Self-supervised learning has gained significant attention in contemporary applications, particularly due to the scarcity of labeled data. While existing SSL methodologies primarily address feature variance and linear correlations, they often neglect the intricate relations between samples and the nonlinear dependencies inherent in complex data. In this paper, we introduce Correlation-Dependence Self-Supervised Learning (CDSSL), a novel framework that unifies and extends existing SSL paradigms by integrating both linear correlations and nonlinear dependencies, encapsulating sample-wise and feature-wise interactions. Our approach incorporates the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) to robustly capture nonlinear dependencies within a Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space, enriching representation learning. Experimental evaluations on diverse benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy of CDSSL in improving representation quality.

As part of an ongoing worldwide effort to comprehend and monitor insect biodiversity, this paper presents the BIOSCAN-5M Insect dataset to the machine learning community and establish several benchmark tasks. BIOSCAN-5M is a comprehensive dataset containing multi-modal information for over 5 million insect specimens, and it significantly expands existing image-based biological datasets by including taxonomic labels, raw nucleotide barcode sequences, assigned barcode index numbers, and geographical information. We propose three benchmark experiments to demonstrate the impact of the multi-modal data types on the classification and clustering accuracy. First, we pretrain a masked language model on the DNA barcode sequences of the BIOSCAN-5M dataset, and demonstrate the impact of using this large reference library on species- and genus-level classification performance. Second, we propose a zero-shot transfer learning task applied to images and DNA barcodes to cluster feature embeddings obtained from self-supervised learning, to investigate whether meaningful clusters can be derived from these representation embeddings. Third, we benchmark multi-modality by performing contrastive learning on DNA barcodes, image data, and taxonomic information. This yields a general shared embedding space enabling taxonomic classification using multiple types of information and modalities. The code repository of the BIOSCAN-5M Insect dataset is available at https://github.com/zahrag/BIOSCAN-5M.

Machine comprehension of visual information from images and videos by neural networks faces two primary challenges. Firstly, there exists a computational and inference gap in connecting vision and language, making it difficult to accurately determine which object a given agent acts on and represent it through language. Secondly, classifiers trained by a single, monolithic neural network often lack stability and generalization. To overcome these challenges, we introduce MoE-VRD, a novel approach to visual relationship detection utilizing a mixture of experts. MoE-VRD identifies language triplets in the form of < subject, predicate, object> tuples to extract relationships from visual processing. Leveraging recent advancements in visual relationship detection, MoE-VRD addresses the requirement for action recognition in establishing relationships between subjects (acting) and objects (being acted upon). In contrast to single monolithic networks, MoE-VRD employs multiple small models as experts, whose outputs are aggregated. Each expert in MoE-VRD specializes in visual relationship learning and object tagging. By utilizing a sparsely-gated mixture of experts, MoE-VRD enables conditional computation and significantly enhances neural network capacity without increasing computational complexity. Our experimental results demonstrate that the conditional computation capabilities and scalability of the mixture-of-experts approach lead to superior performance in visual relationship detection compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Dietary intake data are routinely drawn upon to explore diet-health relationships. However, these data are often subject to measurement error, distorting the true relationships. Beyond measurement error, there are likely complex synergistic and sometimes antagonistic interactions between different dietary components, complicating the relationships between diet and health outcomes. Flexible models are required to capture the nuance that these complex interactions introduce. This complexity makes research on diet-health relationships an appealing candidate for the application of machine learning techniques, and in particular, neural networks. Neural networks are computational models that are able to capture highly complex, nonlinear relationships so long as sufficient data are available. While these models have been applied in many domains, the impacts of measurement error on the performance of predictive modeling has not been systematically investigated. However, dietary intake data are typically collected using self-report methods and are prone to large amounts of measurement error. In this work, we demonstrate the ways in which measurement error erodes the performance of neural networks, and illustrate the care that is required for leveraging these models in the presence of error. We demonstrate the role that sample size and replicate measurements play on model performance, indicate a motivation for the investigation of transformations to additivity, and illustrate the caution required to prevent model overfitting. While the past performance of neural networks across various domains make them an attractive candidate for examining diet-health relationships, our work demonstrates that substantial care and further methodological development are both required to observe increased predictive performance when applying these techniques, compared to more traditional statistical procedures.

In an effort to catalog insect biodiversity, we propose a new large dataset of hand-labelled insect images, the BIOSCAN-1M Insect Dataset. Each record is taxonomically classified by an expert, and also has associated genetic information including raw nucleotide barcode sequences and assigned barcode index numbers, which are genetically-based proxies for species classification. This paper presents a curated million-image dataset, primarily to train computer-vision models capable of providing image-based taxonomic assessment, however, the dataset also presents compelling characteristics, the study of which would be of interest to the broader machine learning community. Driven by the biological nature inherent to the dataset, a characteristic long-tailed class-imbalance distribution is exhibited. Furthermore, taxonomic labelling is a hierarchical classification scheme, presenting a highly fine-grained classification problem at lower levels. Beyond spurring interest in biodiversity research within the machine learning community, progress on creating an image-based taxonomic classifier will also further the ultimate goal of all BIOSCAN research: to lay the foundation for a comprehensive survey of global biodiversity. This paper introduces the dataset and explores the classification task through the implementation and analysis of a baseline classifier.

Recent state-of-the-art semi-supervised Video Object Segmentation (VOS) methods have shown significant improvements in target object segmentation accuracy when information from preceding frames is used in undertaking segmentation on the current frame. In particular, such memory-based approaches can help a model to more effectively handle appearance changes (representation drift) or occlusions. Ideally, for maximum performance, online VOS methods would need all or most of the preceding frames (or their extracted information) to be stored in memory and be used for online learning in consecutive frames. Such a solution is not feasible for long videos, as the required memory size would grow without bound. On the other hand, these methods can fail when memory is limited and a target object experiences repeated representation drifts throughout a video. We propose two novel techniques to reduce the memory requirement of online VOS methods while improving modeling accuracy and generalization on long videos. Motivated by the success of continual learning techniques in preserving previously-learned knowledge, here we propose Gated-Regularizer Continual Learning (GRCL), which improves the performance of any online VOS subject to limited memory, and a Reconstruction-based Memory Selection Continual Learning (RMSCL) which empowers online VOS methods to efficiently benefit from stored information in memory. Experimental results show that the proposed methods improve the performance of online VOS models up to 10 %, and boosts their robustness on long-video datasets while maintaining comparable performance on short-video datasets DAVIS16 and DAVIS17.

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to bridge the gap between source and target domains in the absence of target domain labels using two main techniques: input-level alignment (such as generative modeling and stylization) and feature-level alignment (which matches the distribution of the feature maps, e.g. gradient reversal layers). Motivated from the success of generative modeling for image classification, stylization-based methods were recently proposed for regression tasks, such as pose estimation. However, use of input-level alignment via generative modeling and stylization incur additional overhead and computational complexity which limit their use in real-world DA tasks. To investigate the role of input-level alignment for DA, we ask the following question: Is generative modeling-based stylization necessary for visual domain adaptation in regression? Surprisingly, we find that input-alignment has little effect on regression tasks as compared to classification. Based on these insights, we develop a non-parametric feature-level domain alignment method -- Implicit Stylization (ImSty) -- which results in consistent improvements over SOTA regression task, without the need for computationally intensive stylization and generative modeling. Our work conducts a critical evaluation of the role of generative modeling and stylization, at a time when these are also gaining popularity for domain generalization.

Continual learning in real-world scenarios is a major challenge. A general continual learning model should have a constant memory size and no predefined task boundaries, as is the case in semi-supervised Video Object Segmentation (VOS), where continual learning challenges particularly present themselves in working on long video sequences. In this article, we first formulate the problem of semi-supervised VOS, specifically online VOS, as a continual learning problem, and then secondly provide a public VOS dataset, CLVOS23, focusing on continual learning. Finally, we propose and implement a regularization-based continual learning approach on LWL, an existing online VOS baseline, to demonstrate the efficacy of continual learning when applied to online VOS and to establish a CLVOS23 baseline. We apply the proposed baseline to the Long Videos dataset as well as to two short video VOS datasets, DAVIS16 and DAVIS17. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that VOS has been defined and addressed as a continual learning problem.

In this paper we investigate a variety of deep learning strategies for solving inverse problems. We classify existing deep learning solutions for inverse problems into three categories of Direct Mapping, Data Consistency Optimizer, and Deep Regularizer. We choose a sample of each inverse problem type, so as to compare the robustness of the three categories, and report a statistical analysis of their differences. We perform extensive experiments on the classic problem of linear regression and three well-known inverse problems in computer vision, namely image denoising, 3D human face inverse rendering, and object tracking, selected as representative prototypes for each class of inverse problems. The overall results and the statistical analyses show that the solution categories have a robustness behaviour dependent on the type of inverse problem domain, and specifically dependent on whether or not the problem includes measurement outliers. Based on our experimental results, we conclude by proposing the most robust solution category for each inverse problem class.

Uncertainty quantification (UQ) plays a pivotal role in reduction of uncertainties during both optimization and decision making processes. It can be applied to solve a variety of real-world applications in science and engineering. Bayesian approximation and ensemble learning techniques are two most widely-used UQ methods in the literature. In this regard, researchers have proposed different UQ methods and examined their performance in a variety of applications such as computer vision (e.g., self-driving cars and object detection), image processing (e.g., image restoration), medical image analysis (e.g., medical image classification and segmentation), natural language processing (e.g., text classification, social media texts and recidivism risk-scoring), bioinformatics, etc.This study reviews recent advances in UQ methods used in deep learning. Moreover, we also investigate the application of these methods in reinforcement learning (RL). Then, we outline a few important applications of UQ methods. Finally, we briefly highlight the fundamental research challenges faced by UQ methods and discuss the future research directions in this field.