4,842 research outputs found
Is Deep Learning Safe for Robot Vision? Adversarial Examples against the iCub Humanoid
Deep neural networks have been widely adopted in recent years, exhibiting
impressive performances in several application domains. It has however been
shown that they can be fooled by adversarial examples, i.e., images altered by
a barely-perceivable adversarial noise, carefully crafted to mislead
classification. In this work, we aim to evaluate the extent to which
robot-vision systems embodying deep-learning algorithms are vulnerable to
adversarial examples, and propose a computationally efficient countermeasure to
mitigate this threat, based on rejecting classification of anomalous inputs. We
then provide a clearer understanding of the safety properties of deep networks
through an intuitive empirical analysis, showing that the mapping learned by
such networks essentially violates the smoothness assumption of learning
algorithms. We finally discuss the main limitations of this work, including the
creation of real-world adversarial examples, and sketch promising research
directions.Comment: Accepted for publication at the ICCV 2017 Workshop on Vision in
Practice on Autonomous Robots (ViPAR
Least Ambiguous Set-Valued Classifiers with Bounded Error Levels
In most classification tasks there are observations that are ambiguous and
therefore difficult to correctly label. Set-valued classifiers output sets of
plausible labels rather than a single label, thereby giving a more appropriate
and informative treatment to the labeling of ambiguous instances. We introduce
a framework for multiclass set-valued classification, where the classifiers
guarantee user-defined levels of coverage or confidence (the probability that
the true label is contained in the set) while minimizing the ambiguity (the
expected size of the output). We first derive oracle classifiers assuming the
true distribution to be known. We show that the oracle classifiers are obtained
from level sets of the functions that define the conditional probability of
each class. Then we develop estimators with good asymptotic and finite sample
properties. The proposed estimators build on existing single-label classifiers.
The optimal classifier can sometimes output the empty set, but we provide two
solutions to fix this issue that are suitable for various practical needs.Comment: Final version to be published in the Journal of the American
Statistical Association at
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01621459.2017.1395341?journalCode=uasa2
Predictive User Modeling with Actionable Attributes
Different machine learning techniques have been proposed and used for
modeling individual and group user needs, interests and preferences. In the
traditional predictive modeling instances are described by observable
variables, called attributes. The goal is to learn a model for predicting the
target variable for unseen instances. For example, for marketing purposes a
company consider profiling a new user based on her observed web browsing
behavior, referral keywords or other relevant information. In many real world
applications the values of some attributes are not only observable, but can be
actively decided by a decision maker. Furthermore, in some of such applications
the decision maker is interested not only to generate accurate predictions, but
to maximize the probability of the desired outcome. For example, a direct
marketing manager can choose which type of a special offer to send to a client
(actionable attribute), hoping that the right choice will result in a positive
response with a higher probability. We study how to learn to choose the value
of an actionable attribute in order to maximize the probability of a desired
outcome in predictive modeling. We emphasize that not all instances are equally
sensitive to changes in actions. Accurate choice of an action is critical for
those instances, which are on the borderline (e.g. users who do not have a
strong opinion one way or the other). We formulate three supervised learning
approaches for learning to select the value of an actionable attribute at an
instance level. We also introduce a focused training procedure which puts more
emphasis on the situations where varying the action is the most likely to take
the effect. The proof of concept experimental validation on two real-world case
studies in web analytics and e-learning domains highlights the potential of the
proposed approaches
Time series classification with ensembles of elastic distance measures
Several alternative distance measures for comparing time series have recently been proposed and evaluated on time series classification (TSC) problems. These include variants of dynamic time warping (DTW), such as weighted and derivative DTW, and edit distance-based measures, including longest common subsequence, edit distance with real penalty, time warp with edit, and move–split–merge. These measures have the common characteristic that they operate in the time domain and compensate for potential localised misalignment through some elastic adjustment. Our aim is to experimentally test two hypotheses related to these distance measures. Firstly, we test whether there is any significant difference in accuracy for TSC problems between nearest neighbour classifiers using these distance measures. Secondly, we test whether combining these elastic distance measures through simple ensemble schemes gives significantly better accuracy. We test these hypotheses by carrying out one of the largest experimental studies ever conducted into time series classification. Our first key finding is that there is no significant difference between the elastic distance measures in terms of classification accuracy on our data sets. Our second finding, and the major contribution of this work, is to define an ensemble classifier that significantly outperforms the individual classifiers. We also demonstrate that the ensemble is more accurate than approaches not based in the time domain. Nearly all TSC papers in the data mining literature cite DTW (with warping window set through cross validation) as the benchmark for comparison. We believe that our ensemble is the first ever classifier to significantly outperform DTW and as such raises the bar for future work in this area
Information-Theoretic Measures for Objective Evaluation of Classifications
This work presents a systematic study of objective evaluations of abstaining
classifications using Information-Theoretic Measures (ITMs). First, we define
objective measures for which they do not depend on any free parameter. This
definition provides technical simplicity for examining "objectivity" or
"subjectivity" directly to classification evaluations. Second, we propose
twenty four normalized ITMs, derived from either mutual information,
divergence, or cross-entropy, for investigation. Contrary to conventional
performance measures that apply empirical formulas based on users' intuitions
or preferences, the ITMs are theoretically more sound for realizing objective
evaluations of classifications. We apply them to distinguish "error types" and
"reject types" in binary classifications without the need for input data of
cost terms. Third, to better understand and select the ITMs, we suggest three
desirable features for classification assessment measures, which appear more
crucial and appealing from the viewpoint of classification applications. Using
these features as "meta-measures", we can reveal the advantages and limitations
of ITMs from a higher level of evaluation knowledge. Numerical examples are
given to corroborate our claims and compare the differences among the proposed
measures. The best measure is selected in terms of the meta-measures, and its
specific properties regarding error types and reject types are analytically
derived.Comment: 25 Pages, 1 Figure, 10 Table
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