Open containers, i.e., containers without covers, are an important and ubiquitous class of objects in human life. In this letter, we propose a novel method for robots to "imagine" the open containability affordance of a previously unseen object via physical simulations. We implement our imagination method on a UR5 manipulator. The robot autonomously scans the object with an RGB-D camera. The scanned 3D model is used for open containability imagination which quantifies the open containability affordance by physically simulating dropping particles onto the object and counting how many particles are retained in it. This quantification is used for open-container vs. non-open-container binary classification (hereafter referred to as open container classification). If the object is classified as an open container, the robot further imagines pouring into the object, again using physical simulations, to obtain the pouring position and orientation for real robot autonomous pouring. We evaluate our method on open container classification and autonomous pouring of granular material on a dataset containing 130 previously unseen objects with 57 object categories. Although our proposed method uses only 11 objects for simulation calibration (training), its open container classification aligns well with human judgements. In addition, our method endows the robot with the capability to autonomously pour into the 55 containers in the dataset with a very high success rate. We also compare to a deep learning method. Results show that our method achieves the same performance as the deep learning method on open container classification and outperforms it on autonomous pouring. Moreover, our method is fully explainable.
Early diagnosis of cancer often allows for a more vast choice of therapy opportunities. After a cancer diagnosis, staging provides essential information about the extent of disease in the body and the expected response to a particular treatment. The leading importance of classifying cancer patients at the early stage into high or low-risk groups has led many research teams, both from the biomedical and bioinformatics field, to study the application of Deep Learning (DL) methods. The ability of DL to detect critical features from complex datasets is a significant achievement in early diagnosis and cell cancer progression. In this paper, we focus the attention on osteosarcoma. Osteosarcoma is one of the primary malignant bone tumors which usually afflicts people in adolescence. Our contribution to the classification of osteosarcoma cells is made as follows: a DL approach is applied to discriminate human Mesenchymal Stromal Cells (MSCs) from osteosarcoma cells and to classify the different cell populations under investigation. Glass slides of differ-ent cell populations were cultured including MSCs, differentiated in healthy bone cells (osteoblasts) and osteosarcoma cells, both single cell populations or mixed. Images of such samples of isolated cells (single-type of mixed) are recorded with traditional optical microscopy. DL is then applied to identify and classify single cells. Proper data augmentation techniques and cross-fold validation are used to appreciate the capabilities of a convolutional neural network to address the cell detection and classification problem. Based on the results obtained on individual cells, and to the versatility and scalability of our DL approach, the next step will be its application to discriminate and classify healthy or cancer tissues to advance digital pathology.
Numerous metamorphic and polymorphic malicious variants are generated automatically on a daily basis by mutation engines that transform the code of a malicious program while retaining its functionality, in order to evade signature-based detection. These automatic processes have greatly increased the number of malware variants, deeming their fully-manual analysis impossible. Malware classification is the task of determining to which family a new malicious variant belongs. Variants of the same malware family show similar behavioral patterns. Thus, classifying newly discovered malicious programs and applications helps assess the risks they pose. Moreover, malware classification facilitates determining which of the newly discovered variants should undergo manual analysis by a security expert, in order to determine whether they belong to a new family (e.g., one whose members exploit a zero-day vulnerability) or are simply the result of a concept drift within a known malicious family. This motivated intense research in recent years on devising high-accuracy automatic tools for malware classification. In this work, we present DAEMON - a novel dataset-agnostic malware classifier. A key property of DAEMON is that the type of features it uses and the manner in which they are mined facilitate understanding the distinctive behavior of malware families, making its classification decisions explainable. We've optimized DAEMON using a large-scale dataset of x86 binaries, belonging to a mix of several malware families targeting computers running Windows. We then re-trained it and applied it, without any algorithmic change, feature re-engineering or parameter tuning, to two other large-scale datasets of malicious Android applications consisting of numerous malware families. DAEMON obtained highly accurate classification results on all datasets, establishing that it is also platform-agnostic.
With the increased size and complexity of seismic surveys, manual labeling of seismic facies has become a significant challenge. Application of automatic methods for seismic facies interpretation could significantly reduce the manual labor and subjectivity of a particular interpreter present in conventional methods. A recently emerged group of methods is based on deep neural networks. These approaches are data-driven and require large labeled datasets for network training. We apply a deep convolutional autoencoder for unsupervised seismic facies classification, which does not require manually labeled examples. The facies maps are generated by clustering the deep-feature vectors obtained from the input data. Our method yields accurate results on real data and provides them instantaneously. The proposed approach opens up possibilities to analyze geological patterns in real time without human intervention.
End-to-end spoken language understanding (SLU) systems have many advantages over conventional pipeline systems, but collecting in-domain speech data to train an end-to-end system is costly and time consuming. One question arises from this: how to train an end-to-end SLU with limited amounts of data? Many researchers have explored approaches that make use of other related data resources, typically by pre-training parts of the model on high-resource speech recognition. In this paper, we suggest improving the generalization performance of SLU models with a non-standard learning algorithm, Reptile. Though Reptile was originally proposed for model-agnostic meta learning, we argue that it can also be used to directly learn a target task and result in better generalization than conventional gradient descent. In this work, we employ Reptile to the task of end-to-end spoken intent classification. Experiments on four datasets of different languages and domains show improvement of intent prediction accuracy, both when Reptile is used alone and used in addition to pre-training.
In the electronic health record, using clinical notes to identify entities such as disorders and their temporality (e.g. the order of an event relative to a time index) can inform many important analyses. However, creating training data for clinical entity tasks is time consuming and sharing labeled data is challenging due to privacy concerns. The information needs of the COVID-19 pandemic highlight the need for agile methods of training machine learning models for clinical notes. We present Trove, a framework for weakly supervised entity classification using medical ontologies and expert-generated rules. Our approach, unlike hand-labeled notes, is easy to share and modify, while offering performance comparable to learning from manually labeled training data. In this work, we validate our framework on six benchmark tasks and demonstrate Trove's ability to analyze the records of patients visiting the emergency department at Stanford Health Care for COVID-19 presenting symptoms and risk factors.
Currently, the state of the art for classification of psychiatric illness is based on audio-based classification. This thesis aims to design and evaluate a state of the art text classification network on this challenge. The hypothesis is that a well designed text-based approach poses a strong competition against the state-of-the-art audio based approaches. Dutch natural language models are being limited by the scarcity of pre-trained monolingual NLP models, as a result Dutch natural language models have a low capture of long range semantic dependencies over sentences. For this issue, this thesis presents belabBERT, a new Dutch language model extending the RoBERTa[15] architecture. belabBERT is trained on a large Dutch corpus (+32GB) of web crawled texts. After this thesis evaluates the strength of text-based classification, a brief exploration is done, extending the framework to a hybrid text- and audio-based classification. The goal of this hybrid framework is to show the principle of hybridisation with a very basic audio-classification network. The overall goal is to create the foundations for a hybrid psychiatric illness classification, by proving that the new text-based classification is already a strong stand-alone solution.
Information technology has spread widely, and extraordinarily large amounts of data have been made accessible to users, which has made it challenging to select data that are in accordance with user needs. For the resolution of the above issue, recommender systems have emerged, which much help users go through the process of decision-making and selecting relevant data. A recommender system predicts users behavior to be capable of detecting their interests and needs, and it often uses the classification technique for this purpose. It may not be sufficiently accurate to employ individual classification, where not all cases can be examined, which makes the method inappropriate to specific problems. In this research, group classification and the ensemble learning technique were used for increasing prediction accuracy in recommender systems. Another issue that is raised here concerns user analysis. Given the large size of the data and a large number of users, the process of user needs analysis and prediction (using a graph in most cases, representing the relations between users and their selected items) is complicated and cumbersome in recommender systems. Graph embedding was also proposed for resolution of this issue, where all or part of user behavior can be simulated through the generation of several vectors, resolving the problem of user behavior analysis to a large extent while maintaining high efficiency. In this research, individuals most similar to the target user were classified using ensemble learning, fuzzy rules, and the decision tree, and relevant recommendations were then made to each user with a heterogeneous knowledge graph and embedding vectors. This study was performed on the MovieLens datasets, and the obtained results indicated the high efficiency of the presented method.
In recent years, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown impressive ability to represent hyperspectral images (HSIs) and achieved encouraging results in HSI classification. However, the existing CNN-based models operate at the patch-level, in which pixel is separately classified into classes using a patch of images around it. This patch-level classification will lead to a large number of repeated calculations, and it is difficult to determine the appropriate patch size that is beneficial to classification accuracy. In addition, the conventional CNN models operate convolutions with local receptive fields, which cause failures in modeling contextual spatial information. To overcome the aforementioned limitations, we propose a novel end-to-end, pixels-to-pixels fully convolutional spatial propagation network (FCSPN) for HSI classification. Our FCSPN consists of a 3D fully convolution network (3D-FCN) and a convolutional spatial propagation network (CSPN). Specifically, the 3D-FCN is firstly introduced for reliable preliminary classification, in which a novel dual separable residual (DSR) unit is proposed to effectively capture spectral and spatial information simultaneously with fewer parameters. Moreover, the channel-wise attention mechanism is adapted in the 3D-FCN to grasp the most informative channels from redundant channel information. Finally, the CSPN is introduced to capture the spatial correlations of HSI via learning a local linear spatial propagation, which allows maintaining the HSI spatial consistency and further refining the classification results. Experimental results on three HSI benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed FCSPN achieves state-of-the-art performance on HSI classification.
With the memory-resource-limited constraints, class-incremental learning (CIL) usually suffers from the "catastrophic forgetting" problem when updating the joint classification model on the arrival of newly added classes. To cope with the forgetting problem, many CIL methods transfer the knowledge of old classes by preserving some exemplar samples into the size-constrained memory buffer. To utilize the memory buffer more efficiently, we propose to keep more auxiliary low-fidelity exemplar samples rather than the original real high-fidelity exemplar samples. Such a memory-efficient exemplar preserving scheme makes the old-class knowledge transfer more effective. However, the low-fidelity exemplar samples are often distributed in a different domain away from that of the original exemplar samples, that is, a domain shift. To alleviate this problem, we propose a duplet learning scheme that seeks to construct domain-compatible feature extractors and classifiers, which greatly narrows down the above domain gap. As a result, these low-fidelity auxiliary exemplar samples have the ability to moderately replace the original exemplar samples with a lower memory cost. In addition, we present a robust classifier adaptation scheme, which further refines the biased classifier (learned with the samples containing distillation label knowledge about old classes) with the help of the samples of pure true class labels. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of this work against the state-of-the-art approaches.
We consider the problem of classification of points sampled from an unknown probability measure on a Euclidean space. We study the question of querying the class label at a very small number of judiciously chosen points so as to be able to attach the appropriate class label to every point in the set. Our approach is to consider the unknown probability measure as a convex combination of the conditional probabilities for each class. Our technique involves the use of a highly localized kernel constructed from Hermite polynomials, in order to create a hierarchical estimate of the supports of the constituent probability measures. We do not need to make any assumptions on the nature of any of the probability measures nor know in advance the number of classes involved. We give theoretical guarantees measured by the $F$-score for our classification scheme. Examples include classification in hyper-spectral images and MNIST classification.
Obtaining object response maps is one important step to achieve weakly-supervised semantic segmentation using image-level labels. However, existing methods rely on the classification task, which could result in a response map only attending on discriminative object regions as the network does not need to see the entire object for optimizing the classification loss. To tackle this issue, we propose a principled and end-to-end train-able framework to allow the network to pay attention to other parts of the object, while producing a more complete and uniform response map. Specifically, we introduce the mixup data augmentation scheme into the classification network and design two uncertainty regularization terms to better interact with the mixup strategy. In experiments, we conduct extensive analysis to demonstrate the proposed method and show favorable performance against state-of-the-art approaches.
Purpose: To design multi-disease classifiers for body CT scans for three different organ systems using automatically extracted labels from radiology text reports.Materials & Methods: This retrospective study included a total of 12,092 patients (mean age 57 +- 18; 6,172 women) for model development and testing (from 2012-2017). Rule-based algorithms were used to extract 19,225 disease labels from 13,667 body CT scans from 12,092 patients. Using a three-dimensional DenseVNet, three organ systems were segmented: lungs and pleura; liver and gallbladder; and kidneys and ureters. For each organ, a three-dimensional convolutional neural network classified no apparent disease versus four common diseases for a total of 15 different labels across all three models. Testing was performed on a subset of 2,158 CT volumes relative to 2,875 manually derived reference labels from 2133 patients (mean age 58 +- 18;1079 women). Performance was reported as receiver operating characteristic area under the curve (AUC) with 95% confidence intervals by the DeLong method. Results: Manual validation of the extracted labels confirmed 91% to 99% accuracy across the 15 different labels. AUCs for lungs and pleura labels were: atelectasis 0.77 (95% CI: 0.74, 0.81), nodule 0.65 (0.61, 0.69), emphysema 0.89 (0.86, 0.92), effusion 0.97 (0.96, 0.98), and no apparent disease 0.89 (0.87, 0.91). AUCs for liver and gallbladder were: hepatobiliary calcification 0.62 (95% CI: 0.56, 0.67), lesion 0.73 (0.69, 0.77), dilation 0.87 (0.84, 0.90), fatty 0.89 (0.86, 0.92), and no apparent disease 0.82 (0.78, 0.85). AUCs for kidneys and ureters were: stone 0.83 (95% CI: 0.79, 0.87), atrophy 0.92 (0.89, 0.94), lesion 0.68 (0.64, 0.72), cyst 0.70 (0.66, 0.73), and no apparent disease 0.79 (0.75, 0.83). Conclusion: Weakly-supervised deep learning models were able to classify diverse diseases in multiple organ systems.
It is undeniable that aerial/satellite images can provide useful information for a large variety of tasks. But, since these images are always looking from above, some applications can benefit from complementary information provided by other perspective views of the scene, such as ground-level images. Despite a large number of public repositories for both georeferenced photographs and aerial images, there is a lack of benchmark datasets that allow the development of approaches that exploit the benefits and complementarity of aerial/ground imagery. In this paper, we present two new publicly available datasets named \thedataset~and CV-BrCT. The first one contains triplets of images from the same geographic coordinate with different perspectives of view extracted from various places around the world. Each triplet is composed of an aerial RGB image, a ground-level perspective image, and a Sentinel-2 sample. The second dataset contains pairs of aerial and street-level images extracted from southeast Brazil. We design an extensive set of experiments concerning multi-view scene classification, using early and late fusion. Such experiments were conducted to show that image classification can be enhanced using multi-view data.
The Ubicomp Digital 2020 -- Time Series Classification Challenge from STABILO is a challenge about multi-variate time series classification. The data collected from 100 volunteer writers, and contains 15 features measured with multiple sensors on a pen. In this paper,we use a neural network to classify the data into 52 classes, that is lower and upper cases of Arabic letters. The proposed architecture of the neural network a is CNN-LSTM network. It combines convolutional neural network (CNN) for short term context with along short term memory layer (LSTM) for also long term dependencies. We reached an accuracy of 68% on our writer exclusive test set and64.6% on the blind challenge test set resulting in the second place.
Land use and land cover (LULC) classification using remote sensing imagery plays a vital role in many environment modeling and land use inventories. In this study, a hybrid feature optimization algorithm along with a deep learning classifier is proposed to improve the performance of LULC classification, helping to predict wildlife habitat, deteriorating environmental quality, haphazard, etc. LULC classification is assessed using Sat 4, Sat 6 and Eurosat datasets. After the selection of remote sensing images, normalization and histogram equalization methods are used to improve the quality of the images. Then, a hybrid optimization is accomplished by using the Local Gabor Binary Pattern Histogram Sequence (LGBPHS), the Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) and Haralick texture features, for the feature extraction from the selected images. The benefits of this hybrid optimization are a high discriminative power and invariance to color and grayscale images. Next, a Human Group based Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm is applied to select the optimal features, whose benefits are fast convergence rate and easy to implement. After selecting the optimal feature values, a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) network is utilized to classify the LULC classes. Experimental results showed that the Human Group based PSO algorithm with a LSTM classifier effectively well differentiates the land use and land cover classes in terms of classification accuracy, recall and precision. An improvement of 2.56% in accuracy is achieved compared to the existing models GoogleNet, VGG, AlexNet, ConvNet, when the proposed method is applied.
Traditional machine learning approaches may fail to perform satisfactorily when dealing with complex data. In this context, the importance of data mining evolves w.r.t. building an efficient knowledge discovery and mining framework. Ensemble learning is aimed at integration of fusion, modeling and mining of data into a unified model. However, traditional ensemble learning methods are complex and have optimization or tuning problems. In this paper, we propose a simple, sequential, efficient, ensemble learning approach using multiple deep networks. The deep network used in the ensembles is ResNet50. The model draws inspiration from binary decision/classification trees. The proposed approach is compared against the baseline viz. the single classifier approach i.e. using a single multiclass ResNet50 on the ImageNet and Natural Images datasets. Our approach outperforms the baseline on all experiments on the ImageNet dataset. Code is available in https://github.com/mueedhafiz1982/CNNTreeEnsemble.git
Memes have become an ubiquitous social media entity and the processing and analysis of suchmultimodal data is currently an active area of research. This paper presents our work on theMemotion Analysis shared task of SemEval 2020, which involves the sentiment and humoranalysis of memes. We propose a system which uses different bimodal fusion techniques toleverage the inter-modal dependency for sentiment and humor classification tasks. Out of all ourexperiments, the best system improved the baseline with macro F1 scores of 0.357 on SentimentClassification (Task A), 0.510 on Humor Classification (Task B) and 0.312 on Scales of SemanticClasses (Task C).
Text classification is the most fundamental and essential task in natural language processing. The last decade has seen a surge of research in this area due to the unprecedented success of deep learning. Numerous methods, datasets, and evaluation metrics have been proposed in the literature, raising the need for a comprehensive and updated survey. This paper fills the gap by reviewing the state-of-the-art approaches from 1961 to 2021, focusing on models from traditional models to deep learning. We create a taxonomy for text classification according to the text involved and the models used for feature extraction and classification. We then discuss each of these categories in detail, dealing with both the technical developments and benchmark datasets that support tests of predictions. A comprehensive comparison between different techniques, as well as identifying the pros and cons of various evaluation metrics are also provided in this survey. Finally, we conclude by summarizing key implications, future research directions, and the challenges facing the research area.
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are prone to overfit small training datasets. We present a novel two-phase pipeline that leverages self-supervised learning and knowledge distillation to improve the generalization ability of CNN models for image classification under the data-deficient setting. The first phase is to learn a teacher model which possesses rich and generalizable visual representations via self-supervised learning, and the second phase is to distill the representations into a student model in a self-distillation manner, and meanwhile fine-tune the student model for the image classification task. We also propose a novel margin loss for the self-supervised contrastive learning proxy task to better learn the representation under the data-deficient scenario. Together with other tricks, we achieve competitive performance in the VIPriors image classification challenge.