23,427 research outputs found
Efficient AUC Optimization for Information Ranking Applications
Adequate evaluation of an information retrieval system to estimate future
performance is a crucial task. Area under the ROC curve (AUC) is widely used to
evaluate the generalization of a retrieval system. However, the objective
function optimized in many retrieval systems is the error rate and not the AUC
value. This paper provides an efficient and effective non-linear approach to
optimize AUC using additive regression trees, with a special emphasis on the
use of multi-class AUC (MAUC) because multiple relevance levels are widely used
in many ranking applications. Compared to a conventional linear approach, the
performance of the non-linear approach is comparable on binary-relevance
benchmark datasets and is better on multi-relevance benchmark datasets.Comment: 12 page
A General Two-Step Approach to Learning-Based Hashing
Most existing approaches to hashing apply a single form of hash function, and
an optimization process which is typically deeply coupled to this specific
form. This tight coupling restricts the flexibility of the method to respond to
the data, and can result in complex optimization problems that are difficult to
solve. Here we propose a flexible yet simple framework that is able to
accommodate different types of loss functions and hash functions. This
framework allows a number of existing approaches to hashing to be placed in
context, and simplifies the development of new problem-specific hashing
methods. Our framework decomposes hashing learning problem into two steps: hash
bit learning and hash function learning based on the learned bits. The first
step can typically be formulated as binary quadratic problems, and the second
step can be accomplished by training standard binary classifiers. Both problems
have been extensively studied in the literature. Our extensive experiments
demonstrate that the proposed framework is effective, flexible and outperforms
the state-of-the-art.Comment: 13 pages. Appearing in Int. Conf. Computer Vision (ICCV) 201
Feature and Region Selection for Visual Learning
Visual learning problems such as object classification and action recognition
are typically approached using extensions of the popular bag-of-words (BoW)
model. Despite its great success, it is unclear what visual features the BoW
model is learning: Which regions in the image or video are used to discriminate
among classes? Which are the most discriminative visual words? Answering these
questions is fundamental for understanding existing BoW models and inspiring
better models for visual recognition.
To answer these questions, this paper presents a method for feature selection
and region selection in the visual BoW model. This allows for an intermediate
visualization of the features and regions that are important for visual
learning. The main idea is to assign latent weights to the features or regions,
and jointly optimize these latent variables with the parameters of a classifier
(e.g., support vector machine). There are four main benefits of our approach:
(1) Our approach accommodates non-linear additive kernels such as the popular
and intersection kernel; (2) our approach is able to handle both
regions in images and spatio-temporal regions in videos in a unified way; (3)
the feature selection problem is convex, and both problems can be solved using
a scalable reduced gradient method; (4) we point out strong connections with
multiple kernel learning and multiple instance learning approaches.
Experimental results in the PASCAL VOC 2007, MSR Action Dataset II and YouTube
illustrate the benefits of our approach
Recognizing point clouds using conditional random fields
Detecting objects in cluttered scenes is a necessary step for many robotic tasks and facilitates the interaction of the robot with its environment. Because of the availability of efficient 3D sensing devices as the Kinect, methods for the recognition of objects in 3D point clouds have gained importance during the last years. In this paper, we propose a new supervised learning approach for the recognition of objects from 3D point clouds using Conditional Random Fields, a type of discriminative, undirected probabilistic graphical model. The various features and contextual relations of the objects are described by the potential functions in the graph. Our method allows for learning and inference from unorganized point clouds of arbitrary sizes and shows significant benefit in terms of computational speed during prediction when compared to a state-of-the-art approach based on constrained optimization.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft
Sparse Support Vector Infinite Push
In this paper, we address the problem of embedded feature selection for
ranking on top of the list problems. We pose this problem as a regularized
empirical risk minimization with -norm push loss function () and
sparsity inducing regularizers. We leverage the issues related to this
challenging optimization problem by considering an alternating direction method
of multipliers algorithm which is built upon proximal operators of the loss
function and the regularizer. Our main technical contribution is thus to
provide a numerical scheme for computing the infinite push loss function
proximal operator. Experimental results on toy, DNA microarray and BCI problems
show how our novel algorithm compares favorably to competitors for ranking on
top while using fewer variables in the scoring function.Comment: Appears in Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on
Machine Learning (ICML 2012
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