We propose a novel approach, called FeaBoost, to image semantic segmentation with only image-level labels taken as weakly-supervised constraints. Our approach is motivated from two evidences: 1) each superpixel can be represented as a linear combination of basic components (e.g., predefined classes); 2) visually similar superpixels have high probability to share the same set of labels, i.e., they tend to have common combination of predefined classes. By taking these two evidences into consideration, semantic segmentation is formulated as joint feature and label refinement over superpixels. Furthermore, we develop an efficient FeaBoost algorithm to solve such optimization problem. Extensive experiments on the MSRC and LabelMe datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our FeaBoost approach in comparison with the state-of-the-art methods, especially when noisy labels are provided for semantic segmentation.

This paper presents a large-scale sparse coding algorithm to deal with the challenging problem of noise-robust semi-supervised learning over very large data with only few noisy initial labels. By giving an L1-norm formulation of Laplacian regularization directly based upon the manifold structure of the data, we transform noise-robust semi-supervised learning into a generalized sparse coding problem so that noise reduction can be imposed upon the noisy initial labels. Furthermore, to keep the scalability of noise-robust semi-supervised learning over very large data, we make use of both nonlinear approximation and dimension reduction techniques to solve this generalized sparse coding problem in linear time and space complexity. Finally, we evaluate the proposed algorithm in the challenging task of large-scale semi-supervised image classification with only few noisy initial labels. The experimental results on several benchmark image datasets show the promising performance of the proposed algorithm.

Answering natural language questions against structured knowledge bases (KB) has been attracting increasing attention in both IR and NLP communities. The task involves two main challenges: recognizing the questions' meanings, which are then grounded to a given KB. Targeting simple factoid questions, many existing open domain semantic parsers jointly solve these two subtasks, but are usually expensive in complexity and resources.In this paper, we propose a simple pipeline framework to efficiently answer more complicated questions, especially those implying aggregation operations, e.g., argmax, argmin.We first develop a transition-based parsing model to recognize the KB-independent meaning representation of the user's intention inherent in the question. Secondly, we apply a probabilistic model to map the meaning representation, including those aggregation functions, to a structured query.The experimental results showed that our method can better understand aggregation questions, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods on the Free917 dataset while still maintaining promising performance on a more challenging dataset, WebQuestions, without extra training.