Probability Distributions.- Linear Models for Regression.- Linear Models for Classification.- Neural Networks.- Kernel Methods.- Sparse Kernel Machines.- Graphical Models.- Mixture Models and EM.- Approximate Inference.- Sampling Methods.- Continuous Latent Variables.- Sequential Data.- Combining Models.

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

The key idea behind active learning is that a machine learning algorithm can achieve greater accuracy with fewer training labels if it is allowed to choose the data from which it learns. An active learner may pose queries, usually in the form of unlabeled data instances to be labeled by an oracle (e.g., a human annotator). Active learning is well-motivated in many modern machine learning problems, where unlabeled data may be abundant or easily obtained, but labels are difficult, time-consuming, or expensive to obtain. This report provides a general introduction to active learning and a survey of the literature. This includes a discussion of the scenarios in which queries can be formulated, and an overview of the query strategy frameworks proposed in the literature to date. An analysis of the empirical and theoretical evidence for successful active learning, a summary of problem setting variants and practical issues, and a discussion of related topics in machine learning research are also presented.

Active Learning Literature Survey

We introduce an extremely computation-efficient CNN architecture named ShuffleNet, which is designed specially for mobile devices with very limited computing power (e.g., 10-150 MFLOPs). The new architecture utilizes two new operations, pointwise group convolution and channel shuffle, to greatly reduce computation cost while maintaining accuracy. Experiments on ImageNet classification and MS COCO object detection demonstrate the superior performance of ShuffleNet over other structures, e.g. lower top-1 error (absolute 7.8%) than recent MobileNet [12] on ImageNet classification task, under the computation budget of 40 MFLOPs. On an ARM-based mobile device, ShuffleNet achieves ~13A— actual speedup over AlexNet while maintaining comparable accuracy.

/pdf/shufflenet-an-extremely-efficient-convolutional-neural-1ptfqz7r4g.pdf

ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices

In this paper, we address the scene segmentation task by capturing rich contextual dependencies based on the self-attention mechanism. Unlike previous works that capture contexts by multi-scale features fusion, we propose a Dual Attention Networks (DANet) to adaptively integrate local features with their global dependencies. Specifically, we append two types of attention modules on top of traditional dilated FCN, which model the semantic interdependencies in spatial and channel dimensions respectively. The position attention module selectively aggregates the features at each position by a weighted sum of the features at all positions. Similar features would be related to each other regardless of their distances. Meanwhile, the channel attention module selectively emphasizes interdependent channel maps by integrating associated features among all channel maps. We sum the outputs of the two attention modules to further improve feature representation which contributes to more precise segmentation results. We achieve new state-of-the-art segmentation performance on three challenging scene segmentation datasets, i.e., Cityscapes, PASCAL Context and COCO Stuff dataset. In particular, a Mean IoU score of 81.5% on Cityscapes test set is achieved without using coarse data.

/pdf/dual-attention-network-for-scene-segmentation-1t75tyo5w8.pdf

Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation

In this book, Andrew Harvey sets out to provide a unified and comprehensive theory of structural time series models. Unlike the traditional ARIMA models, structural time series models consist explicitly of unobserved components, such as trends and seasonals, which have a direct interpretation. As a result the model selection methodology associated with structural models is much closer to econometric methodology. The link with econometrics is made even closer by the natural way in which the models can be extended to include explanatory variables and to cope with multivariate time series. From the technical point of view, state space models and the Kalman filter play a key role in the statistical treatment of structural time series models. The book includes a detailed treatment of the Kalman filter. This technique was originally developed in control engineering, but is becoming increasingly important in fields such as economics and operations research. This book is concerned primarily with modelling economic and social time series, and with addressing the special problems which the treatment of such series poses. The properties of the models and the methodological techniques used to select them are illustrated with various applications. These range from the modellling of trends and cycles in US macroeconomic time series to to an evaluation of the effects of seat belt legislation in the UK.

Forecasting, Structural Time Series Models and the Kalman Filter

Recent advances in Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (GCNNs) have shown their efficiency for non-Euclidean data on graphs, which often require a large amount of labeled data with high cost. It it thus critical to learn graph feature representations in an unsupervised manner in practice. To this end, we propose a novel unsupervised learning of Graph Transformation Equivariant Representations (GraphTER), aiming to capture intrinsic patterns of graph structure under both global and local transformations. Specifically, we allow to sample different groups of nodes from a graph and then transform them node-wise isotropically or anisotropically. Then, we self-train a representation encoder to capture the graph structures by reconstructing these node-wise transformations from the feature representations of the original and transformed graphs. In experiments, we apply the learned GraphTER to graphs of 3D point cloud data, and results on point cloud segmentation/classification show that GraphTER significantly outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches and pushes greatly closer towards the upper bound set by the fully supervised counterparts. The code is available at: this https URL.

GraphTER: Unsupervised Learning of Graph Transformation Equivariant Representations via Auto-Encoding Node-wise Transformations

Field aided lateral crystallization of amorphous silicon with large grain formation

The two-volume set LNCS 9516 and 9517 constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Multimedia Modeling, MMM 2016, held in Miami, FL, USA, in January 2016. The 32 revised full papers and 52 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 117 submissions. In addition 20 papers were accepted for five special sessions out of 38 submissions as well as 7 demonstrations (from 11 submissions) and 9 video showcase papers. The papers are organized in topical sections on video content analysis, social media analysis, object recognition and system, multimedia retrieval and ranking, multimedia representation, machine learning in multimedia, and interaction and mobile. The special sessions are: good practices in multimedia modeling; semantics discovery from multimedia big data; perception, aesthetics, and emotion in multimedia quality modeling; multimodal learning and computing for human activity understanding; and perspectives on multimedia analytics

MultiMedia modeling: 22nd International conference, MMM 2016 Miami, FL, USA, january 4–6, 2016 proceedings, part II

This demonstration illustrates PhotoNet, an image delivery service for mobile camera networks. PhotoNet is motivated by the needs of disaster-response applications, where a group of survivors and first responders may survey damage and send images to a rescue center in the absence of a functional communication infrastructure. The protocol runs on mobile devices, handling opportunistic forwarding (when they come in contact) and in-network storage. It assigns priorities to images for forwarding and replacement depending on the degree of similarity (or dissimilarity) among them. Prioritization aims at reducing semantic redundancy such as that between pictures of the same scene taken from slightly different angles. This is in contrast to redundancy among identical objects and among time series data. We evaluate PhotoNet in an emulated disaster recovery scenario, with a predetermined set of problem locales that need attention. Humans with camera phones form a mobible camera sensor network. Not all pictures make it to the rescue center because of resource constraints. At the rescue center, the utility of the camera network is measured by the number of problem locales of which the center becomes aware as a function of time. A better network delivers awareness of more trouble locales sooner. We show that, in resource constrained networks, reducing semantic redundancy can significantly improve utility. Users of the demo will be allowed to interact with both a simulator and a small set of mobile phones to understand the impact of network and protocol parameters on situation awareness.

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/25042/117.pdf?sequence=3

PhotoNet: A similarity-aware image delivery service for situation awareness

Recently, deep convolution neural networks (CNNs) steered face super-resolution methods have achieved great progress in restoring degraded facial details by joint training with facial priors. However, these methods have some obvious limitations. On the one hand, multi-task joint learning requires additional marking on the dataset, and the introduced prior network will significantly increase the computational cost of the model. On the other hand, the limited receptive field of CNN will reduce the fidelity and naturalness of the reconstructed facial images, resulting in suboptimal reconstructed images. In this work, we propose an efficient CNN-Transformer Cooperation Network (CTCNet) for face super-resolution tasks, which uses the multi-scale connected encoder-decoder architecture as the backbone. Specifically, we first devise a novel Local-Global Feature Cooperation Module (LGCM), which is composed of a Facial Structure Attention Unit (FSAU) and a Transformer block, to promote the consistency of local facial detail and global facial structure restoration simultaneously. Then, we design an efficient Feature Refinement Module (FRM) to enhance the encoded features. Finally, to further improve the restoration of fine facial details, we present a Multi-scale Feature Fusion Unit (MFFU) to adaptively fuse the features from different stages in the encoder procedure. Extensive evaluations on various datasets have assessed that the proposed CTCNet can outperform other state-of-the-art methods significantly. Source code will be available at https://github.com/IVIPLab/CTCNet.

Guo-Jun Qi

Papers

GraphTER: Unsupervised Learning of Graph Transformation Equivariant Representations via Auto-Encoding Node-wise Transformations

Field aided lateral crystallization of amorphous silicon with large grain formation

MultiMedia modeling: 22nd International conference, MMM 2016 Miami, FL, USA, january 4–6, 2016 proceedings, part II

PhotoNet: A similarity-aware image delivery service for situation awareness

CTCNet: A CNN-Transformer Cooperation Network for Face Image Super-Resolution