Sparse Subspace Clustering: Algorithm, Theory, and Applications

In many real-world problems, we are dealing with collections of high-dimensional data, such as images, videos, text and web documents, DNA microarray data, and more. Often, high-dimensional data lie close to low-dimensional structures corresponding to several classes or categories the data belongs to. In this paper, we propose and study an algorithm, called Sparse Subspace Clustering (SSC), to cluster data points that lie in a union of low-dimensional subspaces. The key idea is that, among infinitely many possible representations of a data point in terms of other points, a sparse representation corresponds to selecting a few points from the same subspace. This motivates solving a sparse optimization program whose solution is used in a spectral clustering framework to infer the clustering of data into subspaces. Since solving the sparse optimization program is in general NP-hard, we consider a convex relaxation and show that, under appropriate conditions on the arrangement of subspaces and the distribution of data, the proposed minimization program succeeds in recovering the desired sparse representations. The proposed algorithm can be solved efficiently and can handle data points near the intersections of subspaces. Another key advantage of the proposed algorithm with respect to the state of the art is that it can deal with data nuisances, such as noise, sparse outlying entries, and missing entries, directly by incorporating the model of the data into the sparse optimization program. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm through experiments on synthetic data as well as the two real-world problems of motion segmentation and face clustering

Block-Sparse Recovery via Convex Optimization

Given a dictionary that consists of multiple blocks and a signal that lives in the range space of only a few blocks, we study the problem of finding a block-sparse representation of the signal, i.e., a representation that uses the minimum number of blocks. Motivated by signal/image processing and computer vision applications, such as face recognition, we consider the block-sparse recovery problem in the case where the number of atoms in each block is arbitrary, possibly much larger than the dimension of the underlying subspace. To find a block-sparse representation of a signal, we propose two classes of non-convex optimization programs, which aim to minimize the number of nonzero coefficient blocks and the number of nonzero reconstructed vectors from the blocks, respectively. Since both classes of problems are NP-hard, we propose convex relaxations and derive conditions under which each class of the convex programs is equivalent to the original non-convex formulation. Our conditions depend on the notions of mutual and cumulative subspace coherence of a dictionary, which are natural generalizations of existing notions of mutual and cumulative coherence. We evaluate the performance of the proposed convex programs through simulations as well as real experiments on face recognition. We show that treating the face recognition problem as a block-sparse recovery problem improves the state-of-the-art results by 10% with only 25% of the training data.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin

BIT: Bi-Level Temporal Modeling for Efficient Supervised Action Segmentation

We address the task of supervised action segmentation which aims to partition a video into non-overlapping segments, each representing a different action. Recent works apply transformers to perform temporal modeling at the frame-level, which suffer from high computational cost and cannot well capture action dependencies over long temporal horizons. To address these issues, we propose an efficient BI-level Temporal modeling (BIT) framework that learns explicit action tokens to represent action segments, in parallel performs temporal modeling on frame and action levels, while maintaining a low computational cost. Our model contains (i) a frame branch that uses convolution to learn frame-level relationships, (ii) an action branch that uses transformer to learn action-level dependencies with a small set of action tokens and (iii) cross-attentions to allow communication between the two branches. We apply and extend a set-prediction objective to allow each action token to represent one or multiple action segments, thus can avoid learning a large number of tokens over long videos with many segments. Thanks to the design of our action branch, we can also seamlessly leverage textual transcripts of videos (when available) to help action segmentation by using them to initialize the action tokens. We evaluate our model on four video datasets (two egocentric and two third-person) for action segmentation with and without transcripts, showing that BIT significantly improves the state-of-the-art accuracy with much lower computational cost (30 times faster) compared to existing transformer-based methods.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure

Towards Effective Multi-Label Recognition Attacks via Knowledge Graph Consistency

Many real-world applications of image recognition require multi-label learning, whose goal is to find all labels in an image. Thus, robustness of such systems to adversarial image perturbations is extremely important. However, despite a large body of recent research on adversarial attacks, the scope of the existing works is mainly limited to the multi-class setting, where each image contains a single label. We show that the naive extensions of multi-class attacks to the multi-label setting lead to violating label relationships, modeled by a knowledge graph, and can be detected using a consistency verification scheme. Therefore, we propose a graph-consistent multi-label attack framework, which searches for small image perturbations that lead to misclassifying a desired target set while respecting label hierarchies. By extensive experiments on two datasets and using several multi-label recognition models, we show that our method generates extremely successful attacks that, unlike naive multi-label perturbations, can produce model predictions consistent with the knowledge graph

Ionic liquid containing high-density polyethylene supported tungstate: a novel, efficient, and highly recoverable catalyst

Synthesis and catalytic application of polymeric-based nanocomposites are important subjects among researchers due to their high lipophilicity as well as high chemical and mechanical stability. In the present work, a novel nanocomposite material involving ionic liquid and high-density polyethylene supported tungstate (PE/IL-WO4=) is synthesized, characterized and its catalytic application is investigated. The coacervation method was used to incorporate 1-methyl-3-octylimidazolium bromide ([MOIm] [Br]) ionic liquid in high-density polyethylene, resulting in a PE/IL composite. Subsequently, tungstate was anchored on PE/IL to give PE/IL-WO4= catalyst. The PXRD, FT-IR, EDX, TGA, and SEM analyses were used to characterize the PE/IL-WO4= composite. This material demonstrated high catalytic efficiency in the synthesis of bioactive tetrahydrobenzo[a]xanthen-11-ones under green conditions. The recoverability and leching tests were performed to investigate the stability and durability of the designed PE/IL-WO4= catalyst under applied conditions

Automatic Calibration of Cameras with Special Motions

We consider the problem of auto-calibrating the intrinsic parameters of a camera moving with a special motion: the rotation axis of the camera being perpendicular to its translation direction. Our method for calibrating the camera is based on Kruppa’s equation which in general requires solving a set of nonlinear equations. We prove in a theorem how to recover the true scale of the Kruppa’s equation from the eigenvalues of a matrix formed using the fundamental matrix between two views