Semi–Supervised Learning for Image Modality Classification

Searching for medical image content is a regular task for many physicians, especially in radiology. Retrieval of medical images from the scientific literature can benefit from automatic modality classification to focus the search and filter out non–relevant items. Training datasets are often unevenly distributed regarding the classes resulting sometimes in a less than optimal classification performance. This article proposes a semi–supervised learning approach applied using a k–Nearest Neighbour (k–NN) classifier to exploit unlabelled data and to expand the training set. The algorithmic implementation is described and the method is evaluated on the ImageCLEFmed modality classification benchmark. Results show that this approach achieves an improved performance over supervised k–NN and Random Forest classifiers. Moreover, medical case–based retrieval benefits from the modality filter

Multi-modal curriculum learning for semi-supervised image classification

Semi-supervised image classification aims to classify a large quantity of unlabeled images by typically harnessing scarce labeled images. Existing semi-supervised methods often suffer from inadequate classification accuracy when encountering difficult yet critical images, such as outliers, because they treat all unlabeled images equally and conduct classifications in an imperfectly ordered sequence. In this paper, we employ the curriculum learning methodology by investigating the difficulty of classifying every unlabeled image. The reliability and the discriminability of these unlabeled images are particularly investigated for evaluating their difficulty. As a result, an optimized image sequence is generated during the iterative propagations, and the unlabeled images are logically classified from simple to difficult. Furthermore, since images are usually characterized by multiple visual feature descriptors, we associate each kind of features with a teacher, and design a multi-modal curriculum learning (MMCL) strategy to integrate the information from different feature modalities. In each propagation, each teacher analyzes the difficulties of the currently unlabeled images from its own modality viewpoint. A consensus is subsequently reached among all the teachers, determining the currently simplest images (i.e., a curriculum), which are to be reliably classified by the multi-modal learner. This well-organized propagation process leveraging multiple teachers and one learner enables our MMCL to outperform five state-of-the-art methods on eight popular image data sets

S-CLIP: Semi-supervised Vision-Language Learning using Few Specialist Captions

Vision-language models, such as contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP), have demonstrated impressive results in natural image domains. However, these models often struggle when applied to specialized domains like remote sensing, and adapting to such domains is challenging due to the limited number of image-text pairs available for training. To address this, we propose S-CLIP, a semi-supervised learning method for training CLIP that utilizes additional unpaired images. S-CLIP employs two pseudo-labeling strategies specifically designed for contrastive learning and the language modality. The caption-level pseudo-label is given by a combination of captions of paired images, obtained by solving an optimal transport problem between unpaired and paired images. The keyword-level pseudo-label is given by a keyword in the caption of the nearest paired image, trained through partial label learning that assumes a candidate set of labels for supervision instead of the exact one. By combining these objectives, S-CLIP significantly enhances the training of CLIP using only a few image-text pairs, as demonstrated in various specialist domains, including remote sensing, fashion, scientific figures, and comics. For instance, S-CLIP improves CLIP by 10% for zero-shot classification and 4% for image-text retrieval on the remote sensing benchmark, matching the performance of supervised CLIP while using three times fewer image-text pairs.Comment: NeurIPS 202

Semi-supervised Deep Generative Modelling of Incomplete Multi-Modality Emotional Data

There are threefold challenges in emotion recognition. First, it is difficult to recognize human's emotional states only considering a single modality. Second, it is expensive to manually annotate the emotional data. Third, emotional data often suffers from missing modalities due to unforeseeable sensor malfunction or configuration issues. In this paper, we address all these problems under a novel multi-view deep generative framework. Specifically, we propose to model the statistical relationships of multi-modality emotional data using multiple modality-specific generative networks with a shared latent space. By imposing a Gaussian mixture assumption on the posterior approximation of the shared latent variables, our framework can learn the joint deep representation from multiple modalities and evaluate the importance of each modality simultaneously. To solve the labeled-data-scarcity problem, we extend our multi-view model to semi-supervised learning scenario by casting the semi-supervised classification problem as a specialized missing data imputation task. To address the missing-modality problem, we further extend our semi-supervised multi-view model to deal with incomplete data, where a missing view is treated as a latent variable and integrated out during inference. This way, the proposed overall framework can utilize all available (both labeled and unlabeled, as well as both complete and incomplete) data to improve its generalization ability. The experiments conducted on two real multi-modal emotion datasets demonstrated the superiority of our framework.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1704.07548, 2018 ACM Multimedia Conference (MM'18

ForestHash: Semantic Hashing With Shallow Random Forests and Tiny Convolutional Networks

Hash codes are efficient data representations for coping with the ever growing amounts of data. In this paper, we introduce a random forest semantic hashing scheme that embeds tiny convolutional neural networks (CNN) into shallow random forests, with near-optimal information-theoretic code aggregation among trees. We start with a simple hashing scheme, where random trees in a forest act as hashing functions by setting `1' for the visited tree leaf, and `0' for the rest. We show that traditional random forests fail to generate hashes that preserve the underlying similarity between the trees, rendering the random forests approach to hashing challenging. To address this, we propose to first randomly group arriving classes at each tree split node into two groups, obtaining a significantly simplified two-class classification problem, which can be handled using a light-weight CNN weak learner. Such random class grouping scheme enables code uniqueness by enforcing each class to share its code with different classes in different trees. A non-conventional low-rank loss is further adopted for the CNN weak learners to encourage code consistency by minimizing intra-class variations and maximizing inter-class distance for the two random class groups. Finally, we introduce an information-theoretic approach for aggregating codes of individual trees into a single hash code, producing a near-optimal unique hash for each class. The proposed approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art hashing methods for image retrieval tasks on large-scale public datasets, while performing at the level of other state-of-the-art image classification techniques while utilizing a more compact and efficient scalable representation. This work proposes a principled and robust procedure to train and deploy in parallel an ensemble of light-weight CNNs, instead of simply going deeper.Comment: Accepted to ECCV 201