Topic Models and Fusion Methods: a Union to Improve Text Clustering and Cluster Labeling

Topic modeling algorithms are statistical methods that aim to discover the topics running through the text documents. Using topic models in machine learning and text mining is popular due to its applicability in inferring the latent topic structure of a corpus. In this paper, we represent an enriching document approach, using state-of-the-art topic models and data fusion methods, to enrich documents of a collection with the aim of improving the quality of text clustering and cluster labeling. We propose a bi-vector space model in which every document of the corpus is represented by two vectors: one is generated based on the fusion-based topic modeling approach, and one simply is the traditional vector model. Our experiments on various datasets show that using a combination of topic modeling and fusion methods to create documents’ vectors can significantly improve the quality of the results in clustering the documents

Fusion of Head and Full-Body Detectors for Multi-Object Tracking

In order to track all persons in a scene, the tracking-by-detection paradigm has proven to be a very effective approach. Yet, relying solely on a single detector is also a major limitation, as useful image information might be ignored. Consequently, this work demonstrates how to fuse two detectors into a tracking system. To obtain the trajectories, we propose to formulate tracking as a weighted graph labeling problem, resulting in a binary quadratic program. As such problems are NP-hard, the solution can only be approximated. Based on the Frank-Wolfe algorithm, we present a new solver that is crucial to handle such difficult problems. Evaluation on pedestrian tracking is provided for multiple scenarios, showing superior results over single detector tracking and standard QP-solvers. Finally, our tracker ranks 2nd on the MOT16 benchmark and 1st on the new MOT17 benchmark, outperforming over 90 trackers.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures; Winner of the MOT17 challenge; CVPRW 201

GOGGLES: Automatic Image Labeling with Affinity Coding

Generating large labeled training data is becoming the biggest bottleneck in building and deploying supervised machine learning models. Recently, the data programming paradigm has been proposed to reduce the human cost in labeling training data. However, data programming relies on designing labeling functions which still requires significant domain expertise. Also, it is prohibitively difficult to write labeling functions for image datasets as it is hard to express domain knowledge using raw features for images (pixels). We propose affinity coding, a new domain-agnostic paradigm for automated training data labeling. The core premise of affinity coding is that the affinity scores of instance pairs belonging to the same class on average should be higher than those of pairs belonging to different classes, according to some affinity functions. We build the GOGGLES system that implements affinity coding for labeling image datasets by designing a novel set of reusable affinity functions for images, and propose a novel hierarchical generative model for class inference using a small development set. We compare GOGGLES with existing data programming systems on 5 image labeling tasks from diverse domains. GOGGLES achieves labeling accuracies ranging from a minimum of 71% to a maximum of 98% without requiring any extensive human annotation. In terms of end-to-end performance, GOGGLES outperforms the state-of-the-art data programming system Snuba by 21% and a state-of-the-art few-shot learning technique by 5%, and is only 7% away from the fully supervised upper bound.Comment: Published at 2020 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Dat

Towards Real-Time Detection and Tracking of Spatio-Temporal Features: Blob-Filaments in Fusion Plasma

A novel algorithm and implementation of real-time identification and tracking of blob-filaments in fusion reactor data is presented. Similar spatio-temporal features are important in many other applications, for example, ignition kernels in combustion and tumor cells in a medical image. This work presents an approach for extracting these features by dividing the overall task into three steps: local identification of feature cells, grouping feature cells into extended feature, and tracking movement of feature through overlapping in space. Through our extensive work in parallelization, we demonstrate that this approach can effectively make use of a large number of compute nodes to detect and track blob-filaments in real time in fusion plasma. On a set of 30GB fusion simulation data, we observed linear speedup on 1024 processes and completed blob detection in less than three milliseconds using Edison, a Cray XC30 system at NERSC.Comment: 14 pages, 40 figure

Radar-based Feature Design and Multiclass Classification for Road User Recognition

The classification of individual traffic participants is a complex task, especially for challenging scenarios with multiple road users or under bad weather conditions. Radar sensors provide an - with respect to well established camera systems - orthogonal way of measuring such scenes. In order to gain accurate classification results, 50 different features are extracted from the measurement data and tested on their performance. From these features a suitable subset is chosen and passed to random forest and long short-term memory (LSTM) classifiers to obtain class predictions for the radar input. Moreover, it is shown why data imbalance is an inherent problem in automotive radar classification when the dataset is not sufficiently large. To overcome this issue, classifier binarization is used among other techniques in order to better account for underrepresented classes. A new method to couple the resulting probabilities is proposed and compared to others with great success. Final results show substantial improvements when compared to ordinary multiclass classificationComment: 8 pages, 6 figure

Non-Abelian Quantum Hall States and their Quasiparticles: from the Pattern of Zeros to Vertex Algebra

In the pattern-of-zeros approach to quantum Hall states, a set of data {n;m;S_a|a=1,...,n; n,m,S_a in N} (called the pattern of zeros) is introduced to characterize a quantum Hall wave function. In this paper we find sufficient conditions on the pattern of zeros so that the data correspond to a valid wave function. Some times, a set of data {n;m;S_a} corresponds to a unique quantum Hall state, while other times, a set of data corresponds to several different quantum Hall states. So in the latter cases, the patterns of zeros alone does not completely characterize the quantum Hall states. In this paper, We find that the following expanded set of data {n;m;S_a;c|a=1,...,n; n,m,S_a in N; c in R} provides a more complete characterization of quantum Hall states. Each expanded set of data completely characterize a unique quantum Hall state, at least for the examples discussed in this paper. The result is obtained by combining the pattern of zeros and Z_n simple-current vertex algebra which describes a large class of Abelian and non-Abelian quantum Hall states \Phi_{Z_n}^sc. The more complete characterization in terms of {n;m;S_a;c} allows us to obtain more topological properties of those states, which include the central charge c of edge states, the scaling dimensions and the statistics of quasiparticle excitations.Comment: 42 pages. RevTeX