We propose a deep convolutional neural network architecture codenamed Inception that achieves the new state of the art for classification and detection in the ImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2014 (ILSVRC14). The main hallmark of this architecture is the improved utilization of the computing resources inside the network. By a carefully crafted design, we increased the depth and width of the network while keeping the computational budget constant. To optimize quality, the architectural decisions were based on the Hebbian principle and the intuition of multi-scale processing. One particular incarnation used in our submission for ILSVRC14 is called GoogLeNet, a 22 layers deep network, the quality of which is assessed in the context of classification and detection.

/pdf/going-deeper-with-convolutions-1yobw2o2ds.pdf

Going deeper with convolutions

There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

A major assumption in many machine learning and data mining algorithms is that the training and future data must be in the same feature space and have the same distribution. However, in many real-world applications, this assumption may not hold. For example, we sometimes have a classification task in one domain of interest, but we only have sufficient training data in another domain of interest, where the latter data may be in a different feature space or follow a different data distribution. In such cases, knowledge transfer, if done successfully, would greatly improve the performance of learning by avoiding much expensive data-labeling efforts. In recent years, transfer learning has emerged as a new learning framework to address this problem. This survey focuses on categorizing and reviewing the current progress on transfer learning for classification, regression, and clustering problems. In this survey, we discuss the relationship between transfer learning and other related machine learning techniques such as domain adaptation, multitask learning and sample selection bias, as well as covariate shift. We also explore some potential future issues in transfer learning research.

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A Survey on Transfer Learning

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.).

Machine learning

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

Age Specific Human-Computer Interaction (ASHCI) has vast potential applications in daily life. However, automatic age estimation technique is still underdeveloped. One of the main reasons is that the aging effects on human faces present several unique characteristics which make age estimation a challenging task that requires non-standard classification approaches. According to the speciality of the facial aging effects, this paper proposes the AGES (AGing pattErn Subspace) method for automatic age estimation. The basic idea is to model the aging pattern, which is defined as a sequence of personal aging face images, by learning a representative subspace. The proper aging pattern for an unseen face image is then determined by the projection in the subspace that can best reconstruct the face image, while the position of the face image in that aging pattern will indicate its age. The AGES method has shown encouraging performance in the comparative experiments either as an age estimator or as an age range estimator.

Learning from facial aging patterns for automatic age estimation

Previous studies on multi-instance learning typically treated instances in the bags as independently and identically distributed. The instances in a bag, however, are rarely independent in real tasks, and a better performance can be expected if the instances are treated in an non-i.i.d. way that exploits relations among instances. In this paper, we propose two simple yet effective methods. In the first method, we explicitly map every bag to an undirected graph and design a graph kernel for distinguishing the positive and negative bags. In the second method, we implicitly construct graphs by deriving affinity matrices and propose an efficient graph kernel considering the clique information. The effectiveness of the proposed methods are validated by experiments.

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Multi-instance learning by treating instances as non-I.I.D. samples

Real data are often with multiple modalities or coming from multiple channels, while multi-view clustering provides a natural formulation for generating clusters from such data. Previous studies assumed that each example appears in all views, or at least there is one view containing all examples. In real tasks, however, it is often the case that every view suffers from the missing of some data and therefore results in many partial examples, i.e., examples with some views missing. In this paper, we present possibly the first study on partial multiview clustering. Our proposed approach, PVC, works by establishing a latent subspace where the instances corresponding to the same example in different views are close to each other, and similar instances (belonging to different examples) in the same view should be well grouped. Experiments on two-view data demonstrate the advantages of our proposed approach.

/pdf/partial-multi-view-clustering-a9i6cyy0vu.pdf

Partial multi-view clustering

GPS-equipped taxis can be viewed as pervasive sensors and the large-scale digital traces produced allow us to reveal many hidden "facts" about the city dynamics and human behaviors. In this paper, we aim to discover anomalous driving patterns from taxi's GPS traces, targeting applications like automatically detecting taxi driving frauds or road network change in modern cites. To achieve the objective, firstly we group all the taxi trajectories crossing the same source destination cell-pair and represent each taxi trajectory as a sequence of symbols. Secondly, we propose an Isolation-Based Anomalous Trajectory (iBAT) detection method and verify with large scale taxi data that iBAT achieves remarkable performance (AUC>0.99, over 90% detection rate at false alarm rate of less than 2%). Finally, we demonstrate the potential of iBAT in enabling innovative applications by using it for taxi driving fraud detection and road network change detection.

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iBAT: detecting anomalous taxi trajectories from GPS traces

It is usually expected that, when labeled data are limited, the learning performance can be improved by exploiting unlabeled data. In many cases, however, the performances of current semi-supervised learning approaches may be even worse than purely using the limited labeled data. It is desired to have safe semi-supervised learning approaches which never degenerate learning performance by using unlabeled data. In this paper, we focus on semi-supervised support vector machines (S3VMs) and propose S4VMs, i.e., safe S3VMs. Unlike S3VMs which typically aim at approaching an optimal low-density separator, S4VMs try to exploit the candidate low-density separators simultaneously to reduce the risk of identifying a poor separator with unlabeled data. We describe two implementations of S4VMs, and our comprehensive experiments show that the overall performance of S4VMs are highly competitive to S3VMs, while in contrast to S3VMs which degenerate performance in many cases, S4VMs are never significantly inferior to inductive SVMs.

/pdf/towards-making-unlabeled-data-never-hurt-27k9oba7bt.pdf

Zhi-Hua Zhou

Papers

Learning from facial aging patterns for automatic age estimation

Multi-instance learning by treating instances as non-I.I.D. samples

Partial multi-view clustering

iBAT: detecting anomalous taxi trajectories from GPS traces

Towards Making Unlabeled Data Never Hurt