Representation Learning: A Review and New Perspectives

The success of machine learning algorithms generally depends on data representation, and we hypothesize that this is because different representations can entangle and hide more or less the different explanatory factors of variation behind the data. Although specific domain knowledge can be used to help design representations, learning with generic priors can also be used, and the quest for AI is motivating the design of more powerful representation-learning algorithms implementing such priors. This paper reviews recent work in the area of unsupervised feature learning and deep learning, covering advances in probabilistic models, auto-encoders, manifold learning, and deep networks. This motivates longer-term unanswered questions about the appropriate objectives for learning good representations, for computing representations (i.e., inference), and the geometrical connections between representation learning, density estimation and manifold learning

K-Space at TRECVid 2007

In this paper we describe K-Space participation in TRECVid 2007. K-Space participated in two tasks, high-level feature extraction and interactive search. We present our approaches for each of these activities and provide a brief analysis of our results. Our high-level feature submission utilized multi-modal low-level features which included visual, audio and temporal elements. Specific concept detectors (such as Face detectors) developed by K-Space partners were also used. We experimented with different machine learning approaches including logistic regression and support vector machines (SVM). Finally we also experimented with both early and late fusion for feature combination. This year we also participated in interactive search, submitting 6 runs. We developed two interfaces which both utilized the same retrieval functionality. Our objective was to measure the effect of context, which was supported to different degrees in each interface, on user performance. The first of the two systems was a ‘shot’ based interface, where the results from a query were presented as a ranked list of shots. The second interface was ‘broadcast’ based, where results were presented as a ranked list of broadcasts. Both systems made use of the outputs of our high-level feature submission as well as low-level visual features

Automatic large-scale classification of bird sounds is strongly improved by unsupervised feature learning

This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt and build upon this work, for commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited. See: http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0

Semi-Supervised Sparse Coding

Sparse coding approximates the data sample as a sparse linear combination of some basic codewords and uses the sparse codes as new presentations. In this paper, we investigate learning discriminative sparse codes by sparse coding in a semi-supervised manner, where only a few training samples are labeled. By using the manifold structure spanned by the data set of both labeled and unlabeled samples and the constraints provided by the labels of the labeled samples, we learn the variable class labels for all the samples. Furthermore, to improve the discriminative ability of the learned sparse codes, we assume that the class labels could be predicted from the sparse codes directly using a linear classifier. By solving the codebook, sparse codes, class labels and classifier parameters simultaneously in a unified objective function, we develop a semi-supervised sparse coding algorithm. Experiments on two real-world pattern recognition problems demonstrate the advantage of the proposed methods over supervised sparse coding methods on partially labeled data sets

Non-Negative Tensor Factorization Applied to Music Genre Classification

Music genre classification techniques are typically applied to the data matrix whose columns are the feature vectors extracted from music recordings. In this paper, a feature vector is extracted using a texture window of one sec, which enables the representation of any 30 sec long music recording as a time sequence of feature vectors, thus yielding a feature matrix. Consequently, by stacking the feature matrices associated to any dataset recordings, a tensor is created, a fact which necessitates studying music genre classification using tensors. First, a novel algorithm for non-negative tensor factorization (NTF) is derived that extends the non-negative matrix factorization. Several variants of the NTF algorithm emerge by employing different cost functions from the class of Bregman divergences. Second, a novel supervised NTF classifier is proposed, which trains a basis for each class separately and employs basis orthogonalization. A variety of spectral, temporal, perceptual, energy, and pitch descriptors is extracted from 1000 recordings of the GTZAN dataset, which are distributed across 10 genre classes. The NTF classifier performance is compared against that of the multilayer perceptron and the support vector machines by applying a stratified 10-fold cross validation. A genre classification accuracy of 78.9% is reported for the NTF classifier demonstrating the superiority of the aforementioned multilinear classifier over several data matrix-based state-of-the-art classifiers