Most of the approaches for discovering visual attributes in images demand significant supervision, which is cumbersome to obtain. In this paper, we aim to discover visual attributes in a weakly supervised setting that is commonly encountered with contemporary image search engines. Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have enjoyed remarkable success in vision applications recently. However, in a weakly supervised scenario, widely used CNN training procedures do not learn a robust model for predicting multiple attribute labels simultaneously. The primary reason is that the attributes highly co-occur within the training data. To ameliorate this limitation, we propose Deep-Carving, a novel training procedure with CNNs, that helps the net efficiently carve itself for the task of multiple attribute prediction. During training, the responses of the feature maps are exploited in an ingenious way to provide the net with multiple pseudo-labels (for training images) for subsequent iterations. The process is repeated periodically after a fixed number of iterations, and enables the net carve itself iteratively for efficiently disentangling features. Additionally, we contribute a noun-adjective pairing inspired Natural Scenes Attributes Dataset to the research community, CAMIT - NSAD, containing a number of co-occurring attributes within a noun category. We describe, in detail, salient aspects of this dataset. Our experiments on CAMIT-NSAD and the SUN Attributes Dataset, with weak supervision, clearly demonstrate that the Deep-Carved CNNs consistently achieve considerable improvement in the precision of attribute prediction over popular baseline methods.
The main idea behind @cite_30 @cite_37 is to use an Entropy Minimization method to create low-density separation between the features obtained from deep stacked auto-encoders. Their work can be deemed to be nearest to our proposed approach; however, we do not deal with unlabelled data, and tend to follow a more comprehensive approach for attribute prediction. @cite_24 proposes a weakly supervised graph learning method for visual ranking of attributes, but the graph formulation is heavily dependent on the attribute co-occurrence statistics, which can often be inconsistent in practical scenarios. Researchers in @cite_15 attempt to leverage weak attributes in images for better image categorization, but expect all weak attributes in the training data to be labelled. Authors in @cite_39 solve the partial labelling problem, where a consideration set of labels is provided for a training image, out of which only one is correct. However, as depicted in Fig , each training image in our problem setting can have more than one correct (but unlabelled) attribute.
@cite_30 @cite_37 @cite_39 @cite_24 @cite_15
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In this work, we propose the use of large set of unlabeled images as a source of regularization data for learning robust visual representation. Given a visual model trained by a labeled dataset in a supervised fashion, we augment our training samples by incorporating large number of unlabeled data and train a semi-supervised model. We demonstrate that our proposed learning approach leverages an abundance of unlabeled images and boosts the visual recognition performance which alleviates the need to rely on large labeled datasets for learning robust representation. To increment the number of image instances needed to learn robust visual models in our approach, each labeled image propagates its label to its nearest unlabeled image instances. These retrieved unlabeled images serve as local perturbations of each labeled image to perform Visual Self-Regularization (VISER). To retrieve such visual self regularizers, we compute the cosine similarity in a semantic space defined by the penultimate layer in a fully convolutional neural network. We use the publicly available Yahoo Flickr Creative Commons 100M dataset as the source of our unlabeled image set and propose a distributed approximate nearest neighbor algorithm to make retrieval practical at that scale. Using the labeled instances and their regularizer samples we show that we significantly improve object categorization and localization performance on the MS COCO and Visual Genome datasets where objects appear in context. We consider the problem of using a large unlabeled sample to boost performance of a learning algorit,hrn when only a small set of labeled examples is available. In particular, we consider a problem setting motivated by the task of learning to classify web pages, in which the description of each example can be partitioned into two distinct views. For example, the description of a web page can be partitioned into the words occurring on that page, and the words occurring in hyperlinks t,hat point to that page. We assume that either view of the example would be sufficient for learning if we had enough labeled data, but our goal is to use both views together to allow inexpensive unlabeled data to augment, a much smaller set of labeled examples. Specifically, the presence of two distinct views of each example suggests strategies in which two learning algorithms are trained separately on each view, and then each algorithm’s predictions on new unlabeled examples are used to enlarge the training set of the other. Our goal in this paper is to provide a PAC-style analysis for this setting, and, more broadly, a PAC-style framework for the general problem of learning from both labeled and unlabeled data. We also provide empirical results on real web-page data indicating that this use of unlabeled examples can lead to significant improvement of hypotheses in practice. *This research was supported in part by the DARPA HPKB program under contract F30602-97-1-0215 and by NSF National Young investigator grant CCR-9357793. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. TO copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and or a fee. COLT 98 Madison WI USA Copyright ACM 1998 l-58113-057--0 98 7... 5.00 92 Tom Mitchell School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3891 mitchell+@cs.cmu.edu We address the task of learning a semantic segmentation from weakly supervised data. Our aim is to devise a system that predicts an object label for each pixel by making use of only image level labels during training – the information whether a certain object is present or not in the image. Such coarse tagging of images is faster and easier to obtain as opposed to the tedious task of pixelwise labeling required in state of the art systems. We cast this task naturally as a multiple instance learning (MIL) problem. We use Semantic Texton Forest (STF) as the basic framework and extend it for the MIL setting. We make use of multitask learning (MTL) to regularize our solution. Here, an external task of geometric context estimation is used to improve on the task of semantic segmentation. We report experimental results on the MSRC21 and the very challenging VOC2007 datasets. On MSRC21 dataset we are able, by using 276 weakly labeled images, to achieve the performance of a supervised STF trained on pixelwise labeled training set of 56 images, which is a significant reduction in supervision needed. In this article, we exploit the problem of annotating a large-scale image corpus by label propagation over noisily tagged web images. To annotate the images more accurately, we propose a novel kNN-sparse graph-based semi-supervised learning approach for harnessing the labeled and unlabeled data simultaneously. The sparse graph constructed by datum-wise one-vs-kNN sparse reconstructions of all samples can remove most of the semantically unrelated links among the data, and thus it is more robust and discriminative than the conventional graphs. Meanwhile, we apply the approximate k nearest neighbors to accelerate the sparse graph construction without loosing its effectiveness. More importantly, we propose an effective training label refinement strategy within this graph-based learning framework to handle the noise in the training labels, by bringing in a dual regularization for both the quantity and sparsity of the noise. We conduct extensive experiments on a real-world image database consisting of 55,615 Flickr images and noisily tagged training labels. The results demonstrate both the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach and its capability to deal with the noise in the training labels.