Reinforced Decision Trees

In order to speed-up classification models when facing a large number of categories, one usual approach consists in organizing the categories in a particular structure, this structure being then used as a way to speed-up the prediction computation. This is for example the case when using error-correcting codes or even hierarchies of categories. But in the majority of approaches, this structure is chosen \textit{by hand}, or during a preliminary step, and not integrated in the learning process. We propose a new model called Reinforced Decision Tree which simultaneously learns how to organize categories in a tree structure and how to classify any input based on this structure. This approach keeps the advantages of existing techniques (low inference complexity) but allows one to build efficient classifiers in one learning step. The learning algorithm is inspired by reinforcement learning and policy-gradient techniques which allows us to integrate the two steps (building the tree, and learning the classifier) in one single algorithm

Indexing ensembles of exemplar-SVMs with rejecting taxonomies

Ensembles of Exemplar-SVMs have been used for a wide variety of tasks, such as object detection, segmentation, label transfer and mid-level feature learning. In order to make this technique effective though a large collection of classifiers is needed, which often makes the evaluation phase prohibitive. To overcome this issue we exploit the joint distribution of exemplar classifier scores to build a taxonomy capable of indexing each Exemplar-SVM and enabling a fast evaluation of the whole ensemble. We experiment with the Pascal 2007 benchmark on the task of object detection and on a simple segmentation task, in order to verify the robustness of our indexing data structure with reference to the standard Ensemble. We also introduce a rejection strategy to discard not relevant image patches for a more efficient access to the data