Socializing the Semantic Gap: A Comparative Survey on Image Tag Assignment, Refinement and Retrieval

Where previous reviews on content-based image retrieval emphasize on what can be seen in an image to bridge the semantic gap, this survey considers what people tag about an image. A comprehensive treatise of three closely linked problems, i.e., image tag assignment, refinement, and tag-based image retrieval is presented. While existing works vary in terms of their targeted tasks and methodology, they rely on the key functionality of tag relevance, i.e. estimating the relevance of a specific tag with respect to the visual content of a given image and its social context. By analyzing what information a specific method exploits to construct its tag relevance function and how such information is exploited, this paper introduces a taxonomy to structure the growing literature, understand the ingredients of the main works, clarify their connections and difference, and recognize their merits and limitations. For a head-to-head comparison between the state-of-the-art, a new experimental protocol is presented, with training sets containing 10k, 100k and 1m images and an evaluation on three test sets, contributed by various research groups. Eleven representative works are implemented and evaluated. Putting all this together, the survey aims to provide an overview of the past and foster progress for the near future.Comment: to appear in ACM Computing Survey

Projections as visual aids for classification system design.

Dimensionality reduction is a compelling alternative for high-dimensional data visualization. This method provides insight into high-dimensional feature spaces by mapping relationships between observations (high-dimensional vectors) to low (two or three) dimensional spaces. These low-dimensional representations support tasks such as outlier and group detection based on direct visualization. Supervised learning, a subfield of machine learning, is also concerned with observations. A key task in supervised learning consists of assigning class labels to observations based on generalization from previous experience. Effective development of such classification systems depends on many choices, including features descriptors, learning algorithms, and hyperparameters. These choices are not trivial, and there is no simple recipe to improve classification systems that perform poorly. In this context, we first propose the use of visual representations based on dimensionality reduction (projections) for predictive feedback on classification efficacy. Second, we propose a projection-based visual analytics methodology, and supportive tooling, that can be used to improve classification systems through feature selection. We evaluate our proposal through experiments involving four datasets and three representative learning algorithms

On error correlation and accuracy of nearest neighbor ensemble classifiers

Recent empirical work has shown that combining predictors can lead to significant reduction in generalization error. Unfortunately, many combining methods do not improve nearest neighbor (NN) classifiers at all. This is because NN methods are very robust with respect to variations of a data set. In contrast, they are sensitive to input features. We exploit the instability of NN classifiers with respect to different choices of features to generate an effective and diverse set of NN classifiers. Interestingly, the approach takes advantage of the high dimensionality of the data. We investigate techniques to decorrelate errors while keeping the individual classifiers accurate. We analyze the results both in terms of error rates and error correlations. The experimental results show that our technique can offer significant performance improvements with respect to competitive methods.

Discriminative Learning of Similarity and Group Equivariant Representations

One of the most fundamental problems in machine learning is to compare examples: Given a pair of objects we want to return a value which indicates degree of (dis)similarity. Similarity is often task specific, and pre-defined distances can perform poorly, leading to work in metric learning. However, being able to learn a similarity-sensitive distance function also presupposes access to a rich, discriminative representation for the objects at hand. In this dissertation we present contributions towards both ends. In the first part of the thesis, assuming good representations for the data, we present a formulation for metric learning that makes a more direct attempt to optimize for the k-NN accuracy as compared to prior work. We also present extensions of this formulation to metric learning for kNN regression, asymmetric similarity learning and discriminative learning of Hamming distance. In the second part, we consider a situation where we are on a limited computational budget i.e. optimizing over a space of possible metrics would be infeasible, but access to a label aware distance metric is still desirable. We present a simple, and computationally inexpensive approach for estimating a well motivated metric that relies only on gradient estimates, discussing theoretical and experimental results. In the final part, we address representational issues, considering group equivariant convolutional neural networks (GCNNs). Equivariance to symmetry transformations is explicitly encoded in GCNNs; a classical CNN being the simplest example. In particular, we present a SO(3)-equivariant neural network architecture for spherical data, that operates entirely in Fourier space, while also providing a formalism for the design of fully Fourier neural networks that are equivariant to the action of any continuous compact group.Comment: PhD thesi

One-Class Classification: Taxonomy of Study and Review of Techniques

One-class classification (OCC) algorithms aim to build classification models when the negative class is either absent, poorly sampled or not well defined. This unique situation constrains the learning of efficient classifiers by defining class boundary just with the knowledge of positive class. The OCC problem has been considered and applied under many research themes, such as outlier/novelty detection and concept learning. In this paper we present a unified view of the general problem of OCC by presenting a taxonomy of study for OCC problems, which is based on the availability of training data, algorithms used and the application domains applied. We further delve into each of the categories of the proposed taxonomy and present a comprehensive literature review of the OCC algorithms, techniques and methodologies with a focus on their significance, limitations and applications. We conclude our paper by discussing some open research problems in the field of OCC and present our vision for future research.Comment: 24 pages + 11 pages of references, 8 figure