations of existing datasets (e.g., CUHK03 \cite{li2014deepreid} and Market-1501 \cite{zheng2015scalable}), which are quite expensive because each image in these datasets has to be assigned with a proper label. In this work, we explore to ease the annotation of ReID by replacing the accurate annotation with inaccurate annotation, i.e., we group the images into bags in terms of time and assign a bag-level label for each bag. This greatly reduces the annotation effort and leads to the creation of a large-scale ReID benchmark called SYSU-30$k$. The new benchmark contains $30k$ categories of persons, which is about $20$ times larger than CUHK03 ($1.3k$ categories) and Market-1501 ($1.5k$ categories), and $30$ times larger the ImageNet ($1k$ categories). It totally sums up to 29,606,918 images. Learning a ReID model with bag-level annotation is called the weakly supervised ReID problem. To solve this problem, we introduce conditional random fields (CRFs) to capture the dependencies from all images in a bag and generate a reliable pseudo label for each person image. The pseudo label is further used to supervise the learning of the ReID model. When compared with the fully supervised ReID models, our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on SYSU-30$k$ and other datasets. The code, dataset, and pretrained model will be available online.
G7 pushes North Korea to continue denuclearization talks with U.S.
DINARD, FRANCE - Foreign ministers of Group of Seven nations on Saturday pushed North Korea to continue denuclearization negotiations with the United States while vowing to maintain pressure on Pyongyang to encourage it to give up its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. In a communique issued after a two-day meeting in Dinard, western France, the ministers also expressed serious concern about the situation in the East and South China seas -- a veiled criticism of China's militarization of outposts in disputed areas of the South China Sea and its attempts to undermine Japan's control of the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea. The Senkakus are administered by Japan, but claimed by China and Taiwa, which call them the Diaoyu and Tiaoyutai, respectively. During the meeting, some G7 members touched on China's expanding global ambitions through its signature Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure project, a Japanese official said. But the communique makes no reference to the initiative in an apparent effort to demonstrate unity among the group.
The Construction Industry Needs a Robot Revolution
In debates about the future of work, technology is often portrayed as the villain. One recent study calculated that 38 percent of jobs in the United States were at a "high risk" of being automated during the next decade. In the construction industry, predictions are especially dire: estimates of robot-fueled joblessness range from 24 percent in Britain to 41percent in Germany. Borja García de Soto is an Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), a Global Network Assistant Professor of Civil and Urban Engineering at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and Director of NYUAD's S.M.A.R.T. Construction Research Group. There is no question that automation will change the way people work, but for some sectors of the economy, change is long overdue.
Bilinear Faster RCNN with ELA for Image Tampering Detection
With technological advances leading to an increase in mechanisms of image tampering, our fraud detection methods must continue to be upgraded to match their sophistication. One problem with current methods is that they require prior knowledge of the method of forgery in order to determine which features to extract from the image to localize the region of interest. When a machine learning algorithm is used to learn different types tampering from a large set of various image types, with a big enough database we can easily classify which images are tampered (by training on the entire image feature map for each image), but we still are left with the question of which features to train on, and how to localize the manipulation. To solve this, object detection networks such as Faster RCNN, which combine an RPN (Region Proposal Network) with a CNN have recently been adapted to fraud detection by utilizing their ability to propose bounding boxes for objects of interest to localize the tampering artifacts. In this work, an existing bilinear Faster RCNN model that was developed will be modified with the second stream having an input of the ELA (Error Level Analysis) JPEG compression level mask.
Adaptively Connected Neural Networks
Wang, Guangrun, Wang, Keze, Lin, Liang
This paper presents a novel adaptively connected neural network (ACNet) to improve the traditional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) {in} two aspects. First, ACNet employs a flexible way to switch global and local inference in processing the internal feature representations by adaptively determining the connection status among the feature nodes (e.g., pixels of the feature maps) \footnote{In a computer vision domain, a node refers to a pixel of a feature map{, while} in {the} graph domain, a node denotes a graph node.}. We can show that existing CNNs, the classical multilayer perceptron (MLP), and the recently proposed non-local network (NLN) \cite{nonlocalnn17} are all special cases of ACNet. Second, ACNet is also capable of handling non-Euclidean data. Extensive experimental analyses on {a variety of benchmarks (i.e.,} ImageNet-1k classification, COCO 2017 detection and segmentation, CUHK03 person re-identification, CIFAR analysis, and Cora document categorization) demonstrate that {ACNet} cannot only achieve state-of-the-art performance but also overcome the limitation of the conventional MLP and CNN \footnote{Corresponding author: Liang Lin (linliang@ieee.org)}. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/wanggrun/Adaptively-Connected-Neural-Networks}.
Policy Gradient Search: Online Planning and Expert Iteration without Search Trees
Anthony, Thomas, Nishihara, Robert, Moritz, Philipp, Salimans, Tim, Schulman, John
Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithms perform simulation-based search to improve policies online. During search, the simulation policy is adapted to explore the most promising lines of play. MCTS has been used by state-of-the-art programs for many problems, however a disadvantage to MCTS is that it estimates the values of states with Monte Carlo averages, stored in a search tree; this does not scale to games with very high branching factors. We propose an alternative simulation-based search method, Policy Gradient Search (PGS), which adapts a neural network simulation policy online via policy gradient updates, avoiding the need for a search tree. In Hex, PGS achieves comparable performance to MCTS, and an agent trained using Expert Iteration with PGS was able defeat MoHex 2.0, the strongest open-source Hex agent, in 9x9 Hex.