105,923 research outputs found
Structured Machine Learning for Robotics
Machine Learning has become the essential tool for automating tasks that consist in predicting the output associated to a certain input.
However many modern algorithms are mainly developed for the simple cases of classification and regression. Structured prediction is the field concerned with predicting outputs consisting of complex objects such as graphs, orientations or sequences. While these objects are often of practical interest, they do not have many of the mathematical properties that allow to design principled and computationally feasible algorithms with traditional techniques.
In this thesis we investigate and develop algorithms for learning manifold-valued functions in the context of structured prediction. Differentiable manifolds are a mathematical abstraction used in many domains to describe sets with continuous constraints and non-Euclidean geometric properties.
By taking a structured prediction approach we show how to define statistically consistent estimators for predicting elements of a manifold, in constrast to traditional structured predition algorithms that are restricted to output sets with finite cardinality.
We introduce a wide range of applications that leverage manifolds structures. Above all, we study the case of the hyperbolic manifold, a space suited for representing hierarchical data. By representing supervised datasets within hyperbolic space we show how it is possible to invent new concepts in a previously known hierarchy and show promising results in hierarchical classification.
We also study how modern structured approaches can help with practical robotics tasks, either improving performances in behavioural pipelines or showing more robust predictions for constrained tasks. Specifically, we show how structured prediction can be used to tackle inverse kinematics problems of redundant robots, accounting for the constraints of the robotic joints. We also consider the task of biological motion detection and show that by leveraging the sequence structure of video streams we significantly reduce the latency of the application. Our studies are complemented by empirical evaluations on both synthetic and real data
Combining multiple resolutions into hierarchical representations for kernel-based image classification
Geographic object-based image analysis (GEOBIA) framework has gained
increasing interest recently. Following this popular paradigm, we propose a
novel multiscale classification approach operating on a hierarchical image
representation built from two images at different resolutions. They capture the
same scene with different sensors and are naturally fused together through the
hierarchical representation, where coarser levels are built from a Low Spatial
Resolution (LSR) or Medium Spatial Resolution (MSR) image while finer levels
are generated from a High Spatial Resolution (HSR) or Very High Spatial
Resolution (VHSR) image. Such a representation allows one to benefit from the
context information thanks to the coarser levels, and subregions spatial
arrangement information thanks to the finer levels. Two dedicated structured
kernels are then used to perform machine learning directly on the constructed
hierarchical representation. This strategy overcomes the limits of conventional
GEOBIA classification procedures that can handle only one or very few
pre-selected scales. Experiments run on an urban classification task show that
the proposed approach can highly improve the classification accuracy w.r.t.
conventional approaches working on a single scale.Comment: International Conference on Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis
(GEOBIA 2016), University of Twente in Enschede, The Netherland
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Methods of conceptual clustering and their relation to numerical taxonomy
Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods for machine learning can be viewed as forms of exploratory data analysis, even though they differ markedly from the statistical methods generally connoted by the term. The distinction between methods of machine learning and statistical data analysis is primarily due to differences in the way techniques of each type represent data and structure within data. That is, methods of machine learning are strongly biased toward symbolic (as opposed to numeric) data representations. We explore this difference within a limited context, devoting the bulk of our paper to the explication of conceptual clustering, an extension to the statistically based methods of numerical taxonomy. In conceptual clustering the formation of object clusters is dependent on the quality of 'higher-level' characterizations, termed concepts, of the clusters. The form of concepts used by existing conceptual clustering systems (sets of necessary and sufficient conditions) is described in some detail. This is followed by descriptions of several conceptual clustering techniques, along with sample output. We conclude with a discussion of how alternative concept representations might enhance the effectiveness of future conceptual clustering systems
Evaluation of Output Embeddings for Fine-Grained Image Classification
Image classification has advanced significantly in recent years with the
availability of large-scale image sets. However, fine-grained classification
remains a major challenge due to the annotation cost of large numbers of
fine-grained categories. This project shows that compelling classification
performance can be achieved on such categories even without labeled training
data. Given image and class embeddings, we learn a compatibility function such
that matching embeddings are assigned a higher score than mismatching ones;
zero-shot classification of an image proceeds by finding the label yielding the
highest joint compatibility score. We use state-of-the-art image features and
focus on different supervised attributes and unsupervised output embeddings
either derived from hierarchies or learned from unlabeled text corpora. We
establish a substantially improved state-of-the-art on the Animals with
Attributes and Caltech-UCSD Birds datasets. Most encouragingly, we demonstrate
that purely unsupervised output embeddings (learned from Wikipedia and improved
with fine-grained text) achieve compelling results, even outperforming the
previous supervised state-of-the-art. By combining different output embeddings,
we further improve results.Comment: @inproceedings {ARWLS15, title = {Evaluation of Output Embeddings for
Fine-Grained Image Classification}, booktitle = {IEEE Computer Vision and
Pattern Recognition}, year = {2015}, author = {Zeynep Akata and Scott Reed
and Daniel Walter and Honglak Lee and Bernt Schiele}
Multimodal Multipart Learning for Action Recognition in Depth Videos
The articulated and complex nature of human actions makes the task of action
recognition difficult. One approach to handle this complexity is dividing it to
the kinetics of body parts and analyzing the actions based on these partial
descriptors. We propose a joint sparse regression based learning method which
utilizes the structured sparsity to model each action as a combination of
multimodal features from a sparse set of body parts. To represent dynamics and
appearance of parts, we employ a heterogeneous set of depth and skeleton based
features. The proper structure of multimodal multipart features are formulated
into the learning framework via the proposed hierarchical mixed norm, to
regularize the structured features of each part and to apply sparsity between
them, in favor of a group feature selection. Our experimental results expose
the effectiveness of the proposed learning method in which it outperforms other
methods in all three tested datasets while saturating one of them by achieving
perfect accuracy
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Approaches to conceptual clustering
Methods for Conceptual Clustering may be explicated in two lights. Conceptual Clustering methods may be viewed as extensions to techniques of numerical taxonomy, a collection of methods developed by social and natural scientists for creating classification schemes over object sets. Alternatively, conceptual clustering may be viewed as a form of learning by observation or concept formation, as opposed to methods of learning from examples or concept identification. In this paper we survey and compare a number of conceptual clustering methods along dimensions suggested by each of these views. The point we most wish to clarify is that conceptual clustering processes can be explicated as being composed of three distinct but inter-dependent subprocesses: the process of deriving a hierarchical classification scheme; the process of aggregating objects into individual classes; and the process of assigning conceptual descriptions to object classes. Each subprocess may be characterized along a number of dimensions related to search, thus facilitating a better understanding of the conceptual clustering process as a whole
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