Privacy protection from surreptitious video recordings is an important societal challenge. We desire a computer vision system (e.g., a robot) that can recognize human activities and assist our daily life, yet ensure that it is not recording video that may invade our privacy. This paper presents a fundamental approach to address such contradicting objectives: human activity recognition while only using extreme low-resolution (e.g., 16x12) anonymized videos. We introduce the paradigm of inverse super resolution (ISR), the concept of learning the optimal set of image transformations to generate multiple low-resolution (LR) training videos from a single video. Our ISR learns different types of sub-pixel transformations optimized for the activity classification, allowing the classifier to best take advantage of existing high-resolution videos (e.g., YouTube videos) by creating multiple LR training videos tailored for the problem. We experimentally confirm that the paradigm of inverse super resolution is able to benefit activity recognition from extreme low-resolution videos.

We propose a novel learning framework for object categorization with interactive semantic feedback. In this framework, a discriminative categorization model improves through human-guided iterative semantic feedbacks. Specifically, the model identifies the most helpful relational semantic queries to discriminatively refine the model. The user feedback on whether the relationship is semantically valid or not is incorporated back into the model, in the form of regularization, and the process iterates. We validate the proposed model in a few-shot multi-class classification scenario, where we measure classification performance on a set of ‘target’ classes, with few training instances, by leveraging and transferring knowledge from ‘anchor’ classes, that contain larger set of labeled instances.

Exponential Random Graphs Models (ERGM) are common, simple statistical models for social network and other network structures. Unfortunately, inference and learning with them is hard even for small networks because their partition functions are intractable for precise computation. In this paper, we introduce a new quadratic time deterministic approximation to these partition functions. Our main insight enabling this advance is that subgraph statistics is sufficient to derive a lower bound for partition functions given that the model is not dominated by a few graphs. The proposed method differs from existing methods in its ways of exploiting asymptotic properties of subgraph statistics. Compared to the current Monte Carlo simulation based methods, the new method is scalable, stable, and precise enough for inference tasks.

The Kalman Filter (KF) is pervasively used to control a vast array of consumer, health and defense products. By grouping sets of symmetric state variables, the Relational Kalman Filter (RKF) enables us to scale the exact KF for large-scale dynamic systems. In this paper, we provide a parameter learning algorithm for RKF, and a regrouping algorithm that prevents the degeneration of the relational structure for efficient filtering. The proposed algorithms significantly expand the applicability of the RKFs by solving the following questions: (1) how to learn parameters for RKF from partial observations; and (2) how to regroup the degenerated state variables by noisy real-world observations. To our knowledge, this is the first paper on learning parameters in relational continuous probabilistic models. We show that our new algorithms significantly improve the accuracy and the efficiency of filtering large-scale dynamic systems.

The Kalman Filter (KF) is pervasively used to control a vast array of consumer, health and defense products. By grouping sets of symmetric state variables, the Relational Kalman Filter (RKF) enables to scale the exact KF for large-scale dynamic systems. In this paper, we provide a parameter learning algorithm for RKF, and a regrouping algorithm that prevents the degeneration of the relational structure for efficient filtering. The proposed algorithms significantly expand the applicability of the RKFs by solving the following questions: (1) how to learn parameters for RKF in partial observations; and (2) how to regroup the degenerated state variables by noisy real-world observations. We show that our new algorithms improve the efficiency of filtering the large-scale dynamic system.