Transcribing Content from Structural Images with Spotlight Mechanism

Transcribing content from structural images, e.g., writing notes from music scores, is a challenging task as not only the content objects should be recognized, but the internal structure should also be preserved. Existing image recognition methods mainly work on images with simple content (e.g., text lines with characters), but are not capable to identify ones with more complex content (e.g., structured symbols), which often follow a fine-grained grammar. To this end, in this paper, we propose a hierarchical Spotlight Transcribing Network (STN) framework followed by a two-stage "where-to-what" solution. Specifically, we first decide "where-to-look" through a novel spotlight mechanism to focus on different areas of the original image following its structure. Then, we decide "what-to-write" by developing a GRU based network with the spotlight areas for transcribing the content accordingly. Moreover, we propose two implementations on the basis of STN, i.e., STNM and STNR, where the spotlight movement follows the Markov property and Recurrent modeling, respectively. We also design a reinforcement method to refine the framework by self-improving the spotlight mechanism. We conduct extensive experiments on many structural image datasets, where the results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of STN framework.Comment: Accepted by KDD2018 Research Track. In proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD'18

CoaCor: Code Annotation for Code Retrieval with Reinforcement Learning

To accelerate software development, much research has been performed to help people understand and reuse the huge amount of available code resources. Two important tasks have been widely studied: code retrieval, which aims to retrieve code snippets relevant to a given natural language query from a code base, and code annotation, where the goal is to annotate a code snippet with a natural language description. Despite their advancement in recent years, the two tasks are mostly explored separately. In this work, we investigate a novel perspective of Code annotation for Code retrieval (hence called `CoaCor'), where a code annotation model is trained to generate a natural language annotation that can represent the semantic meaning of a given code snippet and can be leveraged by a code retrieval model to better distinguish relevant code snippets from others. To this end, we propose an effective framework based on reinforcement learning, which explicitly encourages the code annotation model to generate annotations that can be used for the retrieval task. Through extensive experiments, we show that code annotations generated by our framework are much more detailed and more useful for code retrieval, and they can further improve the performance of existing code retrieval models significantly.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures. Accepted by The Web Conference (WWW) 201

Learning models for semantic classification of insufficient plantar pressure images

Establishing a reliable and stable model to predict a target by using insufficient labeled samples is feasible and effective, particularly, for a sensor-generated data-set. This paper has been inspired with insufficient data-set learning algorithms, such as metric-based, prototype networks and meta-learning, and therefore we propose an insufficient data-set transfer model learning method. Firstly, two basic models for transfer learning are introduced. A classification system and calculation criteria are then subsequently introduced. Secondly, a dataset of plantar pressure for comfort shoe design is acquired and preprocessed through foot scan system; and by using a pre-trained convolution neural network employing AlexNet and convolution neural network (CNN)- based transfer modeling, the classification accuracy of the plantar pressure images is over 93.5%. Finally, the proposed method has been compared to the current classifiers VGG, ResNet, AlexNet and pre-trained CNN. Also, our work is compared with known-scaling and shifting (SS) and unknown-plain slot (PS) partition methods on the public test databases: SUN, CUB, AWA1, AWA2, and aPY with indices of precision (tr, ts, H) and time (training and evaluation). The proposed method for the plantar pressure classification task shows high performance in most indices when comparing with other methods. The transfer learning-based method can be applied to other insufficient data-sets of sensor imaging fields