Random Filters for Compressive Sampling

This paper discusses random filtering, a recently proposed method for directly acquiring a compressed version of a digital signal. The technique is based on convolution of the signal with a fixed FIR filter having random taps, followed by downsampling. Experiments show that random filtering is effective at acquiring sparse and compressible signals. This process has the potential for implementation in analog hardware, and so it may have a role to play in new types of analog/digital converters

Random Filters for Compressive Sampling and Reconstruction

We propose and study a new technique for efficiently acquiring and reconstructing signals based on convolution with a fixed FIR filter having random taps. The method is designed for sparse and compressible signals, i.e., ones that are well approximated by a short linear combination of vectors from an orthonormal basis. Signal reconstruction involves a non-linear Orthogonal Matching Pursuit algorithm that we implement efficiently by exploiting the nonadaptive, time-invariant structure of the measurement process. While simpler and more efficient than other random acquisition techniques like Compressed Sensing, random filtering is sufficiently generic to summarize many types of compressible signals and generalizes to streaming and continuous-time signals. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate its efficacy for acquiring and reconstructing signals sparse in the time, frequency, and wavelet domains, as well as piecewise smooth signals and Poisson processes

The Power of Linear Combinations: Learning with Random Convolutions

Following the traditional paradigm of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), modern CNNs manage to keep pace with more recent, for example transformer-based, models by not only increasing model depth and width but also the kernel size. This results in large amounts of learnable model parameters that need to be handled during training. While following the convolutional paradigm with the according spatial inductive bias, we question the significance of \emph{learned} convolution filters. In fact, our findings demonstrate that many contemporary CNN architectures can achieve high test accuracies without ever updating randomly initialized (spatial) convolution filters. Instead, simple linear combinations (implemented through efficient $1\times 1$ convolutions) suffice to effectively recombine even random filters into expressive network operators. Furthermore, these combinations of random filters can implicitly regularize the resulting operations, mitigating overfitting and enhancing overall performance and robustness. Conversely, retaining the ability to learn filter updates can impair network performance. Lastly, although we only observe relatively small gains from learning $3\times 3$ convolutions, the learning gains increase proportionally with kernel size, owing to the non-idealities of the independent and identically distributed (\textit{i.i.d.}) nature of default initialization techniques

Clustering Learning for Robotic Vision

We present the clustering learning technique applied to multi-layer feedforward deep neural networks. We show that this unsupervised learning technique can compute network filters with only a few minutes and a much reduced set of parameters. The goal of this paper is to promote the technique for general-purpose robotic vision systems. We report its use in static image datasets and object tracking datasets. We show that networks trained with clustering learning can outperform large networks trained for many hours on complex datasets.Comment: Code for this paper is available here: https://github.com/culurciello/CL_paper1_cod

Audio style transfer

'Style transfer' among images has recently emerged as a very active research topic, fuelled by the power of convolution neural networks (CNNs), and has become fast a very popular technology in social media. This paper investigates the analogous problem in the audio domain: How to transfer the style of a reference audio signal to a target audio content? We propose a flexible framework for the task, which uses a sound texture model to extract statistics characterizing the reference audio style, followed by an optimization-based audio texture synthesis to modify the target content. In contrast to mainstream optimization-based visual transfer method, the proposed process is initialized by the target content instead of random noise and the optimized loss is only about texture, not structure. These differences proved key for audio style transfer in our experiments. In order to extract features of interest, we investigate different architectures, whether pre-trained on other tasks, as done in image style transfer, or engineered based on the human auditory system. Experimental results on different types of audio signal confirm the potential of the proposed approach.Comment: ICASSP 2018 - 2018 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Apr 2018, Calgary, France. IEE

Unsupervised feature learning by augmenting single images

When deep learning is applied to visual object recognition, data augmentation is often used to generate additional training data without extra labeling cost. It helps to reduce overfitting and increase the performance of the algorithm. In this paper we investigate if it is possible to use data augmentation as the main component of an unsupervised feature learning architecture. To that end we sample a set of random image patches and declare each of them to be a separate single-image surrogate class. We then extend these trivial one-element classes by applying a variety of transformations to the initial 'seed' patches. Finally we train a convolutional neural network to discriminate between these surrogate classes. The feature representation learned by the network can then be used in various vision tasks. We find that this simple feature learning algorithm is surprisingly successful, achieving competitive classification results on several popular vision datasets (STL-10, CIFAR-10, Caltech-101).Comment: ICLR 2014 workshop track submission (7 pages, 4 figures, 1 table