Appearance-and-Relation Networks for Video Classification

Spatiotemporal feature learning in videos is a fundamental problem in computer vision. This paper presents a new architecture, termed as Appearance-and-Relation Network (ARTNet), to learn video representation in an end-to-end manner. ARTNets are constructed by stacking multiple generic building blocks, called as SMART, whose goal is to simultaneously model appearance and relation from RGB input in a separate and explicit manner. Specifically, SMART blocks decouple the spatiotemporal learning module into an appearance branch for spatial modeling and a relation branch for temporal modeling. The appearance branch is implemented based on the linear combination of pixels or filter responses in each frame, while the relation branch is designed based on the multiplicative interactions between pixels or filter responses across multiple frames. We perform experiments on three action recognition benchmarks: Kinetics, UCF101, and HMDB51, demonstrating that SMART blocks obtain an evident improvement over 3D convolutions for spatiotemporal feature learning. Under the same training setting, ARTNets achieve superior performance on these three datasets to the existing state-of-the-art methods.Comment: CVPR18 camera-ready version. Code & models available at https://github.com/wanglimin/ARTNe

A General Framework for Anytime Approximation in Probabilistic Databases

Anytime approximation algorithms that compute the probabilities of queries over probabilistic databases can be of great use to statistical learning tasks. Those approaches have been based so far on either (i) sampling or (ii) branch-and-bound with model-based bounds. We present here a more general branch-and-bound framework that extends the possible bounds by using 'dissociation', which yields tighter bounds.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures, submitted to StarAI 2018 Worksho

Hybrid Models for Learning to Branch

A recent Graph Neural Network (GNN) approach for learning to branch has been shown to successfully reduce the running time of branch-and-bound algorithms for Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP). While the GNN relies on a GPU for inference, MILP solvers are purely CPU-based. This severely limits its application as many practitioners may not have access to high-end GPUs. In this work, we ask two key questions. First, in a more realistic setting where only a CPU is available, is the GNN model still competitive? Second, can we devise an alternate computationally inexpensive model that retains the predictive power of the GNN architecture? We answer the first question in the negative, and address the second question by proposing a new hybrid architecture for efficient branching on CPU machines. The proposed architecture combines the expressive power of GNNs with computationally inexpensive multi-linear perceptrons (MLP) for branching. We evaluate our methods on four classes of MILP problems, and show that they lead to up to 26% reduction in solver running time compared to state-of-the-art methods without a GPU, while extrapolating to harder problems than it was trained on.Comment: Preprint. Under revie