Crossing Generative Adversarial Networks for Cross-View Person Re-identification

Person re-identification (\textit{re-id}) refers to matching pedestrians across disjoint yet non-overlapping camera views. The most effective way to match these pedestrians undertaking significant visual variations is to seek reliably invariant features that can describe the person of interest faithfully. Most of existing methods are presented in a supervised manner to produce discriminative features by relying on labeled paired images in correspondence. However, annotating pair-wise images is prohibitively expensive in labors, and thus not practical in large-scale networked cameras. Moreover, seeking comparable representations across camera views demands a flexible model to address the complex distributions of images. In this work, we study the co-occurrence statistic patterns between pairs of images, and propose to crossing Generative Adversarial Network (Cross-GAN) for learning a joint distribution for cross-image representations in a unsupervised manner. Given a pair of person images, the proposed model consists of the variational auto-encoder to encode the pair into respective latent variables, a proposed cross-view alignment to reduce the view disparity, and an adversarial layer to seek the joint distribution of latent representations. The learned latent representations are well-aligned to reflect the co-occurrence patterns of paired images. We empirically evaluate the proposed model against challenging datasets, and our results show the importance of joint invariant features in improving matching rates of person re-id with comparison to semi/unsupervised state-of-the-arts.Comment: 12 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1702.03431 by other author

Learning compact hashing codes with complex objectives from multiple sources for large scale similarity search

Similarity search is a key problem in many real world applications including image and text retrieval, content reuse detection and collaborative filtering. The purpose of similarity search is to identify similar data examples given a query example. Due to the explosive growth of the Internet, a huge amount of data such as texts, images and videos has been generated, which indicates that efficient large scale similarity search becomes more important.^ Hashing methods have become popular for large scale similarity search due to their computational and memory efficiency. These hashing methods design compact binary codes to represent data examples so that similar examples are mapped into similar codes. This dissertation addresses five major problems for utilizing supervised information from multiple sources in hashing with respect to different objectives. Firstly, we address the problem of incorporating semantic tags by modeling the latent correlations between tags and data examples. More precisely, the hashing codes are learned in a unified semi-supervised framework by simultaneously preserving the similarities between data examples and ensuring the tag consistency via a latent factor model. Secondly, we solve the missing data problem by latent subspace learning from multiple sources. The hashing codes are learned by enforcing the data consistency among different sources. Thirdly, we address the problem of hashing on structured data by graph learning. A weighted graph is constructed based on the structured knowledge from the data. The hashing codes are then learned by preserving the graph similarities. Fourthly, we address the problem of learning high ranking quality hashing codes by utilizing the relevance judgments from users. The hashing code/function is learned via optimizing a commonly used non-smooth non-convex ranking measure, NDCG. Finally, we deal with the problem of insufficient supervision by active learning. We propose to actively select the most informative data examples and tags in a joint manner based on the selection criteria that both the data examples and tags should be most uncertain and dissimilar with each other.^ Extensive experiments on several large scale datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approaches over several state-of-the-art hashing methods from different perspectives

Similarity learning in the era of big data

This dissertation studies the problem of similarity learning in the era of big data with heavy emphasis on real-world applications in social media. As in the saying “birds of a feather flock together,” in similarity learning, we aim to identify the notion of being similar in a data-driven and task-specific way, which is a central problem for maximizing the value of big data. Despite many successes of similarity learning from past decades, social media networks as one of the most typical big data media contain large-volume, various and high-velocity data, which makes conventional learning paradigms and off- the-shelf algorithms insufficient. Thus, we focus on addressing the emerging challenges brought by the inherent “three-Vs” characteristics of big data by answering the following questions: 1) Similarity is characterized by both links and node contents in networks; how to identify the contribution of each network component to seamlessly construct an application orientated similarity function? 2) Social media data are massive and contain much noise; how to efficiently learn the similarity between node pairs in large and noisy environments? 3) Node contents in social media networks are multi-modal; how to effectively measure cross-modal similarity by bridging the so-called “semantic gap”? 4) User wants and needs, and item characteristics, are continuously evolving, which generates data at an unprecedented rate; how to model the nature of temporal dynamics in principle and provide timely decision makings? The goal of this dissertation is to provide solutions to these questions via innovative research and novel methods. We hope this dissertation sheds more light on similarity learning in the big data era and broadens its applications in social media

Infinite root stacks and quasi-coherent sheaves on logarithmic schemes

We define and study infinite root stacks of fine and saturated logarithmic schemes, a limit version of the root stacks introduced by Niels Borne and the second author. We show in particular that the infinite root stack determines the logarithmic structure, and recovers the Kummer-flat topos of the logarithmic scheme. We also extend the correspondence between parabolic sheaves and quasi-coherent sheaves on root stacks to this new setting.Comment: v2: 61 pages. Final version, to appear in Proc. Lond. Math. So

The geometric Satake equivalence for integral motives

We prove the geometric Satake equivalence for mixed Tate motives over the integral motivic cohomology spectrum. This refines previous versions of the geometric Satake equivalence for split groups and power series affine Grassmannians. Our new geometric results include Whitney-Tate stratifications of Beilinson-Drinfeld Grassmannians and cellular decompositions of semi-infinite orbits. With future global applications in mind, we also achieve an equivalence relative to a power of the affine line. Finally, we use our equivalence to give Tannakian constructions of the C-group and a modified form of Vinberg's monoid.Comment: Comments welcome