State-of-the-art techniques of artificial intelligence, in particular deep learning, are mostly data-driven. However, collecting and manually labeling a large scale dataset is both difficult and expensive. A promising alternative is to introduce synthesized training data, so that the dataset size can be significantly enlarged with little human labor. But, this raises an important problem in active vision: given an infinite data space, how to effectively sample a finite subset to train a visual classifier? This paper presents an approach for learning from synthesized data effectively. The motivation is straightforward -- increasing the probability of seeing difficult training data. We introduce a module named SampleAhead to formulate the learning process into an online communication between a classifier and a sampler , and update them iteratively. In each round, we adjust the sampling distribution according to the classification results, and train the classifier using the data sampled from the updated distribution. Experiments are performed by introducing synthesized images rendered from ShapeNet models to assist PASCAL3D+ classification. Our approach enjoys higher classification accuracy, especially in the scenario of a limited number of training samples. This demonstrates its efficiency in exploring the infinite data space.
Training machine learning systems for computer vision tasks, especially deep neural networks, often requires sufficient data to prevent over-fitting. The availability of large-scale datasets facilitates the ability of training very deep neural networks @cite_2 . However, researchers often required a considerable amount of labor to collect and annotated a large-scale dataset @cite_14 @cite_6 , or a smaller one with reasonable variability @cite_9 @cite_8 .
@cite_14 @cite_8 @cite_9 @cite_6 @cite_2
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The finding that very large networks can be trained efficiently and reliably has led to a paradigm shift in computer vision from engineered solutions to learning formulations. As a result, the research challenge shifts from devising algorithms to creating suitable and abundant training data for supervised learning. How to efficiently create such training data? The dominant data acquisition method in visual recognition is based on web data and manual annotation. Yet, for many computer vision problems, such as stereo or optical flow estimation, this approach is not feasible because humans cannot manually enter a pixel-accurate flow field. In this paper, we promote the use of synthetically generated data for the purpose of training deep networks on such tasks. We suggest multiple ways to generate such data and evaluate the influence of dataset properties on the performance and generalization properties of the resulting networks. We also demonstrate the benefit of learning schedules that use different types of data at selected stages of the training process. Deep neural networks typically require large amounts of annotated data to be trained effectively. However, in several scientific disciplines, including medical image analysis, generating such large annotated datasets requires specialized domain knowledge, and hence is usually very expensive. In this work, we present a novel application of active learning to data sample selection for training Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for Cancerous Tissue Recognition (CTR). Our main idea is to steer annotation efforts towards selecting the most informative samples for training the CNN. To quantify informativeness, we explore three choices based on discrete entropy, best-vs-second-best, and k-nearest neighbor agreement. Our results on three different types of cancer datasets consistently demonstrate that under limited annotated samples, our proposed training scheme converges faster than classical randomized stochastic gradient descent, while achieving the same (or sometimes superior) classification accuracy. A significant weakness of most current deep Convolutional Neural Networks is the need to train them using vast amounts of manually labelled data. In this work we propose a unsupervised framework to learn a deep convolutional neural network for single view depth prediction, without requiring a pre-training stage or annotated ground-truth depths. We achieve this by training the network in a manner analogous to an autoencoder. At training time we consider a pair of images, source and target, with small, known camera motion between the two such as a stereo pair. We train the convolutional encoder for the task of predicting the depth map for the source image. To do so, we explicitly generate an inverse warp of the target image using the predicted depth and known inter-view displacement, to reconstruct the source image; the photometric error in the reconstruction is the reconstruction loss for the encoder. The acquisition of this training data is considerably simpler than for equivalent systems, requiring no manual annotation, nor calibration of depth sensor to camera. We show that our network trained on less than half of the KITTI dataset gives comparable performance to that of the state-of-the-art supervised methods for single view depth estimation. Modern computer vision algorithms often rely on very large training datasets. However, it is conceivable that a carefully selected subsample of the dataset is sufficient for training. In this paper, we propose a gradient-based importance measure that we use to empirically analyze relative importance of training images in four datasets of varying complexity. We find that in some cases, a small subsample is indeed sufficient for training. For other datasets, however, the relative differences in importance are negligible. These results have important implications for active learning on deep networks. Additionally, our analysis method can be used as a general tool to better understand diversity of training examples in datasets.