131,769 research outputs found
Deep Self-Taught Learning for Handwritten Character Recognition
Recent theoretical and empirical work in statistical machine learning has
demonstrated the importance of learning algorithms for deep architectures,
i.e., function classes obtained by composing multiple non-linear
transformations. Self-taught learning (exploiting unlabeled examples or
examples from other distributions) has already been applied to deep learners,
but mostly to show the advantage of unlabeled examples. Here we explore the
advantage brought by {\em out-of-distribution examples}. For this purpose we
developed a powerful generator of stochastic variations and noise processes for
character images, including not only affine transformations but also slant,
local elastic deformations, changes in thickness, background images, grey level
changes, contrast, occlusion, and various types of noise. The
out-of-distribution examples are obtained from these highly distorted images or
by including examples of object classes different from those in the target test
set. We show that {\em deep learners benefit more from out-of-distribution
examples than a corresponding shallow learner}, at least in the area of
handwritten character recognition. In fact, we show that they beat previously
published results and reach human-level performance on both handwritten digit
classification and 62-class handwritten character recognition
Global versus Localized Generative Adversarial Nets
In this paper, we present a novel localized Generative Adversarial Net (GAN)
to learn on the manifold of real data. Compared with the classic GAN that {\em
globally} parameterizes a manifold, the Localized GAN (LGAN) uses local
coordinate charts to parameterize distinct local geometry of how data points
can transform at different locations on the manifold. Specifically, around each
point there exists a {\em local} generator that can produce data following
diverse patterns of transformations on the manifold. The locality nature of
LGAN enables local generators to adapt to and directly access the local
geometry without need to invert the generator in a global GAN. Furthermore, it
can prevent the manifold from being locally collapsed to a dimensionally
deficient tangent subspace by imposing an orthonormality prior between
tangents. This provides a geometric approach to alleviating mode collapse at
least locally on the manifold by imposing independence between data
transformations in different tangent directions. We will also demonstrate the
LGAN can be applied to train a robust classifier that prefers locally
consistent classification decisions on the manifold, and the resultant
regularizer is closely related with the Laplace-Beltrami operator. Our
experiments show that the proposed LGANs can not only produce diverse image
transformations, but also deliver superior classification performances
"Mental Rotation" by Optimizing Transforming Distance
The human visual system is able to recognize objects despite transformations
that can drastically alter their appearance. To this end, much effort has been
devoted to the invariance properties of recognition systems. Invariance can be
engineered (e.g. convolutional nets), or learned from data explicitly (e.g.
temporal coherence) or implicitly (e.g. by data augmentation). One idea that
has not, to date, been explored is the integration of latent variables which
permit a search over a learned space of transformations. Motivated by evidence
that people mentally simulate transformations in space while comparing
examples, so-called "mental rotation", we propose a transforming distance.
Here, a trained relational model actively transforms pairs of examples so that
they are maximally similar in some feature space yet respect the learned
transformational constraints. We apply our method to nearest-neighbour problems
on the Toronto Face Database and NORB
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