Discrete point cloud objects lack sufficient shape descriptors of 3D geometries. In this paper, we present a novel method for aggregating hypothetical curves in point clouds. Sequences of connected points (curves) are initially grouped by taking guided walks in the point clouds, and then subsequently aggregated back to augment their point-wise features. We provide an effective implementation of the proposed aggregation strategy including a novel curve grouping operator followed by a curve aggregation operator. Our method was benchmarked on several point cloud analysis tasks where we achieved the state-of-the-art classification accuracy of 94.2% on the ModelNet40 classification task, instance IoU of 86.8 on the ShapeNetPart segmentation task, and cosine error of 0.11 on the ModelNet40 normal estimation task.
Counterfactual explanation is one branch of interpretable machine learning that produces a perturbation sample to change the model's original decision. The generated samples can act as a recommendation for end-users to achieve their desired outputs. Most of the current counterfactual explanation approaches are the gradient-based method, which can only optimize the differentiable loss functions with continuous variables. Accordingly, the gradient-free methods are proposed to handle the categorical variables, which however have several major limitations: 1) causal relationships among features are typically ignored when generating the counterfactuals, possibly resulting in impractical guidelines for decision-makers; 2) the counterfactual explanation algorithm requires a great deal of effort into parameter tuning for dertermining the optimal weight for each loss functions which must be conducted repeatedly for different datasets and settings. In this work, to address the above limitations, we propose a prototype-based counterfactual explanation framework (ProCE). ProCE is capable of preserving the causal relationship underlying the features of the counterfactual data. In addition, we design a novel gradient-free optimization based on the multi-objective genetic algorithm that generates the counterfactual explanations for the mixed-type of continuous and categorical features. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our method compares favorably with state-of-the-art methods and therefore is applicable to existing prediction models. All the source codes and data are available at \url{https://github.com/tridungduong16/multiobj-scm-cf}.
Accurate evaluation of the treatment result on X-ray images is a significant and challenging step in root canal therapy since the incorrect interpretation of the therapy results will hamper timely follow-up which is crucial to the patients' treatment outcome. Nowadays, the evaluation is performed in a manual manner, which is time-consuming, subjective, and error-prone. In this paper, we aim to automate this process by leveraging the advances in computer vision and artificial intelligence, to provide an objective and accurate method for root canal therapy result assessment. A novel anatomy-guided multi-branch Transformer (AGMB-Transformer) network is proposed, which first extracts a set of anatomy features and then uses them to guide a multi-branch Transformer network for evaluation. Specifically, we design a polynomial curve fitting segmentation strategy with the help of landmark detection to extract the anatomy features. Moreover, a branch fusion module and a multi-branch structure including our progressive Transformer and Group Multi-Head Self-Attention (GMHSA) are designed to focus on both global and local features for an accurate diagnosis. To facilitate the research, we have collected a large-scale root canal therapy evaluation dataset with 245 root canal therapy X-ray images, and the experiment results show that our AGMB-Transformer can improve the diagnosis accuracy from 57.96% to 90.20% compared with the baseline network. The proposed AGMB-Transformer can achieve a highly accurate evaluation of root canal therapy. To our best knowledge, our work is the first to perform automatic root canal therapy evaluation and has important clinical value to reduce the workload of endodontists.
User queries for a real-world dialog system may sometimes fall outside the scope of the system's capabilities, but appropriate system responses will enable smooth processing throughout the human-computer interaction. This paper is concerned with the user's intent, and focuses on out-of-scope intent classification in dialog systems. Although user intents are highly correlated with the application domain, few studies have exploited such correlations for intent classification. Rather than developing a two-stage approach that first classifies the domain and then the intent, we propose a hierarchical multi-task learning approach based on a joint model to classify domain and intent simultaneously. Novelties in the proposed approach include: (1) sharing supervised out-of-scope signals in joint modeling of domain and intent classification to replace a two-stage pipeline; and (2) introducing a hierarchical model that learns the intent and domain representations in the higher and lower layers respectively. Experiments show that the model outperforms existing methods in terms of accuracy, out-of-scope recall and F1. Additionally, threshold-based post-processing further improves performance by balancing precision and recall in intent classification.
In this paper, we propose a novel subspace learning framework for one-class classification. The proposed framework presents the problem in the form of graph embedding. It includes the previously proposed subspace one-class techniques as its special cases and provides further insight on what these techniques actually optimize. The framework allows to incorporate other meaningful optimization goals via the graph preserving criterion and reveals a spectral solution and a spectral regression-based solution as alternatives to the previously used gradient-based technique. We combine the subspace learning framework iteratively with Support Vector Data Description applied in the subspace to formulate Graph-Embedded Subspace Support Vector Data Description. We experimentally analyzed the performance of newly proposed different variants. We demonstrate improved performance against the baselines and the recently proposed subspace learning methods for one-class classification.
Few-shot classification aims to recognize unseen classes with few labeled samples from each class. Many meta-learning models for few-shot classification elaborately design various task-shared inductive bias (meta-knowledge) to solve such tasks, and achieve impressive performance. However, when there exists the domain shift between the training tasks and the test tasks, the obtained inductive bias fails to generalize across domains, which degrades the performance of the meta-learning models. In this work, we aim to improve the robustness of the inductive bias through task augmentation. Concretely, we consider the worst-case problem around the source task distribution, and propose the adversarial task augmentation method which can generate the inductive bias-adaptive 'challenging' tasks. Our method can be used as a simple plug-and-play module for various meta-learning models, and improve their cross-domain generalization capability. We conduct extensive experiments under the cross-domain setting, using nine few-shot classification datasets: mini-ImageNet, CUB, Cars, Places, Plantae, CropDiseases, EuroSAT, ISIC and ChestX. Experimental results show that our method can effectively improve the few-shot classification performance of the meta-learning models under domain shift, and outperforms the existing works. Our code is available at https://github.com/Haoqing-Wang/CDFSL-ATA.
Astronomers require efficient automated detection and classification pipelines when conducting large-scale surveys of the (optical) sky for variable and transient sources. Such pipelines are fundamentally important, as they permit rapid follow-up and analysis of those detections most likely to be of scientific value. We therefore present a deep learning pipeline based on the convolutional neural network architecture called $\texttt{MeerCRAB}$. It is designed to filter out the so called 'bogus' detections from true astrophysical sources in the transient detection pipeline of the MeerLICHT telescope. Optical candidates are described using a variety of 2D images and numerical features extracted from those images. The relationship between the input images and the target classes is unclear, since the ground truth is poorly defined and often the subject of debate. This makes it difficult to determine which source of information should be used to train a classification algorithm. We therefore used two methods for labelling our data (i) thresholding and (ii) latent class model approaches. We deployed variants of $\texttt{MeerCRAB}$ that employed different network architectures trained using different combinations of input images and training set choices, based on classification labels provided by volunteers. The deepest network worked best with an accuracy of 99.5$\%$ and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) value of 0.989. The best model was integrated to the MeerLICHT transient vetting pipeline, enabling the accurate and efficient classification of detected transients that allows researchers to select the most promising candidates for their research goals.
Classification models are very sensitive to data uncertainty, and finding robust classifiers that are less sensitive to data uncertainty has raised great interest in the machine learning literature. This paper aims to construct robust \emph{Support Vector Machine} classifiers under feature data uncertainty via two probabilistic arguments. The first classifier, \emph{Single Perturbation}, reduces the local effect of data uncertainty with respect to one given feature and acts as a local test that could confirm or refute the presence of significant data uncertainty for that particular feature. The second classifier, \emph{Extreme Empirical Loss}, aims to reduce the aggregate effect of data uncertainty with respect to all features, which is possible via a trade-off between the number of prediction model violations and the size of these violations. Both methodologies are computationally efficient and our extensive numerical investigation highlights the advantages and possible limitations of the two robust classifiers on synthetic and real-life data.
Graph pooling is an essential ingredient of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in graph classification and regression tasks. For these tasks, different pooling strategies have been proposed to generate a graph-level representation by downsampling and summarizing nodes' features in a graph. However, most existing pooling methods are unable to capture distinguishable structural information effectively. Besides, they are prone to adversarial attacks. In this work, we propose a novel pooling method named as {HIBPool} where we leverage the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle that optimally balances the expressiveness and robustness of a model to learn representations of input data. Furthermore, we introduce a novel structure-aware Discriminative Pooling Readout ({DiP-Readout}) function to capture the informative local subgraph structures in the graph. Finally, our experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms other state-of-art methods on several graph classification benchmarks and more resilient to feature-perturbation attack than existing pooling methods.
Most classification models treat different object classes in parallel and the misclassifications between any two classes are treated equally. In contrast, human beings can exploit high-level information in making a prediction of an unknown object. Inspired by this observation, the paper proposes a super-class guided network (SGNet) to integrate the high-level semantic information into the network so as to increase its performance in inference. SGNet takes two-level class annotations that contain both super-class and finer class labels. The super-classes are higher-level semantic categories that consist of a certain amount of finer classes. A super-class branch (SCB), trained on super-class labels, is introduced to guide finer class prediction. At the inference time, we adopt two different strategies: Two-step inference (TSI) and direct inference (DI). TSI first predicts the super-class and then makes predictions of the corresponding finer class. On the other hand, DI directly generates predictions from the finer class branch (FCB). Extensive experiments have been performed on CIFAR-100 and MS COCO datasets. The experimental results validate the proposed approach and demonstrate its superior performance on image classification and object detection.
One of the main challenges since the advancement of convolutional neural networks is how to connect the extracted feature map to the final classification layer. VGG models used two sets of fully connected layers for the classification part of their architectures, which significantly increased the number of models' weights. ResNet and the next deep convolutional models used the Global Average Pooling (GAP) layer to compress the feature map and feed it to the classification layer. Although using the GAP layer reduces the computational cost, but also causes losing spatial resolution of the feature map, which results in decreasing learning efficiency. In this paper, we aim to tackle this problem by replacing the GAP layer with a new architecture called Wise-SrNet. It is inspired by the depthwise convolutional idea and is designed for processing spatial resolution while not increasing computational cost. We have evaluated our method using three different datasets: Intel Image Classification Challenge, MIT Indoors Scenes, and a part of the ImageNet dataset. We investigated the implementation of our architecture on several models of the Inception, ResNet, and DenseNet families. Applying our architecture has revealed a significant effect on increasing convergence speed and accuracy. Our Experiments on images with 224*224 resolution increased the Top-1 accuracy between 2% to 8% on different datasets and models. Running our models on 512*512 resolution images of the MIT Indoors Scenes dataset showed a notable result of improving the Top-1 accuracy within 3% to 26%. We will also demonstrate the GAP layer's disadvantage when the input images are large and the number of classes is not few. In this circumstance, our proposed architecture can do a great help in enhancing classification results. The code is shared at https://github.com/mr7495/image-classification-spatial.
Scientific claim verification is a unique challenge that is attracting increasing interest. The SCIVER shared task offers a benchmark scenario to test and compare claim verification approaches by participating teams and consists in three steps: relevant abstract selection, rationale selection and label prediction. In this paper, we present team QMUL-SDS's participation in the shared task. We propose an approach that performs scientific claim verification by doing binary classifications step-by-step. We trained a BioBERT-large classifier to select abstracts based on pairwise relevance assessments for each <claim, title of the abstract> and continued to train it to select rationales out of each retrieved abstract based on <claim, sentence>. We then propose a two-step setting for label prediction, i.e. first predicting "NOT_ENOUGH_INFO" or "ENOUGH_INFO", then label those marked as "ENOUGH_INFO" as either "SUPPORT" or "CONTRADICT". Compared to the baseline system, we achieve substantial improvements on the dev set. As a result, our team is the No. 4 team on the leaderboard.
In some memory-constrained settings like IoT devices and over-the-network data pipelines, it can be advantageous to have smaller contextual embeddings. We investigate the efficacy of projecting contextual embedding data (BERT) onto a manifold, and using nonlinear dimensionality reduction techniques to compress these embeddings. In particular, we propose a novel post-processing approach, applying a combination of Isomap and PCA. We find that the geodesic distance estimations, estimates of the shortest path on a Riemannian manifold, from Isomap's k-Nearest Neighbors graph bolstered the performance of the compressed embeddings to be comparable to the original BERT embeddings. On one dataset, we find that despite a 12-fold dimensionality reduction, the compressed embeddings performed within 0.1% of the original BERT embeddings on a downstream classification task. In addition, we find that this approach works particularly well on tasks reliant on syntactic data, when compared with linear dimensionality reduction. These results show promise for a novel geometric approach to achieve lower dimensional text embeddings from existing transformers and pave the way for data-specific and application-specific embedding compressions.
We introduce a new rule-based optimization method for classification with constraints. The proposed method leverages column generation for linear programming, and hence, is scalable to large datasets. The resulting pricing subproblem is shown to be NP-Hard. We recourse to a decision tree-based heuristic and solve a proxy pricing subproblem for acceleration. The method returns a set of rules along with their optimal weights indicating the importance of each rule for learning. We address interpretability and fairness by assigning cost coefficients to the rules and introducing additional constraints. In particular, we focus on local interpretability and generalize separation criterion in fairness to multiple sensitive attributes and classes. We test the performance of the proposed methodology on a collection of datasets and present a case study to elaborate on its different aspects. The proposed rule-based learning method exhibits a good compromise between local interpretability and fairness on the one side, and accuracy on the other side.
We present a framework for learning multimodal representations from unlabeled data using convolution-free Transformer architectures. Specifically, our Video-Audio-Text Transformer (VATT) takes raw signals as inputs and extracts multimodal representations that are rich enough to benefit a variety of downstream tasks. We train VATT end-to-end from scratch using multimodal contrastive losses and evaluate its performance by the downstream tasks of video action recognition, audio event classification, image classification, and text-to-video retrieval. Furthermore, we study a modality-agnostic, single-backbone Transformer by sharing weights among the three modalities. We show that the convolution-free VATT outperforms state-of-the-art ConvNet-based architectures in the downstream tasks. Especially, VATT's vision Transformer achieves the top-1 accuracy of 82.1% on Kinetics-400, 83.6% on Kinetics-600, 72.7% on Kinetics-700, and 41.1% on Moments in Time, new records while avoiding supervised pre-training. Transferring to image classification leads to 78.7% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet compared to 64.7% by training the same Transformer from scratch, showing the generalizability of our model despite the domain gap between videos and images. VATT's audio Transformer also sets a new record on waveform-based audio event recognition by achieving the mAP of 39.4% on AudioSet without any supervised pre-training. VATT's source code is publicly available.
Recently the vision transformer (ViT) architecture, where the backbone purely consists of self-attention mechanism, has achieved very promising performance in visual classification. However, the high performance of the original ViT heavily depends on pretraining using ultra large-scale datasets, and it significantly underperforms on ImageNet-1K if trained from scratch. This paper makes the efforts toward addressing this problem, by carefully considering the role of visual tokens. First, for classification head, existing ViT only exploits class token while entirely neglecting rich semantic information inherent in high-level visual tokens. Therefore, we propose a new classification paradigm, where the second-order, cross-covariance pooling of visual tokens is combined with class token for final classification. Meanwhile, a fast singular value power normalization is proposed for improving the second-order pooling. Second, the original ViT employs the naive embedding of fixed-size image patches, lacking the ability to model translation equivariance and locality. To alleviate this problem, we develop a light-weight, hierarchical module based on off-the-shelf convolutions for visual token embedding. The proposed architecture, which we call So-ViT, is thoroughly evaluated on ImageNet-1K. The results show our models, when trained from scratch, outperform the competing ViT variants, while being on par with or better than state-of-the-art CNN models. Code is available at https://github.com/jiangtaoxie/So-ViT
In this paper, we present token labeling -- a new training objective for training high-performance vision transformers (ViTs). Different from the standard training objective of ViTs that computes the classification loss on an additional trainable class token, our proposed one takes advantage of all the image patch tokens to compute the training loss in a dense manner. Specifically, token labeling reformulates the image classification problem into multiple token-level recognition problems and assigns each patch token with an individual location-specific supervision generated by a machine annotator. Experiments show that token labeling can clearly and consistently improve the performance of various ViT models across a wide spectrum. For a vision transformer with 26M learnable parameters serving as an example, with token labeling, the model can achieve 84.4% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet. The result can be further increased to 86.4% by slightly scaling the model size up to 150M, delivering the minimal-sized model among previous models (250M+) reaching 86%. We also show that token labeling can clearly improve the generalization capability of the pre-trained models on downstream tasks with dense prediction, such as semantic segmentation. Our code and all the training details will be made publicly available at https://github.com/zihangJiang/TokenLabeling.
Multi-label classification is a type of classification task, it is used when there are two or more classes, and the data point we want to predict may belong to none of the classes or all of them at the same time. In the real world, many applications are actually multi-label involved, including information retrieval, multimedia content annotation, web mining, and so on. A game theory-based framework known as SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) has been applied to explain various supervised learning models without being aware of the exact model. Herein, this work further extends the explanation of multi-label classification task by using the SHAP methodology. The experiment demonstrates a comprehensive comparision of different algorithms on well known multi-label datasets and shows the usefulness of the interpretation.
We introduce a theoretical framework for understanding and predicting the complexity of sequence classification tasks, using a novel extension of the theory of Boolean function sensitivity. The sensitivity of a function, given a distribution over input sequences, quantifies the number of disjoint subsets of the input sequence that can each be individually changed to change the output. We argue that standard sequence classification methods are biased towards learning low-sensitivity functions, so that tasks requiring high sensitivity are more difficult. To that end, we show analytically that simple lexical classifiers can only express functions of bounded sensitivity, and we show empirically that low-sensitivity functions are easier to learn for LSTMs. We then estimate sensitivity on 15 NLP tasks, finding that sensitivity is higher on challenging tasks collected in GLUE than on simple text classification tasks, and that sensitivity predicts the performance both of simple lexical classifiers and of vanilla BiLSTMs without pretrained contextualized embeddings. Within a task, sensitivity predicts which inputs are hard for such simple models. Our results suggest that the success of massively pretrained contextual representations stems in part because they provide representations from which information can be extracted by low-sensitivity decoders.
We address the problem of unsupervised classification of players in a team sport according to their team affiliation, when jersey colours and design are not known a priori. We adopt a contrastive learning approach in which an embedding network learns to maximize the distance between representations of players on different teams relative to players on the same team, in a purely unsupervised fashion, without any labelled data. We evaluate the approach using a new hockey dataset and find that it outperforms prior unsupervised approaches by a substantial margin, particularly for real-time application when only a small number of frames are available for unsupervised learning before team assignments must be made. Remarkably, we show that our contrastive method achieves 94% accuracy after unsupervised training on only a single frame, with accuracy rising to 97% within 500 frames (17 seconds of game time). We further demonstrate how accurate team classification allows accurate team-conditional heat maps of player positioning to be computed.