Human pose estimation has an important impact on a wide range of applications from human-computer interface to surveillance and content-based video retrieval. For human pose estimation, joint obstructions and overlapping upon human bodies result in departed pose estimation. To address these problems, by integrating priors of the structure of human bodies, we present a novel structure-aware network to discreetly consider such priors during the training of the network. Typically, learning such constraints is a challenging task. Instead, we propose generative adversarial networks as our learning model in which we design two residual multiple instance learning (MIL) models with the identical architecture, one is used as the generator and the other one is used as the discriminator. The discriminator task is to distinguish the actual poses from the fake ones. If the pose generator generates the results that the discriminator is not able to distinguish from the real ones, the model has successfully learnt the priors. In the proposed model, the discriminator differentiates the ground-truth heatmaps from the generated ones, and later the adversarial loss back-propagates to the generator. Such procedure assists the generator to learn reasonable body configurations and is proved to be advantageous to improve the pose estimation accuracy. Meanwhile, we propose a novel function for MIL. It is an adjustable structure for both instance selection and modeling to appropriately pass the information between instances in a single bag. In the proposed residual MIL neural network, the pooling action adequately updates the instance contribution to its bag. The proposed adversarial residual multi-instance neural network that is based on pooling has been validated on two datasets for the human pose estimation task and successfully outperforms the other state-of-arts models.
Breast cancer has the highest mortality among cancers in women. Computer-aided pathology to analyze microscopic histopathology images for diagnosis with an increasing number of breast cancer patients can bring the cost and delays of diagnosis down. Deep learning in histopathology has attracted attention over the last decade of achieving state-of-the-art performance in classification and localization tasks. The convolutional neural network, a deep learning framework, provides remarkable results in tissue images analysis, but lacks in providing interpretation and reasoning behind the decisions. We aim to provide a better interpretation of classification results by providing localization on microscopic histopathology images. We frame the image classification problem as weakly supervised multiple instance learning problem where an image is collection of patches i.e. instances. Attention-based multiple instance learning (A-MIL) learns attention on the patches from the image to localize the malignant and normal regions in an image and use them to classify the image. We present classification and localization results on two publicly available BreakHIS and BACH dataset. The classification and visualization results are compared with other recent techniques. The proposed method achieves better localization results without compromising classification accuracy.
This paper is about weakly supervised action segmentation, where the ground truth specifies only a set of actions present in a training video, but not their true temporal ordering. Prior work typically uses a classifier that independently labels video frames for generating the pseudo ground truth, and multiple instance learning for training the classifier. We extend this framework by specifying an HMM, which accounts for co-occurrences of action classes and their temporal lengths, and by explicitly training the HMM on a Viterbi-based loss. Our first contribution is the formulation of a new set-constrained Viterbi algorithm (SCV). Given a video, the SCV generates the MAP action segmentation that satisfies the ground truth. This prediction is used as a framewise pseudo ground truth in our HMM training. Our second contribution in training is a new regularization of feature affinities between training videos that share the same action classes. Evaluation on action segmentation and alignment on the Breakfast, MPII Cooking2, Hollywood Extended datasets demonstrates our significant performance improvement for the two tasks over prior work.
Weakly supervised object detection (WSOD) using only image-level annotations has attracted growing attention over the past few years. Existing approaches using multiple instance learning easily fall into local optima, because such mechanism tends to learn from the most discriminative object in an image for each category. Therefore, these methods suffer from missing object instances which degrade the performance of WSOD. To address this problem, this paper introduces an end-to-end object instance mining (OIM) framework for weakly supervised object detection. OIM attempts to detect all possible object instances existing in each image by introducing information propagation on the spatial and appearance graphs, without any additional annotations. During the iterative learning process, the less discriminative object instances from the same class can be gradually detected and utilized for training. In addition, we design an object instance reweighted loss to learn larger portion of each object instance to further improve the performance. The experimental results on two publicly available databases, VOC 2007 and 2012, demonstrate the efficacy of proposed approach.
Abnormal activity detection is one of the most challenging tasks in the field of computer vision. This study is motivated by the recent state-of-art work of abnormal activity detection, which utilizes both abnormal and normal videos in learning abnormalities with the help of multiple instance learning by providing the data with video-level information. In the absence of temporal-annotations, such a model is prone to give a false alarm while detecting the abnormalities. For this reason, in this paper, we focus on the task of minimizing the false alarm rate while performing an abnormal activity detection task. The mitigation of these false alarms and recent advancement of 3D deep neural network in video action recognition task collectively give us motivation to exploit the 3D ResNet in our proposed method, which helps to extract spatial-temporal features from the videos. Afterwards, using these features and deep multiple instance learning along with the proposed ranking loss, our model learns to predict the abnormality score at the video segment level. Therefore, our proposed method 3D deep Multiple Instance Learning with ResNet (MILR) along with the new proposed ranking loss function achieves the best performance on the UCF-Crime benchmark dataset, as compared to other state-of-art methods. The effectiveness of our proposed method is demonstrated on the UCF-Crime dataset.
We present a deep learning system for testing graphics units by detecting novel visual corruptions in videos. Unlike previous work in which manual tagging was required to collect labeled training data, our weak supervision method is fully automatic and needs no human labelling. This is achieved by reproducing driver bugs that increase the probability of generating corruptions, and by making use of ideas and methods from the Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) setting. In our experiments, we significantly outperform unsupervised methods such as GAN-based models and discover novel corruptions undetected by baselines, while adhering to strict requirements on accuracy and efficiency of our real-time system.
Classification and localization are two pillars of visual object detectors. However, in CNN-based detectors, these two modules are usually optimized under a fixed set of candidate (or anchor) bounding boxes. This configuration significantly limits the possibility to jointly optimize classification and localization. In this paper, we propose a Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) approach that selects anchors and jointly optimizes the two modules of a CNN-based object detector. Our approach, referred to as Multiple Anchor Learning (MAL), constructs anchor bags and selects the most representative anchors from each bag. Such an iterative selection process is potentially NP-hard to optimize. To address this issue, we solve MAL by repetitively depressing the confidence of selected anchors by perturbing their corresponding features. In an adversarial selection-depression manner, MAL not only pursues optimal solutions but also fully leverages multiple anchors/features to learn a detection model. Experiments show that MAL improves the baseline RetinaNet with significant margins on the commonly used MS-COCO object detection benchmark and achieves new state-of-the-art detection performance compared with recent methods.
It is challenging for weakly supervised object detection network to precisely predict the positions of the objects, since there are no instance-level category annotations. Most existing methods tend to solve this problem by using a two-phase learning procedure, i.e., multiple instance learning detector followed by a fully supervised learning detector with bounding-box regression. Based on our observation, this procedure may lead to local minima for some object categories. In this paper, we propose to jointly train the two phases in an end-to-end manner to tackle this problem. Specifically, we design a single network with both multiple instance learning and bounding-box regression branches that share the same backbone. Meanwhile, a guided attention module using classification loss is added to the backbone for effectively extracting the implicit location information in the features. Experimental results on public datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Classification with Costly Features (CwCF) is a classification problem that includes the cost of features in the optimization criteria. Individually for each sample, its features are sequentially acquired to maximize accuracy while minimizing the acquired features' cost. However, existing approaches can only process data that can be expressed as vectors of fixed length. In real life, the data often possesses rich and complex structure, which can be more precisely described with formats such as XML or JSON. The data is hierarchical and often contains nested lists of objects. In this work, we extend an existing deep reinforcement learning-based algorithm with hierarchical deep sets and hierarchical softmax, so that it can directly process this data. The extended method has greater control over which features it can acquire and, in experiments with seven datasets, we show that this leads to superior performance. To showcase the real usage of the new method, we apply it to a real-life problem of classifying malicious web domains, using an online service.
In statistical learning, many problem formulations have been proposed so far, such as multi-class learning, complementarily labeled learning, multi-label learning, multi-task learning, which provide theoretical models for various real-world tasks. Although they have been extensively studied, the relationship among them has not been fully investigated. In this work, we focus on a particular problem formulation called Multiple-Instance Learning (MIL), and show that various learning problems including all the problems mentioned above with some of new problems can be reduced to MIL with theoretically guaranteed generalization bounds, where the reductions are established under a new reduction scheme we provide as a by-product. The results imply that the MIL-reduction gives a simplified and unified framework for designing and analyzing algorithms for various learning problems. Moreover, we show that the MIL-reduction framework can be kernelized.
Multiple instance learning (MIL) is a supervised learning methodology that aims to allow models to learn instance class labels from bag class labels, where a bag is defined to contain multiple instances. MIL is gaining traction for learning from weak labels but has not been widely applied to 3D medical imaging. MIL is well-suited to clinical CT acquisitions since (1) the highly anisotropic voxels hinder application of traditional 3D networks and (2) patch-based networks have limited ability to learn whole volume labels. In this work, we apply MIL with a deep convolutional neural network to identify whether clinical CT head image volumes possess one or more large hemorrhages (> 20cm$^3$), resulting in a learned 2D model without the need for 2D slice annotations. Individual image volumes are considered separate bags, and the slices in each volume are instances. Such a framework sets the stage for incorporating information obtained in clinical reports to help train a 2D segmentation approach. Within this context, we evaluate the data requirements to enable generalization of MIL by varying the amount of training data. Our results show that a training size of at least 400 patient image volumes was needed to achieve accurate per-slice hemorrhage detection. Over a five-fold cross-validation, the leading model, which made use of the maximum number of training volumes, had an average true positive rate of 98.10%, an average true negative rate of 99.36%, and an average precision of 0.9698. The models have been made available along with source code to enabled continued exploration and adaption of MIL in CT neuroimaging.
Treatment of patients with obstructive coronary artery disease is guided by the functional significance of a coronary artery stenosis. Fractional flow reserve (FFR), measured during invasive coronary angiography (ICA), is considered the gold standard to define the functional significance of a coronary stenosis. Here, we present a method for non-invasive detection of patients with functionally significant coronary artery stenosis, combining analysis of the coronary artery tree and the left ventricular (LV) myocardium in cardiac CT angiography (CCTA) images. We retrospectively collected CCTA scans of 126 patients who underwent invasive FFR measurements, to determine the functional significance of coronary stenoses. We combine our previous works for the analysis of the complete coronary artery tree and the LV myocardium: Coronary arteries are encoded by two disjoint convolutional autoencoders (CAEs) and the LV myocardium is characterized by a convolutional neural network (CNN) and a CAE. Thereafter, using the extracted encodings of all coronary arteries and the LV myocardium, patients are classified according to the presence of functionally significant stenosis, as defined by the invasively measured FFR. To handle the varying number of coronary arteries in a patient, the classification is formulated as a multiple instance learning problem and is performed using an attention-based neural network. Cross-validation experiments resulted in an average area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of $0.74 \pm 0.01$, and showed that the proposed combined analysis outperformed the analysis of the coronary arteries or the LV myocardium only. The results demonstrate the feasibility of combining the analyses of the complete coronary artery tree and the LV myocardium in CCTA images for the detection of patients with functionally significant stenosis in coronary arteries.
Discourse parsing could not yet take full advantage of the neural NLP revolution, mostly due to the lack of annotated datasets. We propose a novel approach that uses distant supervision on an auxiliary task (sentiment classification), to generate abundant data for RST-style discourse structure prediction. Our approach combines a neural variant of multiple-instance learning, using document-level supervision, with an optimal CKY-style tree generation algorithm. In a series of experiments, we train a discourse parser (for only structure prediction) on our automatically generated dataset and compare it with parsers trained on human-annotated corpora (news domain RST-DT and Instructional domain). Results indicate that while our parser does not yet match the performance of a parser trained and tested on the same dataset (intra-domain), it does perform remarkably well on the much more difficult and arguably more useful task of inter-domain discourse structure prediction, where the parser is trained on one domain and tested/applied on another one.
Diabetic retinopathy (DR) grading is crucial in determining the adequate treatment and follow up of patients, but the screening process can be tiresome and prone to errors. Deep learning approaches have shown promising performance as computer-aided diagnosis(CAD) systems, but their black-box behaviour hinders the clinical application. We propose DR$\vert$GRADUATE, a novel deep learning-based DR grading CAD system that supports its decision by providing a medically interpretable explanation and an estimation of how uncertain that prediction is, allowing the ophthalmologist to measure how much that decision should be trusted. We designed DR$\vert$GRADUATE taking into account the ordinal nature of the DR grading problem. A novel Gaussian-sampling approach built upon a Multiple Instance Learning framework allow DR$\vert$GRADUATE to infer an image grade associated with an explanation map and a prediction uncertainty while being trained only with image-wise labels. DR$\vert$GRADUATE was trained on the Kaggle training set and evaluated across multiple datasets. In DR grading, a quadratic-weighted Cohen's kappa (QWK) between 0.71 and 0.84 was achieved in five different datasets. We show that high QWK values occur for images with low prediction uncertainty, thus indicating that this uncertainty is a valid measure of the predictions' quality. Further, bad quality images are generally associated with higher uncertainties, showing that images not suitable for diagnosis indeed lead to less trustworthy predictions. Additionally, tests on unfamiliar medical image data types suggest that DR$\vert$GRADUATE allows outlier detection. The attention maps generally highlight regions of interest for diagnosis. These results show the great potential of DR$\vert$GRADUATE as a second-opinion system in DR severity grading.
Convolutional neural networks can be trained to perform histology slide classification using weak annotations with multiple instance learning (MIL). However, given the paucity of labeled histology data, direct application of MIL can easily suffer from overfitting and the network is unable to learn rich feature representations due to the weak supervisory signal. We propose to overcome such limitations with a two-stage semi-supervised approach that combines the power of data-efficient self-supervised feature learning via contrastive predictive coding (CPC) and the interpretability and flexibility of regularized attention-based MIL. We apply our two-stage CPC + MIL semi-supervised pipeline to the binary classification of breast cancer histology images. Across five random splits, we report state-of-the-art performance with a mean validation accuracy of 95% and an area under the ROC curve of 0.968. We further evaluate the quality of features learned via CPC relative to simple transfer learning and show that strong classification performance using CPC features can be efficiently leveraged under the MIL framework even with the feature encoder frozen.
Recently, Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization (WTAL) has been densely studied but there is still a large gap between weakly-supervised models and fully-supervised models. It is practical and intuitive to annotate temporal boundaries of a few examples and utilize them to help WTAL models better detect actions. However, the train-test discrepancy of action localization strategy prevents WTAL models from leveraging semi-supervision for further improvement. At training time, attention or multiple instance learning is used to aggregate predictions of each snippet for video-level classification; at test time, they first obtain action score sequences over time, then truncate segments of scores higher than a fixed threshold, and post-process action segments. The inconsistent strategy makes it hard to explicitly supervise the action localization model with temporal boundary annotations at training time. In this paper, we propose a Train-Test Consistent framework, TTC-Loc. In both training and testing time, our TTC-Loc localizes actions by comparing scores of action classes and predicted threshold, which enables it to be trained with semi-supervision. By fixing the train-test discrepancy, our TTC-Loc significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art performance on THUMOS'14, ActivityNet 1.2 and 1.3 when only video-level labels are provided for training. With full annotations of only one video per class and video-level labels for the other videos, our TTC-Loc further boosts the performance and achieves 33.4\% mAP (IoU threshold 0.5) on THUMOS's 14.
Automatic pain assessment has an important potential diagnostic value for populations that are incapable of articulating their pain experiences. As one of the dominating nonverbal channels for eliciting pain expression events, facial expressions has been widely investigated for estimating the pain intensity of individual. However, using state-of-the-art deep learning (DL) models in real-world pain estimation applications poses several challenges related to the subjective variations of facial expressions, operational capture conditions, and lack of representative training videos with labels. Given the cost of annotating intensity levels for every video frame, we propose a weakly-supervised domain adaptation (WSDA) technique that allows for training 3D CNNs for spatio-temporal pain intensity estimation using weakly labeled videos, where labels are provided on a periodic basis. In particular, WSDA integrates multiple instance learning into an adversarial deep domain adaptation framework to train an Inflated 3D-CNN (I3D) model such that it can accurately estimate pain intensities in the target operational domain. The training process relies on weak target loss, along with domain loss and source loss for domain adaptation of the I3D model. Experimental results obtained using labeled source domain RECOLA videos and weakly-labeled target domain UNBC-McMaster videos indicate that the proposed deep WSDA approach can achieve significantly higher level of sequence (bag)-level and frame (instance)-level pain localization accuracy than related state-of-the-art approaches.
In this paper, we address the problem of weakly supervised object localization (WSL), which trains a detection network on the dataset with only image-level annotations. The proposed approach is built on the observation that the proposal set from the training dataset is a collection of background, object parts, and objects. Several strategies are taken to adaptively eliminate the noisy proposals and generate pseudo object-level annotations for the weakly labeled dataset. A multiple instance learning (MIL) algorithm enhanced by mask-out strategy is adopted to collect the class-specific object proposals, which are then utilized to adapt a pre-trained classification network to a detection network. In addition, the detection results from the detection network are re-weighted by jointly considering the detection scores and the overlap ratio of proposals in a proposal subset optimization framework. The optimal proposals work as object-level labels that enable a pseudo-strongly supervised dataset for training the detection network. Consequently, we establish a fully adaptive detection network. Extensive evaluations on the PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2012 datasets demonstrate a significant improvement compared with the state-of-the-art methods.
In this work, we propose a simple model that provides permutation invariant maximally predictive prototype generator from a given dataset, which leads to interpretability of the solution and concrete insights to the nature and the solution of a problem. Our aim is to find out prototypes in the feature space to map the collection of instances (i.e. bags) to a distance feature space and simultaneously learn a linear classifier for multiple instance learning (MIL). Our experiments on classical MIL benchmark datasets demonstrate that proposed framework is an accurate and efficient classifier compared to the existing approaches.
In many review classification applications, a fine-grained analysis of the reviews is desirable, because different segments (e.g., sentences) of a review may focus on different aspects of the entity in question. However, training supervised models for segment-level classification requires segment labels, which may be more difficult or expensive to obtain than review labels. In this paper, we employ Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) and use only weak supervision in the form of a single label per review. First, we show that when inappropriate MIL aggregation functions are used, then MIL-based networks are outperformed by simpler baselines. Second, we propose a new aggregation function based on the sigmoid attention mechanism and show that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models for segment-level sentiment classification (by up to 9.8% in F1). Finally, we highlight the importance of fine-grained predictions in an important public-health application: finding actionable reports of foodborne illness. We show that our model achieves 48.6% higher recall compared to previous models, thus increasing the chance of identifying previously unknown foodborne outbreaks.