In modern face recognition, the conventional pipeline consists of four stages: detect => align => represent => classify. We revisit both the alignment step and the representation step by employing explicit 3D face modeling in order to apply a piecewise affine transformation, and derive a face representation from a nine-layer deep neural network. This deep network involves more than 120 million parameters using several locally connected layers without weight sharing, rather than the standard convolutional layers. Thus we trained it on the largest facial dataset to-date, an identity labeled dataset of four million facial images belonging to more than 4, 000 identities. The learned representations coupling the accurate model-based alignment with the large facial database generalize remarkably well to faces in unconstrained environments, even with a simple classifier. Our method reaches an accuracy of 97.35% on the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset, reducing the error of the current state of the art by more than 27%, closely approaching human-level performance.

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DeepFace: Closing the Gap to Human-Level Performance in Face Verification

Convolutional neural networks CNNs have been applied to visual tasks since the late 1980s. However, despite a few scattered applications, they were dormant until the mid-2000s when developments in computing power and the advent of large amounts of labeled data, supplemented by improved algorithms, contributed to their advancement and brought them to the forefront of a neural network renaissance that has seen rapid progression since 2012. In this review, which focuses on the application of CNNs to image classification tasks, we cover their development, from their predecessors up to recent state-of-the-art deep learning systems. Along the way, we analyze 1 their early successes, 2 their role in the deep learning renaissance, 3 selected symbolic works that have contributed to their recent popularity, and 4 several improvement attempts by reviewing contributions and challenges of over 300 publications. We also introduce some of their current trends and remaining challenges.

Deep convolutional neural networks for image classification: A comprehensive review

Matrix Factorization Techniques for Recommender Systems

5分で分かる!? 有名論文ナナメ読み：Jacob Devlin et al. : BERT : Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding

In this work, we propose a very simple deep learning network for image classification which comprises only the very basic data processing components: cascaded principal component analysis (PCA), binary hashing, and block-wise histograms. In the proposed architecture, PCA is employed to learn multistage filter banks. It is followed by simple binary hashing and block histograms for indexing and pooling. This architecture is thus named as a PCA network (PCANet) and can be designed and learned extremely easily and efficiently. For comparison and better understanding, we also introduce and study two simple variations to the PCANet, namely the RandNet and LDANet. They share the same topology of PCANet but their cascaded filters are either selected randomly or learned from LDA. We have tested these basic networks extensively on many benchmark visual datasets for different tasks, such as LFW for face verification, MultiPIE, Extended Yale B, AR, FERET datasets for face recognition, as well as MNIST for hand-written digits recognition. Surprisingly, for all tasks, such a seemingly naive PCANet model is on par with the state of the art features, either prefixed, highly hand-crafted or carefully learned (by DNNs). Even more surprisingly, it sets new records for many classification tasks in Extended Yale B, AR, FERET datasets, and MNIST variations. Additional experiments on other public datasets also demonstrate the potential of the PCANet serving as a simple but highly competitive baseline for texture classification and object recognition.

PCANet: A Simple Deep Learning Baseline for Image Classification?

Many Collaborative Filtering (CF) algorithms are item-based in the sense that they analyze item-item relations in order to produce item similarities. Recently, several works in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) suggested to learn a latent representation of words using neural embedding algorithms. Among them, the Skip-gram with Negative Sampling (SGNS), also known as word2vec, was shown to provide state-of-the-art results on various linguistics tasks. In this paper, we show that item-based CF can be cast in the same framework of neural word embedding. Inspired by SGNS, we describe a method we name item2vec for item-based CF that produces embedding for items in a latent space. The method is capable of inferring item-item relations even when user information is not available. We present experimental results that demonstrate the effectiveness of the item2vec method and show it is competitive with SVD.

ITEM2VEC: Neural item embedding for collaborative filtering

This paper advances descriptor-based face recognition by suggesting a novel usage of descriptors to form an over-complete representation, and by proposing a new metric learning pipeline within the same/not-same framework. First, the Over-Complete Local Binary Patterns (OCLBP) face representation scheme is introduced as a multi-scale modified version of the Local Binary Patterns (LBP) scheme. Second, we propose an efficient matrix-vector multiplication-based recognition system. The system is based on Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) coupled with Within Class Covariance Normalization (WCCN). This is further extended to the unsupervised case by proposing an unsupervised variant of WCCN. Lastly, we introduce Diffusion Maps (DM) for non-linear dimensionality reduction as an alternative to the Whitened Principal Component Analysis (WPCA) method which is often used in face recognition. We evaluate the proposed framework on the LFW face recognition dataset under the restricted, unrestricted and unsupervised protocols. In all three cases we achieve very competitive results.

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Fast High Dimensional Vector Multiplication Face Recognition

This paper describes a study of a protocol and a system for automatic detection and status tracking of early-stage dementia and Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), from speech and voice recordings. The research has been performed in the scope of the EU FP7 Dem@Care project. We describe the speech and voice recording protocol, different families of vocal features as derived from the recorded data, the statistical properties of the vocal features, a classifier based on support vector machine, and the classification results. The vocal features we used detect the manifestation of dementia in the human voice and speech, in three axes: the impact of cognitive deficit and slower brain processing, the impact of certain mood states often observed in dementia, and the impact of impairments of the neuromuscular mechanism of the speech production. Our analysis is based on recordings of over 80 diagnosed subjects; it yields dementia and MCI detection equal-error-rate below 20%, and demonstrates the high value of using speech and voice analysis for automatic screening and status tracking of dementia from the very early stage of MCI.

Evaluation of speech-based protocol for detection of early-stage dementia.

Recently, several works in the domain of natural language processing presented successful methods for word embedding. Among them, the Skip-Gram with negative sampling, known also as word2vec, advanced the state-of-the-art of various linguistics tasks. In this paper, we propose a scalable Bayesian neural word embedding algorithm. The algorithm relies on a Variational Bayes solution for the Skip-Gram objective and a detailed step by step description is provided. We present experimental results that demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm for word analogy and similarity tasks on six different datasets and show it is competitive with the original Skip-Gram method.

Bayesian Neural Word Embedding

In Recommender Systems research, algorithms are often characterized as either Collaborative Filtering (CF) or Content Based (CB). CF algorithms are trained using a dataset of user preferences while CB algorithms are typically based on item profiles. These approaches harness different data sources and therefore the resulting recommended items are generally very different. This paper presents the CB2CF, a deep neural multiview model that serves as a bridge from items content into their CF representations. CB2CF is a "real-world" algorithm designed for Microsoft Store services that handle around a billion users worldwide. CB2CF is demonstrated on movies and apps recommendations, where it is shown to outperform an alternative CB model on completely cold items.

Oren Barkan

Papers

ITEM2VEC: Neural item embedding for collaborative filtering

Fast High Dimensional Vector Multiplication Face Recognition

Evaluation of speech-based protocol for detection of early-stage dementia.

Bayesian Neural Word Embedding

CB2CF: a neural multiview content-to-collaborative filtering model for completely cold item recommendations