Similarity Learning via Kernel Preserving Embedding

Data similarity is a key concept in many data-driven applications. Many algorithms are sensitive to similarity measures. To tackle this fundamental problem, automatically learning of similarity information from data via self-expression has been developed and successfully applied in various models, such as low-rank representation, sparse subspace learning, semi-supervised learning. However, it just tries to reconstruct the original data and some valuable information, e.g., the manifold structure, is largely ignored. In this paper, we argue that it is beneficial to preserve the overall relations when we extract similarity information. Specifically, we propose a novel similarity learning framework by minimizing the reconstruction error of kernel matrices, rather than the reconstruction error of original data adopted by existing work. Taking the clustering task as an example to evaluate our method, we observe considerable improvements compared to other state-of-the-art methods. More importantly, our proposed framework is very general and provides a novel and fundamental building block for many other similarity-based tasks. Besides, our proposed kernel preserving opens up a large number of possibilities to embed high-dimensional data into low-dimensional space.Comment: Published in AAAI 201

Geometric deep learning

The goal of these course notes is to describe the main mathematical ideas behind geometric deep learning and to provide implementation details for several applications in shape analysis and synthesis, computer vision and computer graphics. The text in the course materials is primarily based on previously published work. With these notes we gather and provide a clear picture of the key concepts and techniques that fall under the umbrella of geometric deep learning, and illustrate the applications they enable. We also aim to provide practical implementation details for the methods presented in these works, as well as suggest further readings and extensions of these ideas

Unmasking Clever Hans Predictors and Assessing What Machines Really Learn

Current learning machines have successfully solved hard application problems, reaching high accuracy and displaying seemingly "intelligent" behavior. Here we apply recent techniques for explaining decisions of state-of-the-art learning machines and analyze various tasks from computer vision and arcade games. This showcases a spectrum of problem-solving behaviors ranging from naive and short-sighted, to well-informed and strategic. We observe that standard performance evaluation metrics can be oblivious to distinguishing these diverse problem solving behaviors. Furthermore, we propose our semi-automated Spectral Relevance Analysis that provides a practically effective way of characterizing and validating the behavior of nonlinear learning machines. This helps to assess whether a learned model indeed delivers reliably for the problem that it was conceived for. Furthermore, our work intends to add a voice of caution to the ongoing excitement about machine intelligence and pledges to evaluate and judge some of these recent successes in a more nuanced manner.Comment: Accepted for publication in Nature Communication

Weakly-supervised mesh-convolutional hand reconstruction in the wild

We introduce a simple and effective network architecture for monocular 3D hand pose estimation consisting of an image encoder followed by a mesh convolutional decoder that is trained through a direct 3D hand mesh reconstruction loss. We train our network by gathering a large-scale dataset of hand action in YouTube videos and use it as a source of weak supervision. Our weakly-supervised mesh convolutions-based system largely outperforms state-of-the-art methods, even halving the errors on the in the wild benchmark. The dataset and additional resources are available at https://arielai.com/mesh_hands