Distributionally Robust Semi-Supervised Learning for People-Centric Sensing

Semi-supervised learning is crucial for alleviating labelling burdens in people-centric sensing. However, human-generated data inherently suffer from distribution shift in semi-supervised learning due to the diverse biological conditions and behavior patterns of humans. To address this problem, we propose a generic distributionally robust model for semi-supervised learning on distributionally shifted data. Considering both the discrepancy and the consistency between the labeled data and the unlabeled data, we learn the latent features that reduce person-specific discrepancy and preserve task-specific consistency. We evaluate our model in a variety of people-centric recognition tasks on real-world datasets, including intention recognition, activity recognition, muscular movement recognition and gesture recognition. The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 8 pages, accepted by AAAI201

Affective Behaviour Analysis Using Pretrained Model with Facial Priori

Affective behaviour analysis has aroused researchers' attention due to its broad applications. However, it is labor exhaustive to obtain accurate annotations for massive face images. Thus, we propose to utilize the prior facial information via Masked Auto-Encoder (MAE) pretrained on unlabeled face images. Furthermore, we combine MAE pretrained Vision Transformer (ViT) and AffectNet pretrained CNN to perform multi-task emotion recognition. We notice that expression and action unit (AU) scores are pure and intact features for valence-arousal (VA) regression. As a result, we utilize AffectNet pretrained CNN to extract expression scores concatenating with expression and AU scores from ViT to obtain the final VA features. Moreover, we also propose a co-training framework with two parallel MAE pretrained ViT for expression recognition tasks. In order to make the two views independent, we random mask most patches during the training process. Then, JS divergence is performed to make the predictions of the two views as consistent as possible. The results on ABAW4 show that our methods are effective

Searching for Needles in the Cosmic Haystack

Searching for pulsar signals in radio astronomy data sets is a difficult task. The data sets are extremely large, approaching the petabyte scale, and are growing larger as instruments become more advanced. Big Data brings with it big challenges. Processing the data to identify candidate pulsar signals is computationally expensive and must utilize parallelism to be scalable. Labeling benchmarks for supervised classification is costly. To compound the problem, pulsar signals are very rare, e.g., only 0.05% of the instances in one data set represent pulsars. Furthermore, there are many different approaches to candidate classification with no consensus on a best practice. This dissertation is focused on identifying and classifying radio pulsar candidates from single pulse searches. First, to identify and classify Dispersed Pulse Groups (DPGs), we developed a supervised machine learning approach that consists of RAPID (a novel peak identification algorithm), feature extraction, and supervised machine learning classification. We tested six algorithms for classification with four imbalance treatments. Results showed that classifiers with imbalance treatments had higher recall values. Overall, classifiers using multiclass RandomForests combined with Synthetic Majority Oversampling TEchnique (SMOTE) were the most efficient; they identified additional known pulsars not in the benchmark, with less false positives than other classifiers. Second, we developed a parallel single pulse identification method, D-RAPID, and introduced a novel automated multiclass labeling (ALM) technique that we combined with feature selection to improve execution performance. D-RAPID improved execution performance over RAPID by a factor of 5. We also showed that the combination of ALM and feature selection sped up the execution performance of RandomForest by 54% on average with less than a 2% average reduction in classification performance. Finally, we proposed CoDRIFt, a novel classification algorithm that is distributed for scalability and employs semi-supervised learning to leverage unlabeled data to inform classification. We evaluated and compared CoDRIFt to eleven other classifiers. The results showed that CoDRIFt excelled at classifying candidates in imbalanced benchmarks with a majority of non-pulsar signals (\u3e95%). Furthermore, CoDRIFt models created with very limited sets of labeled data (as few as 22 labeled minority class instances) were able to achieve high recall (mean = 0.98). In comparison to the other algorithms trained on similar sets, CoDRIFt outperformed them all, with recall 2.9% higher than the next best classifier and a 35% average improvement over all eleven classifiers. CoDRIFt is customizable for other problem domains with very large, imbalanced data sets, such as fraud detection and cyber attack detection

Discovering latent class labels for multi-label learning

Existing multi-label learning (MLL) approaches mainly assume all the labels are observed and construct classification models with a fixed set of target labels (known labels). However, in some real applications, multiple latent labels may exist outside this set and hide in the data, especially for large-scale data sets. Discovering and exploring the latent labels hidden in the data may not only find interesting knowledge but also help us to build a more robust learning model. In this paper, a novel approach named DLCL (i.e., Discovering Latent Class Labels for MLL) is proposed which can not only discover the latent labels in the training data but also predict new instances with the latent and known labels simultaneously. Extensive experiments show a competitive performance of DLCL against other state-of-the-art MLL approaches