A Proximity-Aware Hierarchical Clustering of Faces

In this paper, we propose an unsupervised face clustering algorithm called "Proximity-Aware Hierarchical Clustering" (PAHC) that exploits the local structure of deep representations. In the proposed method, a similarity measure between deep features is computed by evaluating linear SVM margins. SVMs are trained using nearest neighbors of sample data, and thus do not require any external training data. Clusters are then formed by thresholding the similarity scores. We evaluate the clustering performance using three challenging unconstrained face datasets, including Celebrity in Frontal-Profile (CFP), IARPA JANUS Benchmark A (IJB-A), and JANUS Challenge Set 3 (JANUS CS3) datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can achieve significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, we also show that the proposed clustering algorithm can be applied to curate a set of large-scale and noisy training dataset while maintaining sufficient amount of images and their variations due to nuisance factors. The face verification performance on JANUS CS3 improves significantly by finetuning a DCNN model with the curated MS-Celeb-1M dataset which contains over three million face images

Performance Analysis of a Dual-Hop Cooperative Relay Network with Co-Channel Interference

This paper analyzes the performance of a dual-hop amplify-and-forward (AF) cooperative relay network in the presence of direct link between the source and destination and multiple co-channel interferences (CCIs) at the relay. Specifically, we derive the new analytical expressions for the moment generating function (MGF) of the output signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and the average symbol error rate (ASER) of the relay network. Computer simulations are given to confirm the validity of the analytical results and show the effects of direct link and interference on the considered AF relay network

Multiphase transport model for heavy ion collisions at RHIC

Using a multiphase transport model (AMPT) with both partonic and hadronic interactions, we study the multiplicity and transverse momentum distributions of charged particles such as pions, kaons and protons in central Au+Au collisions at RHIC energies. Effects due to nuclear shadowing and jet quenching on these observables are also studied. We further show preliminary results on the production of multistrange baryons from the strangeness-exchange reactions during the hadronic stage of heavy ion collisions.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, espcrc1.sty included, presented at 15th International Conference on Ultra-Relativistic Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions (QM2001), Long Island, New York, January 200

Deep Learning with Constraints and Priors for Improved Subject Clustering, Medical Imaging, and Robust Inference

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved significant success in several fields including computer vision, natural language processing, and robot control. The common philosophy behind these success is the use of large amount of annotated data and end-to-end networks with task-specific constraints and priors implicitly incorporated into the trained model without the need for careful feature engineering. However, DNNs are shown to be vulnerable to distribution shifts and adversarial perturbations, which indicates that such implicit priors and constraints are not sufficient for real world applications. In this dissertation, we target three applications and design task-specific constraints and priors for improved performance of deep neural networks. We first study the problem of subject clustering, the task of grouping face images of the same person together. We propose to utilize the prior structure in the feature space of DNNs trained for face identification to design a novel clustering algorithm. Specifically, the clustering algorithm exploits the local neighborhood structure of deep representations by exemplar-based learning based on k-nearest neighbors (k-NN). Extensive experiments show promising results for grouping face images according to subject identity. As an example, we apply the proposed clustering algorithm to automatically curate a large-scale face dataset with noisy labels and show that the performance of face recognition DNNs can be significantly improved by training on the curated dataset. Furthermore, we empirically find that the k-NN rule does not capture proper local structures for deep representations when each subject has very few face images. We then propose to improve upon the exemplar-based approach by a density-aware similarity measure and theoretically show its asymptotic convergence to a density estimator. We conduct experiments on challenging face datasets that show promising results. Second, we study the problem of metal artifact reduction in computed tomography (CT). Unlike typical image restoration tasks such as super-resolution and denoising, metal artifacts in CT images are structured and non-local. Conventional DNNs do not generalize well when metal implants with unseen shapes are presented. We find that the imaging process of CT induces a data consistency prior that can be exploited for image enhancement. Based on this observation, we propose a dual-domain learning approach to CT metal artifact reduction. We design and implement a novel Radon inversion layer that allows gradients in the image domain to be backpropagated to the projection domain. Experiments conducted on both simulated datasets and clinical datasets show promising results. Compared to conventional DNN-based models, the proposed dual-domain approach leads to impressive metal artifact reduction and has improved generalization capability. Finally, we study the problem of robust classification. In the past few years, the vulnerability of DNNs to small imperceptible perturbations has been widely studied, which raises concerns about the security and robustness of DNNs against possible threat models. To defend against threat models, Samangoui et al. proposed DefenseGAN, a preprocessing approach which removes adversarial perturbations by projecting the input images onto the learned data prior. However, the projection operation in DefenseGAN is time-consuming and may not yield proper reconstruction when images have complicated textures. We propose an inversion network to constrain the initial estimates of the latent code for input images. With the proposed constraint, the number of optimization steps in DefenseGAN can be reduced while achieving improved accuracy and robustness. Furthermore, we conduct empirical studies on attack methods that have claimed to break DefenseGAN, which shows that on-manifold robustness might be the key factor for ensuring adversarial robustness