While labeled data is expensive to prepare, ever increasing amounts of unlabeled data is becoming widely available. In order to adapt to this phenomenon, several semi-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms, which learn from labeled as well as unlabeled data, have been developed. In a separate line of work, researchers have started to realize that graphs provide a natural way to represent data in a variety of domains. Graph-based SSL algorithms, which bring together these two lines of work, have been shown to outperform the state-of-the-art in many applications in speech processing, computer vision, natural language processing, and other areas of Artificial Intelligence. Recognizing this promising and emerging area of research, this synthesis lecture focuses on graph-based SSL algorithms (e.g., label propagation methods).

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The Mean-Teacher (MT) scheme is widely adopted in semi-supervised object detection (SSOD). In MT, the sparse pseudo labels, offered by the final predictions of the teacher (e.g., after Non Maximum Suppression (NMS) post-processing), are adopted for the dense supervision for the student via hand-crafted label assignment. However, the sparse-to-dense paradigm complicates the pipeline of SSOD, and simultaneously neglects the powerful direct, dense teacher supervision. In this paper, we attempt to directly leverage the dense guidance of teacher to supervise student training, i.e., the dense-to-dense paradigm. Specifically, we propose the Inverse NMS Clustering (INC) and Rank Matching (RM) to instantiate the dense supervision, without the widely used, conventional sparse pseudo labels. INC leads the student to group candidate boxes into clusters in NMS as the teacher does, which is implemented by learning grouping information revealed in NMS procedure of the teacher. After obtaining the same grouping scheme as the teacher via INC, the student further imitates the rank distribution of the teacher over clustered candidates through Rank Matching. With the proposed INC and RM, we integrate Dense Teacher Guidance into Semi-Supervised Object Detection (termed DTG-SSOD), successfully abandoning sparse pseudo labels and enabling more informative learning on unlabeled data. On COCO benchmark, our DTG-SSOD achieves state-of-the-art performance under various labelling ratios. For example, under 10% labelling ratio, DTG-SSOD improves the supervised baseline from 26.9 to 35.9 mAP, outperforming the previous best method Soft Teacher by 1.9 points.

Machine learning is one of the fastest-growing fields in the current technological landscape and it refers to a branch of artificial intelligence that deals with the prediction of outcomes by imitating the way that humans learn and perceive things. When talking about the classification of machine learning, primarily two categories come to mind namely Supervised Learning and Unsupervised Learning. In the following article, I'll be discussing a median path between the two called Semi-Supervised Learning. The primary difference between supervised and unsupervised learning is the type of data used by the algorithms. Supervised learning works on labelled data while unsupervised learning works on grouping or classifying the data based on similarities or differences rather than labels.

In the field of machine learning, semi-supervised learning (SSL) occupies the middle ground, between supervised learning (in which all training examples are labeled) and unsupervised learning (in which no label data are given). Interest in SSL has increased in recent years, particularly because of application domains in which unlabeled data are plentiful, such as images, text, and bioinformatics. This first comprehensive overview of SSL presents state-of-the-art algorithms, a taxonomy of the field, selected applications, benchmark experiments, and perspectives on ongoing and future research.Semi-Supervised Learning first presents the key assumptions and ideas underlying the field: smoothness, cluster or low-density separation, manifold structure, and transduction. The core of the book is the presentation of SSL methods, organized according to algorithmic strategies. After an examination of generative models, the book describes algorithms that implement the low-density separation assumption, graph-based methods, and algorithms that perform two-step learning.

We investigate the unsupervised learning of non-invertible observation functions in nonlinear state-space models. Assuming abundant data of the observation process along with the distribution of the state process, we introduce a nonparametric generalized moment method to estimate the observation function via constrained regression. The major challenge comes from the non-invertibility of the observation function and the lack of data pairs between the state and observation. We address the fundamental issue of identifiability from quadratic loss functionals and show that the function space of identifiability is the closure of a RKHS that is intrinsic to the state process. Numerical results show that the first two moments and temporal correlations, along with upper and lower bounds, can identify functions ranging from piecewise polynomials to smooth functions, leading to convergent estimators. The limitations of this method, such as non-identifiability due to symmetry and stationarity, are also discussed.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN-s) -- sounds complicated, doesn't it? It is a lot simpler than it sounds. In this article, I will intuitively explain how those programs work, what they are used for, and my view on their future applications. Without further ado, let's get into it. The cheater wants to print banknotes that are indistinguishable from real money.

Presenting a coherent structure, the book logically connects novel mathematical formulations and efficient computational solutions for a range of unsupervised learning tasks, including visual feature matching, learning and classification, object discovery, and semantic segmentation in video. The final part of the book proposes a general strategy for visual learning over several generations of student-teacher neural networks, along with a unique view on the future of unsupervised learning in real-world contexts.

【Keras 2 : 生成深層学習 – CycleGAN】Keras Web サイトのドキュメントの翻訳を進めています。今回は Code examples の「生成深層学習」から「CycleGAN」です。このノートブックは、画像-to-画像変換問題を解くことを目標としたモデル CycleGAN の実装を実演します。[Moe]

Decision making algorithms, in practice, are often trained on data that exhibits a variety of biases. Decision-makers often aim to take decisions based on some ground-truth target that is assumed or expected to be unbiased, i.e., equally distributed across socially salient groups. In many practical settings, the ground-truth cannot be directly observed, and instead, we have to rely on a biased proxy measure of the ground-truth, i.e., biased labels, in the data. In addition, data is often selectively labeled, i.e., even the biased labels are only observed for a small fraction of the data that received a positive decision. To overcome label and selection biases, recent work proposes to learn stochastic, exploring decision policies via i) online training of new policies at each time-step and ii) enforcing fairness as a constraint on performance. However, the existing approach uses only labeled data, disregarding a large amount of unlabeled data, and thereby suffers from high instability and variance in the learned decision policies at different times. In this paper, we propose a novel method based on a variational autoencoder for practical fair decision-making. Our method learns an unbiased data representation leveraging both labeled and unlabeled data and uses the representations to learn a policy in an online process. Using synthetic data, we empirically validate that our method converges to the optimal (fair) policy according to the ground-truth with low variance. In real-world experiments, we further show that our training approach not only offers a more stable learning process but also yields policies with higher fairness as well as utility than previous approaches.