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 Unsupervised or Indirectly Supervised Learning



Supplementary Material of Unsupervised Learning From Incomplete Measurements for Inverse Problems

Neural Information Processing Systems

The proof of Theorem 4.2 in the main paper uses the following technical lemma: The proof of Lemma 1.1 follows standard covering arguments and may be sketched as follows. Full details can be found in the proofs in [1].We can now present the proof of Theorem 4.2: Proof. We end this section with the proof of Proposition 4.3 in the main paper: Proof. Algorithm 1 provides the pseudo-code of the proposed multi-operator imaging (MOI) method. Figure 1: The residual U-Net used in the paper.


Active Learning for Animal Re-Identification with Ambiguity-Aware Sampling

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Animal Re-ID has recently gained substantial attention in the AI research community due to its high impact on biodiversity monitoring and unique research challenges arising from environmental factors. The subtle distinguishing patterns, handling new species and the inherent open-set nature make the problem even harder. To address these complexities, foundation models trained on labeled, large-scale and multi-species animal Re-ID datasets have recently been introduced to enable zero-shot Re-ID. However, our benchmarking reveals significant gaps in their zero-shot Re-ID performance for both known and unknown species. While this highlights the need for collecting labeled data in new domains, exhaustive annotation for Re-ID is laborious and requires domain expertise. Our analyses show that existing unsupervised (USL) and AL Re-ID methods underperform for animal Re-ID. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel AL Re-ID framework that leverages complementary clustering methods to uncover and target structurally ambiguous regions in the embedding space for mining pairs of samples that are both informative and broadly representative. Oracle feedback on these pairs, in the form of must-link and cannot-link constraints, facilitates a simple annotation interface, which naturally integrates with existing USL methods through our proposed constrained clustering refinement algorithm. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that, by utilizing only 0.033% of all annotations, our approach consistently outperforms existing foundational, USL and AL baselines. Specifically, we report an average improvement of 10.49%, 11.19% and 3.99% (mAP) on 13 wildlife datasets over foundational, USL and AL methods, respectively, while attaining state-of-the-art performance on each dataset. Furthermore, we also show an improvement of 11.09%, 8.2% and 2.06% for unknown individuals in an open-world setting.


SiamMM: A Mixture Model Perspective on Deep Unsupervised Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of clustering-based approaches for self-supervised and unsupervised learning. However, the application of clustering is often heuristic, and the optimal methodology remains unclear. In this work, we establish connections between these unsupervised clustering methods and classical mixture models from statistics. Through this framework, we demonstrate significant enhancements to these clustering methods, leading to the development of a novel model named SiamMM. Our method attains state-of-the-art performance across various self-supervised learning benchmarks. Inspection of the learned clusters reveals a strong resemblance to unseen ground truth labels, uncovering potential instances of mislabeling.


Enhancing Phenotype Discovery in Electronic Health Records through Prior Knowledge-Guided Unsupervised Learning

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Objectives: Unsupervised learning with electronic health record (EHR) data has shown promise for phenotype discovery, but approaches typically disregard existing clinical information, limiting interpretability. We operationalize a Bayesian latent class framework for phenotyping that incorporates domain-specific knowledge to improve clinical meaningfulness of EHR-derived phenotypes and illustrate its utility by identifying an asthma sub-phenotype informed by features of Type 2 (T2) inflammation. Materials and methods: We illustrate a framework for incorporating clinical knowledge into a Bayesian latent class model via informative priors to guide unsupervised clustering toward clinically relevant subgroups. This approach models missingness, accounting for potential missing-not-at-random patterns, and provides patient-level probabilities for phenotype assignment with uncertainty. Using reusable and flexible code, we applied the model to a large asthma EHR cohort, specifying informative priors for T2 inflammation-related features and weakly informative priors for other clinical variables, allowing the data to inform posterior distributions. Results and Conclusion: Using encounter data from January 2017 to February 2024 for 44,642 adult asthma patients, we found a bimodal posterior distribution of phenotype assignment, indicating clear class separation. The T2 inflammation-informed class (38.7%) was characterized by elevated eosinophil levels and allergy markers, plus high healthcare utilization and medication use, despite weakly informative priors on the latter variables. These patterns suggest an "uncontrolled T2-high" sub-phenotype. This demonstrates how our Bayesian latent class modeling approach supports hypothesis generation and cohort identification in EHR-based studies of heterogeneous diseases without well-established phenotype definitions.


A generative adversarial network optimization method for damage detection and digital twinning by deep AI fault learning: Z24 Bridge structural health monitoring benchmark validation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The optimization-based damage detection and damage state digital twinning capabilities are examined here of a novel conditional-labeled generative adversarial network methodology. The framework outperforms current approaches for fault anomaly detection as no prior information is required for the health state of the system: a topic of high significance for real-world applications. Specifically, current artificial intelligence-based digital twinning approaches suffer from the uncertainty related to obtaining poor predictions when a low number of measurements is available, physics knowledge is missing, or when the damage state is unknown. To this end, an unsupervised framework is examined and validated rigorously on the benchmark structural health monitoring measurements of Z24 Bridge: a post-tensioned concrete highway bridge in Switzerland. In implementing the approach, firstly, different same damage-level measurements are used as inputs, while the model is forced to converge conditionally to two different damage states. Secondly, the process is repeated for a different group of measurements. Finally, the convergence scores are compared to identify which one belongs to a different damage state. The process for both healthy-to-healthy and damage-to-healthy input data creates, simultaneously, measurements for digital twinning purposes at different damage states, capable of pattern recognition and machine learning data generation. Further to this process, a support vector machine classifier and a principal component analysis procedure is developed to assess the generated and real measurements of each damage category, serving as a secondary new dynamics learning indicator in damage scenarios. Importantly, the approach is shown to capture accurately damage over healthy measurements, providing a powerful tool for vibration-based system-level monitoring and scalable infrastructure resilience.


pDANSE: Particle-based Data-driven Nonlinear State Estimation from Nonlinear Measurements

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We consider the problem of designing a data-driven nonlinear state estimation (DANSE) method that uses (noisy) nonlinear measurements of a process whose underlying state transition model (STM) is unknown. Such a process is referred to as a model-free process. A recurrent neural network (RNN) provides parameters of a Gaussian prior that characterize the state of the model-free process, using all previous measurements at a given time point. In the case of DANSE, the measurement system was linear, leading to a closed-form solution for the state posterior. However, the presence of a nonlinear measurement system renders a closed-form solution infeasible. Instead, the second-order statistics of the state posterior are computed using the nonlinear measurements observed at the time point. We address the nonlinear measurements using a reparameterization trick-based particle sampling approach, and estimate the second-order statistics of the state posterior. The proposed method is referred to as particle-based DANSE (pDANSE). The RNN of pDANSE uses sequential measurements efficiently and avoids the use of computationally intensive sequential Monte-Carlo (SMC) and/or ancestral sampling. We describe the semi-supervised learning method for pDANSE, which transitions to unsupervised learning in the absence of labeled data. Using a stochastic Lorenz-$63$ system as a benchmark process, we experimentally demonstrate the state estimation performance for four nonlinear measurement systems. We explore cubic nonlinearity and a camera-model nonlinearity where unsupervised learning is used; then we explore half-wave rectification nonlinearity and Cartesian-to-spherical nonlinearity where semi-supervised learning is used. The performance of state estimation is shown to be competitive vis-ร -vis particle filters that have complete knowledge of the STM of the Lorenz-$63$ system.


A Re-node Self-training Approach for Deep Graph-based Semi-supervised Classification on Multi-view Image Data

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recently, graph-based semi-supervised learning and pseudo-labeling have gained attention due to their effectiveness in reducing the need for extensive data annotations. Pseudo-labeling uses predictions from unlabeled data to improve model training, while graph-based methods are characterized by processing data represented as graphs. However, the lack of clear graph structures in images combined with the complexity of multi-view data limits the efficiency of traditional and existing techniques. Moreover, the integration of graph structures in multi-view data is still a challenge. In this paper, we propose Re-node Self-taught Graph-based Semi-supervised Learning for Multi-view Data (RSGSLM). Our method addresses these challenges by (i) combining linear feature transformation and multi-view graph fusion within a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) framework, (ii) dynamically incorporating pseudo-labels into the GCN loss function to improve classification in multi-view data, and (iii) correcting topological imbalances by adjusting the weights of labeled samples near class boundaries. Additionally, (iv) we introduce an unsupervised smoothing loss applicable to all samples. This combination optimizes performance while maintaining computational efficiency. Experimental results on multi-view benchmark image datasets demonstrate that RSGSLM surpasses existing semi-supervised learning approaches in multi-view contexts.


Semi-Supervised Learning under General Causal Models

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) aims to train a machine learning model using both labelled and unlabelled data. While the unlabelled data have been used in various ways to improve the prediction accuracy, the reason why unlabelled data could help is not fully understood. One interesting and promising direction is to understand SSL from a causal perspective. In light of the independent causal mechanisms principle, the unlabelled data can be helpful when the label causes the features but not vice versa. However, the causal relations between the features and labels can be complex in real world applications. In this paper, we propose a SSL framework that works with general causal models in which the variables have flexible causal relations. More specifically, we explore the causal graph structures and design corresponding causal generative models which can be learned with the help of unlabelled data. The learned causal generative model can generate synthetic labelled data for training a more accurate predictive model. We verify the effectiveness of our proposed method by empirical studies on both simulated and real data.


Unlabeled Data vs. Pre-trained Knowledge: Rethinking SSL in the Era of Large Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) alleviates the cost of data labeling process by exploiting unlabeled data and has achieved promising results. Meanwhile, with the development of large foundation models, exploiting pre-trained models becomes a promising way to address the label scarcity in the downstream tasks, such as various parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques. This raises a natural yet critical question: When labeled data is limited, should we rely on unlabeled data or pre-trained models? To investigate this issue, we conduct a fair comparison between SSL methods and pre-trained models (e.g., CLIP) on representative image classification tasks under a controlled supervision budget. Experiments reveal that SSL has met its ``Waterloo" in the era of large models, as pre-trained models show both high efficiency and strong performance on widely adopted SSL benchmarks. This underscores the urgent need for SSL researchers to explore new avenues, such as deeper integration between the SSL and pre-trained models. Furthermore, we investigate the potential of Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in image classification tasks. Results show that, despite their massive parameter scales, MLLMs still face significant performance limitations, highlighting that even a seemingly well-studied task remains highly challenging.