13,093 research outputs found
Herding as a Learning System with Edge-of-Chaos Dynamics
Herding defines a deterministic dynamical system at the edge of chaos. It
generates a sequence of model states and parameters by alternating parameter
perturbations with state maximizations, where the sequence of states can be
interpreted as "samples" from an associated MRF model. Herding differs from
maximum likelihood estimation in that the sequence of parameters does not
converge to a fixed point and differs from an MCMC posterior sampling approach
in that the sequence of states is generated deterministically. Herding may be
interpreted as a"perturb and map" method where the parameter perturbations are
generated using a deterministic nonlinear dynamical system rather than randomly
from a Gumbel distribution. This chapter studies the distinct statistical
characteristics of the herding algorithm and shows that the fast convergence
rate of the controlled moments may be attributed to edge of chaos dynamics. The
herding algorithm can also be generalized to models with latent variables and
to a discriminative learning setting. The perceptron cycling theorem ensures
that the fast moment matching property is preserved in the more general
framework
Using parametric set constraints for locating errors in CLP programs
This paper introduces a framework of parametric descriptive directional types
for constraint logic programming (CLP). It proposes a method for locating type
errors in CLP programs and presents a prototype debugging tool. The main
technique used is checking correctness of programs w.r.t. type specifications.
The approach is based on a generalization of known methods for proving
correctness of logic programs to the case of parametric specifications.
Set-constraint techniques are used for formulating and checking verification
conditions for (parametric) polymorphic type specifications. The specifications
are expressed in a parametric extension of the formalism of term grammars. The
soundness of the method is proved and the prototype debugging tool supporting
the proposed approach is illustrated on examples.
The paper is a substantial extension of the previous work by the same authors
concerning monomorphic directional types.Comment: 64 pages, To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programmin
Class-Agnostic Counting
Nearly all existing counting methods are designed for a specific object
class. Our work, however, aims to create a counting model able to count any
class of object. To achieve this goal, we formulate counting as a matching
problem, enabling us to exploit the image self-similarity property that
naturally exists in object counting problems. We make the following three
contributions: first, a Generic Matching Network (GMN) architecture that can
potentially count any object in a class-agnostic manner; second, by
reformulating the counting problem as one of matching objects, we can take
advantage of the abundance of video data labeled for tracking, which contains
natural repetitions suitable for training a counting model. Such data enables
us to train the GMN. Third, to customize the GMN to different user
requirements, an adapter module is used to specialize the model with minimal
effort, i.e. using a few labeled examples, and adapting only a small fraction
of the trained parameters. This is a form of few-shot learning, which is
practical for domains where labels are limited due to requiring expert
knowledge (e.g. microbiology). We demonstrate the flexibility of our method on
a diverse set of existing counting benchmarks: specifically cells, cars, and
human crowds. The model achieves competitive performance on cell and crowd
counting datasets, and surpasses the state-of-the-art on the car dataset using
only three training images. When training on the entire dataset, the proposed
method outperforms all previous methods by a large margin.Comment: Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV), 201
Good Features to Correlate for Visual Tracking
During the recent years, correlation filters have shown dominant and
spectacular results for visual object tracking. The types of the features that
are employed in these family of trackers significantly affect the performance
of visual tracking. The ultimate goal is to utilize robust features invariant
to any kind of appearance change of the object, while predicting the object
location as properly as in the case of no appearance change. As the deep
learning based methods have emerged, the study of learning features for
specific tasks has accelerated. For instance, discriminative visual tracking
methods based on deep architectures have been studied with promising
performance. Nevertheless, correlation filter based (CFB) trackers confine
themselves to use the pre-trained networks which are trained for object
classification problem. To this end, in this manuscript the problem of learning
deep fully convolutional features for the CFB visual tracking is formulated. In
order to learn the proposed model, a novel and efficient backpropagation
algorithm is presented based on the loss function of the network. The proposed
learning framework enables the network model to be flexible for a custom
design. Moreover, it alleviates the dependency on the network trained for
classification. Extensive performance analysis shows the efficacy of the
proposed custom design in the CFB tracking framework. By fine-tuning the
convolutional parts of a state-of-the-art network and integrating this model to
a CFB tracker, which is the top performing one of VOT2016, 18% increase is
achieved in terms of expected average overlap, and tracking failures are
decreased by 25%, while maintaining the superiority over the state-of-the-art
methods in OTB-2013 and OTB-2015 tracking datasets.Comment: Accepted version of IEEE Transactions on Image Processin
kLog: A Language for Logical and Relational Learning with Kernels
We introduce kLog, a novel approach to statistical relational learning.
Unlike standard approaches, kLog does not represent a probability distribution
directly. It is rather a language to perform kernel-based learning on
expressive logical and relational representations. kLog allows users to specify
learning problems declaratively. It builds on simple but powerful concepts:
learning from interpretations, entity/relationship data modeling, logic
programming, and deductive databases. Access by the kernel to the rich
representation is mediated by a technique we call graphicalization: the
relational representation is first transformed into a graph --- in particular,
a grounded entity/relationship diagram. Subsequently, a choice of graph kernel
defines the feature space. kLog supports mixed numerical and symbolic data, as
well as background knowledge in the form of Prolog or Datalog programs as in
inductive logic programming systems. The kLog framework can be applied to
tackle the same range of tasks that has made statistical relational learning so
popular, including classification, regression, multitask learning, and
collective classification. We also report about empirical comparisons, showing
that kLog can be either more accurate, or much faster at the same level of
accuracy, than Tilde and Alchemy. kLog is GPLv3 licensed and is available at
http://klog.dinfo.unifi.it along with tutorials
Sliced Wasserstein Kernel for Persistence Diagrams
Persistence diagrams (PDs) play a key role in topological data analysis
(TDA), in which they are routinely used to describe topological properties of
complicated shapes. PDs enjoy strong stability properties and have proven their
utility in various learning contexts. They do not, however, live in a space
naturally endowed with a Hilbert structure and are usually compared with
specific distances, such as the bottleneck distance. To incorporate PDs in a
learning pipeline, several kernels have been proposed for PDs with a strong
emphasis on the stability of the RKHS distance w.r.t. perturbations of the PDs.
In this article, we use the Sliced Wasserstein approximation SW of the
Wasserstein distance to define a new kernel for PDs, which is not only provably
stable but also provably discriminative (depending on the number of points in
the PDs) w.r.t. the Wasserstein distance between PDs. We also demonstrate
its practicality, by developing an approximation technique to reduce kernel
computation time, and show that our proposal compares favorably to existing
kernels for PDs on several benchmarks.Comment: Minor modification
Fine-Grained Product Class Recognition for Assisted Shopping
Assistive solutions for a better shopping experience can improve the quality
of life of people, in particular also of visually impaired shoppers. We present
a system that visually recognizes the fine-grained product classes of items on
a shopping list, in shelves images taken with a smartphone in a grocery store.
Our system consists of three components: (a) We automatically recognize useful
text on product packaging, e.g., product name and brand, and build a mapping of
words to product classes based on the large-scale GroceryProducts dataset. When
the user populates the shopping list, we automatically infer the product class
of each entered word. (b) We perform fine-grained product class recognition
when the user is facing a shelf. We discover discriminative patches on product
packaging to differentiate between visually similar product classes and to
increase the robustness against continuous changes in product design. (c) We
continuously improve the recognition accuracy through active learning. Our
experiments show the robustness of the proposed method against cross-domain
challenges, and the scalability to an increasing number of products with
minimal re-training.Comment: Accepted at ICCV Workshop on Assistive Computer Vision and Robotics
(ICCV-ACVR) 201
Generalized Max Pooling
State-of-the-art patch-based image representations involve a pooling
operation that aggregates statistics computed from local descriptors. Standard
pooling operations include sum- and max-pooling. Sum-pooling lacks
discriminability because the resulting representation is strongly influenced by
frequent yet often uninformative descriptors, but only weakly influenced by
rare yet potentially highly-informative ones. Max-pooling equalizes the
influence of frequent and rare descriptors but is only applicable to
representations that rely on count statistics, such as the bag-of-visual-words
(BOV) and its soft- and sparse-coding extensions. We propose a novel pooling
mechanism that achieves the same effect as max-pooling but is applicable beyond
the BOV and especially to the state-of-the-art Fisher Vector -- hence the name
Generalized Max Pooling (GMP). It involves equalizing the similarity between
each patch and the pooled representation, which is shown to be equivalent to
re-weighting the per-patch statistics. We show on five public image
classification benchmarks that the proposed GMP can lead to significant
performance gains with respect to heuristic alternatives.Comment: (to appear) CVPR 2014 - IEEE Conference on Computer Vision & Pattern
Recognition (2014
- …