Second-order Democratic Aggregation

Aggregated second-order features extracted from deep convolutional networks have been shown to be effective for texture generation, fine-grained recognition, material classification, and scene understanding. In this paper, we study a class of orderless aggregation functions designed to minimize interference or equalize contributions in the context of second-order features and we show that they can be computed just as efficiently as their first-order counterparts and they have favorable properties over aggregation by summation. Another line of work has shown that matrix power normalization after aggregation can significantly improve the generalization of second-order representations. We show that matrix power normalization implicitly equalizes contributions during aggregation thus establishing a connection between matrix normalization techniques and prior work on minimizing interference. Based on the analysis we present {\gamma}-democratic aggregators that interpolate between sum ({\gamma}=1) and democratic pooling ({\gamma}=0) outperforming both on several classification tasks. Moreover, unlike power normalization, the {\gamma}-democratic aggregations can be computed in a low dimensional space by sketching that allows the use of very high-dimensional second-order features. This results in a state-of-the-art performance on several datasets

Sketch *-metric: Comparing Data Streams via Sketching

12 pages, double colonnesIn this paper, we consider the problem of estimating the distance between any two large data streams in small- space constraint. This problem is of utmost importance in data intensive monitoring applications where input streams are generated rapidly. These streams need to be processed on the fly and accurately to quickly determine any deviance from nominal behavior. We present a new metric, the Sketch ⋆-metric, which allows to define a distance between updatable summaries (or sketches) of large data streams. An important feature of the Sketch ⋆-metric is that, given a measure on the entire initial data streams, the Sketch ⋆-metric preserves the axioms of the latter measure on the sketch (such as the non-negativity, the identity, the symmetry, the triangle inequality but also specific properties of the f-divergence). Extensive experiments conducted on both synthetic traces and real data allow us to validate the robustness and accuracy of the Sketch ⋆-metric