Semantic Models for Machine Learning

In this thesis we present approaches to the creation and usage of semantic models by the analysis of the data spread in the feature space. We aim to introduce the general notion of using feature selection techniques in machine learning applications. The applied approaches obtain new feature directions on data, such that machine learning applications would show an increase in performance. We review three principle methods that are used throughout the thesis. Firstly Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA), which is a method of correlating linear relationships between two multidimensional variables. CCA can be seen as using complex labels as a way of guiding feature selection towards the underlying semantics. CCA makes use of two views of the same semantic object to extract a representation of the semantics. Secondly Partial Least Squares (PLS), a method similar to CCA. It selects feature directions that are useful for the task at hand, though PLS only uses one view of an object and the label as the corresponding pair. PLS could be thought of as a method that looks for directions that are good for distinguishing the different labels. The third method is the Fisher kernel. A method that aims to extract more information of a generative model than simply by their output probabilities. The aim is to analyse how the Fisher score depends on the model and which aspects of the model are important in determining the Fisher score. We focus our theoretical investigation primarily on CCA and its kernel variant. Providing a theoretical analysis of the method's stability using Rademacher complexity, hence deriving the error bound for new data. We conclude the thesis by applying the described approaches to problems in the various fields of image, text, music application and medical analysis, describing several novel applications on relevant real-world data. The aim of the thesis is to provide a theoretical understanding of semantic models, while also providing a good application foundation on how these models can be practically used

Semantic models for machine learning

In this thesis we present approaches to the creation and usage of semantic models by the analysis of the data spread in the feature space. We aim to introduce the general notion of using feature selection techniques in machine learning applications. The applied approaches obtain new feature directions on data, such that machine learning applications would show an increase in performance. We review three principle methods that are used throughout the thesis. Firstly Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA), which is a method of correlating linear relationships between two multidimensional variables. CCA can be seen as using complex labels as a way of guiding feature selection towards the underlying semantics. CCA makes use of two views of the same semantic object to extract a representation of the semantics. Secondly Partial Least Squares (PLS), a method similar to CCA. It selects feature directions that are useful for the task at hand, though PLS only uses one view of an object and the label as the corresponding pair. PLS could be thought of as a method that looks for directions that are good for distinguishing the different labels. The third method is the Fisher kernel. A method that aims to extract more information of a generative model than simply by their output probabilities. The aim is to analyse how the Fisher score depends on the model and which aspects of the model are important in determining the Fisher score. We focus our theoretical investigation primarily on CCA and its kernel variant. Providing a theoretical analysis of the method's stability using Rademacher complexity, hence deriving the error bound for new data. We conclude the thesis by applying the described approaches to problems in the various fields of image, text, music application and medical analysis, describing several novel applications on relevant real-world data. The aim of the thesis is to provide a theoretical understanding of semantic models, while also providing a good application foundation on how these models can be practically used.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Cue Phrase Classification Using Machine Learning

Cue phrases may be used in a discourse sense to explicitly signal discourse structure, but also in a sentential sense to convey semantic rather than structural information. Correctly classifying cue phrases as discourse or sentential is critical in natural language processing systems that exploit discourse structure, e.g., for performing tasks such as anaphora resolution and plan recognition. This paper explores the use of machine learning for classifying cue phrases as discourse or sentential. Two machine learning programs (Cgrendel and C4.5) are used to induce classification models from sets of pre-classified cue phrases and their features in text and speech. Machine learning is shown to be an effective technique for not only automating the generation of classification models, but also for improving upon previous results. When compared to manually derived classification models already in the literature, the learned models often perform with higher accuracy and contain new linguistic insights into the data. In addition, the ability to automatically construct classification models makes it easier to comparatively analyze the utility of alternative feature representations of the data. Finally, the ease of retraining makes the learning approach more scalable and flexible than manual methods.Comment: 42 pages, uses jair.sty, theapa.bst, theapa.st

DEEP FULLY RESIDUAL CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORK FOR SEMANTIC IMAGE SEGMENTATION

Department of Computer Science and EngineeringThe goal of semantic image segmentation is to partition the pixels of an image into semantically meaningful parts and classifying those parts according to a predefined label set. Although object recognition models achieved remarkable performance recently and they even surpass human???s ability to recognize objects, but semantic segmentation models are still behind. One of the reason that makes semantic segmentation relatively a hard problem is the image understanding at pixel level by considering global context as oppose to object recognition. One other challenge is transferring the knowledge of an object recognition model for the task of semantic segmentation. In this thesis, we are delineating some of the main challenges we faced approaching semantic image segmentation with machine learning algorithms. Our main focus was how we can use deep learning algorithms for this task since they require the least amount of feature engineering and also it was shown that such models can be applied to large scale datasets and exhibit remarkable performance. More precisely, we worked on a variation of convolutional neural networks (CNN) suitable for the semantic segmentation task. We proposed a model called deep fully residual convolutional networks (DFRCN) to tackle this problem. Utilizing residual learning makes training of deep models feasible which ultimately leads to having a rich powerful visual representation. Our model also benefits from skip-connections which ease the propagation of information from the encoder module to the decoder module. This would enable our model to have less parameters in the decoder module while it also achieves better performance. We also benchmarked the effective variation of the proposed model on a semantic segmentation benchmark. We first make a thorough review of current high-performance models and the problems one might face when trying to replicate such models which mainly arose from the lack of sufficient provided information. Then, we describe our own novel method which we called deep fully residual convolutional network (DFRCN). We showed that our method exhibits state of the art performance on a challenging benchmark for aerial image segmentation.clos

Android HIV: A Study of Repackaging Malware for Evading Machine-Learning Detection

Machine learning based solutions have been successfully employed for automatic detection of malware in Android applications. However, machine learning models are known to lack robustness against inputs crafted by an adversary. So far, the adversarial examples can only deceive Android malware detectors that rely on syntactic features, and the perturbations can only be implemented by simply modifying Android manifest. While recent Android malware detectors rely more on semantic features from Dalvik bytecode rather than manifest, existing attacking/defending methods are no longer effective. In this paper, we introduce a new highly-effective attack that generates adversarial examples of Android malware and evades being detected by the current models. To this end, we propose a method of applying optimal perturbations onto Android APK using a substitute model. Based on the transferability concept, the perturbations that successfully deceive the substitute model are likely to deceive the original models as well. We develop an automated tool to generate the adversarial examples without human intervention to apply the attacks. In contrast to existing works, the adversarial examples crafted by our method can also deceive recent machine learning based detectors that rely on semantic features such as control-flow-graph. The perturbations can also be implemented directly onto APK's Dalvik bytecode rather than Android manifest to evade from recent detectors. We evaluated the proposed manipulation methods for adversarial examples by using the same datasets that Drebin and MaMadroid (5879 malware samples) used. Our results show that, the malware detection rates decreased from 96% to 1% in MaMaDroid, and from 97% to 1% in Drebin, with just a small distortion generated by our adversarial examples manipulation method.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figure