Stan Z. Li

Bio: Stan Z. Li is an academic researcher from Westlake University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Facial recognition system & Face detection. The author has an hindex of 97, co-authored 532 publications receiving 41793 citations. Previous affiliations of Stan Z. Li include Microsoft & Macau University of Science and Technology.

Self-organization of surface shapes

Abstract: A problem in surface modeling and approximation is how to sample a surface into a set of significant points. It is desirable that the sampling is done in such a way that best preserves the original shape. A principle is that highly curved area should be sampled densely and vice versa. This paper presents a self-organization method for automated surface sampling in this principle. Given a scale shape function of local curvedness of the surface and a number of samples, the set of optimal locations of sample points is defined as the solution to a system of nonlinear equations. The solution can be found using a simple iterative algorithm involving no free parameters. The algorithm forms topology-preserving meshes from random initialisation. Mesh spacing vs. surface curvedness can be easily controlled by a single parameter in the shape function. Key locations can be prescribed by imposing additional boundary conditions. Experiments are presented with synthetic data.

A Discriminant Analysis Method for Face Recognition in Heteroscedastic Distributions

Abstract: Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is a popular method in pattern recognition and is equivalent to Bayesian method when the sample distributions of different classes are obey to the Gaussian with the same covariance matrix. However, in real world, the distribution of data is usually far more complex and the assumption of Gaussian density with the same covariance is seldom to be met which greatly affects the performance of LDA. In this paper, we propose an effective and efficient two step LDA, called LSR-LDA, to alleviate the affection of irregular distribution to improve the result of LDA. First, the samples are normalized so that the variances of variables in each class are consistent, and a pre-transformation matrix from the original data to the normalized one is learned using least squares regression (LSR); second, conventional LDA is conducted on the normalized data to find the most discriminant projective directions. The final projection matrix is obtained by multiply the pre-transformation matrix and the projective directions of LDA. Experimental results on FERET and FRGC ver 2.0 face databases show the proposed LSR-LDA method improves the recognition accuracy over the conventional LDA by using the LSR step.

Multi-camera Trajectory Mining: Database and Evaluation

Abstract: In recent years, large-scale video search and mining has been an active research area. Exploring the trajectory of pedestrian of interest in non-overlapping multi-camera network, namely the trajectory mining, is very useful for visual surveillance and criminal investigation. The trajectory mentioned in our work describes the transition of pedestrian among cameras from a macroscopic perspective which is different from the concept in conventional tracking field. In this paper, we collect a database called TMin to promote research and development of trajectory mining. This release of Version 1 contains 1680 images from 30 subjects, all the images are extracted from 6 surveillance videos over two hours, and each subject appears in at least two different cameras. We describe the apparatuses, environments and procedure of the data collection and present baseline performance on the TMin database.

PrefixMol: Target- and Chemistry-aware Molecule Design via Prefix Embedding

Abstract: Is there a unified model for generating molecules considering different conditions, such as binding pockets and chemical properties? Although target-aware generative models have made significant advances in drug design, they do not consider chemistry conditions and cannot guarantee the desired chemical properties. Unfortunately, merging the target-aware and chemical-aware models into a unified model to meet customized requirements may lead to the problem of negative transfer. Inspired by the success of multi-task learning in the NLP area, we use prefix embeddings to provide a novel generative model that considers both the targeted pocket's circumstances and a variety of chemical properties. All conditional information is represented as learnable features, which the generative model subsequently employs as a contextual prompt. Experiments show that our model exhibits good controllability in both single and multi-conditional molecular generation. The controllability enables us to outperform previous structure-based drug design methods. More interestingly, we open up the attention mechanism and reveal coupling relationships between conditions, providing guidance for multi-conditional molecule generation.

You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection

Abstract: We present YOLO, a new approach to object detection. Prior work on object detection repurposes classifiers to perform detection. Instead, we frame object detection as a regression problem to spatially separated bounding boxes and associated class probabilities. A single neural network predicts bounding boxes and class probabilities directly from full images in one evaluation. Since the whole detection pipeline is a single network, it can be optimized end-to-end directly on detection performance. Our unified architecture is extremely fast. Our base YOLO model processes images in real-time at 45 frames per second. A smaller version of the network, Fast YOLO, processes an astounding 155 frames per second while still achieving double the mAP of other real-time detectors. Compared to state-of-the-art detection systems, YOLO makes more localization errors but is less likely to predict false positives on background. Finally, YOLO learns very general representations of objects. It outperforms other detection methods, including DPM and R-CNN, when generalizing from natural images to other domains like artwork.

Machine learning

Abstract: Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

Abstract: 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.

Robust Face Recognition via Sparse Representation

Abstract: We consider the problem of automatically recognizing human faces from frontal views with varying expression and illumination, as well as occlusion and disguise. We cast the recognition problem as one of classifying among multiple linear regression models and argue that new theory from sparse signal representation offers the key to addressing this problem. Based on a sparse representation computed by C1-minimization, we propose a general classification algorithm for (image-based) object recognition. This new framework provides new insights into two crucial issues in face recognition: feature extraction and robustness to occlusion. For feature extraction, we show that if sparsity in the recognition problem is properly harnessed, the choice of features is no longer critical. What is critical, however, is whether the number of features is sufficiently large and whether the sparse representation is correctly computed. Unconventional features such as downsampled images and random projections perform just as well as conventional features such as eigenfaces and Laplacianfaces, as long as the dimension of the feature space surpasses certain threshold, predicted by the theory of sparse representation. This framework can handle errors due to occlusion and corruption uniformly by exploiting the fact that these errors are often sparse with respect to the standard (pixel) basis. The theory of sparse representation helps predict how much occlusion the recognition algorithm can handle and how to choose the training images to maximize robustness to occlusion. We conduct extensive experiments on publicly available databases to verify the efficacy of the proposed algorithm and corroborate the above claims.

Integrating single-cell transcriptomic data across different conditions, technologies, and species.

Abstract: Computational single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) methods have been successfully applied to experiments representing a single condition, technology, or species to discover and define cellular phenotypes. However, identifying subpopulations of cells that are present across multiple data sets remains challenging. Here, we introduce an analytical strategy for integrating scRNA-seq data sets based on common sources of variation, enabling the identification of shared populations across data sets and downstream comparative analysis. We apply this approach, implemented in our R toolkit Seurat (http://satijalab.org/seurat/), to align scRNA-seq data sets of peripheral blood mononuclear cells under resting and stimulated conditions, hematopoietic progenitors sequenced using two profiling technologies, and pancreatic cell 'atlases' generated from human and mouse islets. In each case, we learn distinct or transitional cell states jointly across data sets, while boosting statistical power through integrated analysis. Our approach facilitates general comparisons of scRNA-seq data sets, potentially deepening our understanding of how distinct cell states respond to perturbation, disease, and evolution.