In this paper we present an unsupervised method to learn the weights with which the scores of multiple classifiers must be combined in classifier fusion settings. We also introduce a novel metric for ranking instances based on an index which depends upon the rank of weighted scores of test points among the weighted scores of training points. We show that the optimized index can be used for computing measures such as average precision. Unlike most classifier fusion methods where a single weight is learned to weigh all examples our method learns instance-specific weights. The problem is formulated as learning the weight which maximizes a clarity index; subsequently the index itself and the learned weights both are used separately to rank all the test points. Our method gives an unsupervised method of optimizing performance on actual test data, unlike the well known stacking-based methods where optimization is done over a labeled training set. Moreover, we show that our method is tolerant to noisy classifiers and can be used for selecting N-best classifiers.
To the best of our knowledge, few recent works have actually looked into instance-specific weight learning @cite_10 @cite_13 . Some of the most promising results are reported in @cite_10 . The basic idea in this work is to propagate fusion weights of labeled instances to the individual unlabeled instances along a graph built on low-level features. The method has been shown to outperform other fusion methods on a variety of datasets. However, although the learned weights are instance specific, the method not only still requires a held-out set for which labels are known, it also requires knowledge of the low-level features of instances. On the other hand, our method does not require held-out data. Moreover, our solution is a meta algorithm that requires no knowledge of the low-level features of the instances. Another issue with @cite_10 is that the weights learned for different test instances are not disjoint from each other. This has the undesirable aspect that newer test instances cannot be independently introduced into the set.
@cite_13 @cite_10
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In this paper we present an unsupervised method to learn the weights with which the scores of multiple classifiers must be combined in classifier fusion settings. We also introduce a novel metric for ranking instances based on an index which depends upon the rank of weighted scores of test points among the weighted scores of training points. We show that the optimized index can be used for computing measures such as average precision. Unlike most classifier fusion methods where a single weight is learned to weigh all examples our method learns instance-specific weights. The problem is formulated as learning the weight which maximizes a clarity index; subsequently the index itself and the learned weights both are used separately to rank all the test points. Our method gives an unsupervised method of optimizing performance on actual test data, unlike the well known stacking-based methods where optimization is done over a labeled training set. Moreover, we show that our method is tolerant to noisy classifiers and can be used for selecting N-best classifiers. Multi-label learning refers to the problems where an instance can be assigned to more than one category. In this paper, we present a novel Semi-supervised algorithm for Multi-label learning by solving a Sylvester Equation (SMSE). Two graphs are first constructed on instance level and category level respectively. For instance level, a graph is defined based on both labeled and unlabeled instances, where each node represents one instance and each edge weight reflects the similarity between corresponding pairwise instances. Similarly, for category level, a graph is also built based on all the categories, where each node represents one category and each edge weight reflects the similarity between corresponding pairwise categories. A regularization framework combining two regularization terms for the two graphs is suggested. The regularization term for instance graph measures the smoothness of the labels of instances, and the regularization term for category graph measures the smoothness of the labels of categories. We show that the labels of unlabeled data finally can be obtained by solving a Sylvester Equation. Experiments on RCV1 data set show that SMSE can make full use of the unlabeled data information as well as the correlations among categories and achieve good performance. In addition, we give a SMSE’s extended application on collaborative filtering. In many real-world applications, such as image retrieval, it would be natural to measure the distances from one instance to others using instance specific distance which captures the distinctions from the perspective of the concerned instance. However, there is no complete framework for learning instance specific distances since existing methods are incapable of learning such distances for test instance and unlabeled data. In this paper, we propose the Isd method to address this issue. The key of Isd is metric propagation, that is, propagating and adapting metrics of individual labeled examples to individual unlabeled instances. We formulate the problem into a convex optimization framework and derive efficient solutions. Experiments show that Isd can effectively learn instance specific distances for labeled as well as unlabeled instances. The metric propagation scheme can also be used in other scenarios. Category models for objects or activities typically rely on supervised learning requiring sufficiently large training sets. Transferring knowledge from known categories to novel classes with no or only a few labels is far less researched even though it is a common scenario. In this work, we extend transfer learning with semi-supervised learning to exploit unlabeled instances of (novel) categories with no or only a few labeled instances. Our proposed approach Propagated Semantic Transfer combines three techniques. First, we transfer information from known to novel categories by incorporating external knowledge, such as linguistic or expert-specified information, e.g., by a mid-level layer of semantic attributes. Second, we exploit the manifold structure of novel classes. More specifically we adapt a graph-based learning algorithm - so far only used for semi-supervised learning -to zero-shot and few-shot learning. Third, we improve the local neighborhood in such graph structures by replacing the raw feature-based representation with a mid-level object- or attribute-based representation. We evaluate our approach on three challenging datasets in two different applications, namely on Animals with Attributes and ImageNet for image classification and on MPII Composites for activity recognition. Our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art transfer and semi-supervised approaches on all datasets. The performance of Nearest Neighbor (NN) classifier is known to be sensitive to the distance (or similarity) function used in classifying a test instance. Another major disadvantage of NN is that it uses all training instances in the generalization phase. This can cause slow execution speed and high storage requirement when dealing with large datasets. In the past research, many solutions have been proposed to handle one or both of the above problems. In the scheme proposed in this paper, we tackle both of these problems by assigning a weight to each training instance. The weight of a training instance is used in the generalization phase to calculate the distance (or similarity) of a query pattern to that instance. The basic NN classifier can be viewed as a special case of this scheme that treats all instances equally (by assigning equal weight to all training instances). Using this form of weighted similarity measure, we propose a learning algorithm that attempts to maximize the leave-one-out (LV1) classification rate of the NN rule by adjusting the weights of the training instances. At the same time, the algorithm reduces the size of the training set and can be viewed as a powerful instance reduction technique. An instance having zero weight is not used in the generalization phase and can be virtually removed from the training set. We show that our scheme has comparable or better performance than some recent methods proposed in the literature for the task of learning the distance function and or prototype reduction. It is difficult to apply machine learning to new domains because often we lack labeled problem instances. In this paper, we provide a solution to this problem that leverages domain knowledge in the form of affinities between input features and classes. For example, in a baseball vs. hockey text classification problem, even without any labeled data, we know that the presence of the word puck is a strong indicator of hockey. We refer to this type of domain knowledge as a labeled feature. In this paper, we propose a method for training discriminative probabilistic models with labeled features and unlabeled instances. Unlike previous approaches that use labeled features to create labeled pseudo-instances, we use labeled features directly to constrain the model's predictions on unlabeled instances. We express these soft constraints using generalized expectation (GE) criteria --- terms in a parameter estimation objective function that express preferences on values of a model expectation. In this paper we train multinomial logistic regression models using GE criteria, but the method we develop is applicable to other discriminative probabilistic models. The complete objective function also includes a Gaussian prior on parameters, which encourages generalization by spreading parameter weight to unlabeled features. Experimental results on text classification data sets show that this method outperforms heuristic approaches to training classifiers with labeled features. Experiments with human annotators show that it is more beneficial to spend limited annotation time labeling features rather than labeling instances. For example, after only one minute of labeling features, we can achieve 80 accuracy on the ibm vs. mac text classification problem using GE-FL, whereas ten minutes labeling documents results in an accuracy of only 77 Multi-instance (MI) learning is a variant of supervised machine learning, where each learning example contains a bag of instances instead of just a single feature vector. MI learning has applications in areas such as drug activity prediction, fruit disease management and image classification. This thesis investigates the case where each instance has a weight value determining the level of influence that it has on its bag’s class label. This is a more general assumption than most existing approaches use, and thus is more widely applicable. The challenge is to accurately estimate these weights in order to make predictions at the bag level. An existing approach known as MILES is retroactively identified as an algorithm that uses instance weights for MI learning, and is evaluated using a variety of base learners on benchmark problems. New algorithms for learning instance weights for MI learning are also proposed and rigorously evaluated on both artificial and realworld datasets. The new algorithms are shown to achieve better root mean squared error rates than existing approaches on artificial data generated according to the algorithms’ underlying assumptions. Experimental results also demonstrate that the new algorithms are competitive with existing approaches on real-world problems. We present a framework for active learning in the multiple-instance (MI) setting. In an MI learning problem, instances are naturally organized into bags and it is the bags, instead of individual instances, that are labeled for training. MI learners assume that every instance in a bag labeled negative is actually negative, whereas at least one instance in a bag labeled positive is actually positive. We consider the particular case in which an MI learner is allowed to selectively query unlabeled instances from positive bags. This approach is well motivated in domains in which it is inexpensive to acquire bag labels and possible, but expensive, to acquire instance labels. We describe a method for learning from labels at mixed levels of granularity, and introduce two active query selection strategies motivated by the MI setting. Our experiments show that learning from instance labels can significantly improve performance of a basic MI learning algorithm in two multiple-instance domains: content-based image retrieval and text classification. There has been much work on applying multiple-instance (MI) learning to content-based image retrieval (CBIR) where the goal is to rank all images in a known repository using a small labeled data set. Most existing MI learning algorithms are non-transductive in that the images in the repository serve only as test data and are not used in the learning process. We present MISSL (Multiple-Instance Semi-Supervised Learning) that transforms any MI problem into an input for a graph-based single-instance semi-supervised learning method that encodes the MI aspects of the problem simultaneously working at both the bag and point levels. Unlike most prior MI learning algorithms, MISSL makes use of the unlabeled data. Algorithm selection as well as hyperparameter optimization are tedious task that have to be dealt with when applying machine learning to real-world problems. Sequential model-based optimization (SMBO), based on so-called “surrogate models”, has been employed to allow for faster and more direct hyperparameter optimization. A surrogate model is a machine learning regression model which is trained on the meta-level instances in order to predict the performance of an algorithm on a specific data set given the hyperparameter settings and data set descriptors. Gaussian processes, for example, make good surrogate models as they provide probability distributions over labels. Recent work on SMBO also includes meta-data, i.e. observed hyperparameter performances on other data sets, into the process of hyperparameter optimization. This can, for example, be accomplished by learning transfer surrogate models on all available instances of meta-knowledge; however, the increasing amount of meta-information can make Gaussian processes infeasible, as they require the inversion of a large covariance matrix which grows with the number of instances. Consequently, instead of learning a joint surrogate model on all of the meta-data, we propose to learn individual surrogate models on the observations of each data set and then combine all surrogates to a joint one using ensembling techniques. The final surrogate is a weighted sum of all data set specific surrogates plus an additional surrogate that is solely learned on the target observations. Within our framework, any surrogate model can be used and explore Gaussian processes in this scenario. We present two different strategies for finding the weights used in the ensemble: the first is based on a probabilistic product of experts approach, and the second is based on kernel regression. Additionally, we extend the framework to directly estimate the acquisition function in the same setting, using a novel technique which we name the “transfer acquisition function”. In an empirical evaluation including comparisons to the current state-of-the-art on two publicly available meta-data sets, we are able to demonstrate that our proposed approach does not only scale to large meta-data, but also finds the stronger prediction models. A citing sentence is one that appears in a scientific article and cites previous work. Citing sentences have been studied and used in many applications. For example, they have been used in scientific paper summarization, automatic survey generation, paraphrase identification, and citation function classification. Citing sentences that cite multiple papers are common in scientific writing. This observation should be taken into consideration when using citing sentences in applications. For instance, when a citing sentence is used in a summary of a scientific paper, only the fragments of the sentence that are relevant to the summarized paper should be included in the summary. In this paper, we present and compare three different approaches for identifying the fragments of a citing sentence that are related to a given target reference. Our methods are: word classification, sequence labeling, and segment classification. Our experiments show that segment classification achieves the best results. This paper proposes deep convolutional network models that utilize local and global context to make human activity label predictions in still images, achieving state-of-the-art performance on two recent datasets with hundreds of labels each. We use multiple instance learning to handle the lack of supervision on the level of individual person instances, and weighted loss to handle unbalanced training data. Further, we show how specialized features trained on these datasets can be used to improve accuracy on the Visual Question Answering (VQA) task, in the form of multiple choice fill-in-the-blank questions (Visual Madlibs). Specifically, we tackle two types of questions on person activity and person-object relationship and show improvements over generic features trained on the ImageNet classification task Support vector machines (SVM) have been highly successful in many machine learning problems. Recently, it is also used for multi-instance (MI) learning by employing a kernel that is defined directly on the bags. As only the bags (but not the instances) have known labels, this MI kernel implicitly assumes all instances in the bag to be equally important. However, a fundamental property of MI learning is that not all instances in a positive bag necessarily belong to the positive class, and thus different instances in the same bag should have different contributions to the kernel. In this paper, we address this instance label ambiguity by using the method of marginalized kernels. It first assumes that all the instance labels are available and defines a label-dependent kernel on the instances. By integrating out the unknown instance labels, a marginalized kernel defined on the bags can then be obtained. A desirable property is that this kernel weights the instance pairs by the consistencies of their probabilistic instance labels. Experiments on both classification and regression data sets show that this marginalized MI kernel, when used in a standard SVM, performs consistently better than the original MI kernel. It also outperforms a number of traditional MI learning methods. We propose a new problem formulation which is similar to, but more informative than, the binary multiple-instance learning problem. In this setting, we are given groups of instances (described by feature vectors) along with estimates of the fraction of positively-labeled instances per group. The task is to learn an instance level classifier from this information. That is, we are trying to estimate the unknown binary labels of individuals from knowledge of group statistics. We propose a principled probabilistic model to solve this problem that accounts for uncertainty in the parameters and in the unknown individual labels. This model is trained with an efficient MCMC algorithm. Its performance is demonstrated on both synthetic and real-world data arising in general object recognition. Late fusion addresses the problem of combining the prediction scores of multiple classifiers, in which each score is predicted by a classifier trained with a specific feature. However, the existing methods generally use a fixed fusion weight for all the scores of a classifier, and thus fail to optimally determine the fusion weight for the individual samples. In this paper, we propose a sample-specific late fusion method to address this issue. Specifically, we cast the problem into an information propagation process which propagates the fusion weights learned on the labeled samples to individual unlabeled samples, while enforcing that positive samples have higher fusion scores than negative samples. In this process, we identify the optimal fusion weights for each sample and push positive samples to top positions in the fusion score rank list. We formulate our problem as a L∞ norm constrained optimization problem and apply the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers for the optimization. Extensive experiment results on various visual categorization tasks show that the proposed method consistently and significantly beats the state-of-the-art late fusion methods. To the best knowledge, this is the first method supporting sample-specific fusion weight learning. Transfer learning has been proven to be effective for the problems where training data from a source domain and test data from a target domain are drawn from different distributions. To reduce the distribution divergence between the source domain and the target domain, many previous studies have been focused on designing and optimizing objective functions with the Euclidean distance to measure dissimilarity between instances. However, in some real-world applications, the Euclidean distance may be inappropriate to capture the intrinsic similarity or dissimilarity between instances. To deal with this issue, in this paper, we propose a metric transfer learning framework (MTLF) to encode metric learning in transfer learning. In MTLF, instance weights are learned and exploited to bridge the distributions of different domains, while Mahalanobis distance is learned simultaneously to maximize the intra-class distances and minimize the inter-class distances for the target domain. Unlike previous work where instance weights and Mahalanobis distance are trained in a pipelined framework that potentially leads to error propagation across different components, MTLF attempts to learn instance weights and a Mahalanobis distance in a parallel framework to make knowledge transfer across domains more effective. Furthermore, we develop general solutions to both classification and regression problems on top of MTLF, respectively. We conduct extensive experiments on several real-world datasets on object recognition, handwriting recognition, and WiFi location to verify the effectiveness of MTLF compared with a number of state-of-the-art methods. This paper aims for generic instance search from one example where the instance can be an arbitrary 3D object like shoes, not just near-planar and one-sided instances like buildings and logos. Firstly, we evaluate state-of-the-art instance search methods on this problem. We observe that what works for buildings loses its generality on shoes. Secondly, we propose to use automatically learned category-specific attributes to address the large appearance variations present in generic instance search. On the problem of searching among instances from the same category as the query, the category-specific attributes outperform existing approaches by a large margin. On a shoe dataset containing 6624 shoe images recorded from all viewing angles, we improve the performance from 36.73 to 56.56 using category-specific attributes. Thirdly, we extend our methods to search objects without restricting to the specifically known category. We show the combination of category-level information and the category-specific attributes is superior to combining category-level information with low-level features such as Fisher vector. In the setting of multi-instance learning, each object is represented by a bag composed of multiple instances instead of by a single instance in a traditional learning setting. Previous works in this area only concern multi-instance prediction problems where each bag is associated with a binary (classification) or real-valued (regression) label. However, unsupervised multi-instance learning where bags are without labels has not been studied. In this paper, the problem of unsupervised multi-instance learning is addressed where a multi-instance clustering algorithm named Bamic is proposed. Briefly, by regarding bags as atomic data items and using some form of distance metric to measure distances between bags, Bamic adapts the popular k -Medoids algorithm to partition the unlabeled training bags into k disjoint groups of bags. Furthermore, based on the clustering results, a novel multi-instance prediction algorithm named Bartmip is developed. Firstly, each bag is re-represented by a k-dimensional feature vector, where the value of the i-th feature is set to be the distance between the bag and the medoid of the i-th group. After that, bags are transformed into feature vectors so that common supervised learners are used to learn from the transformed feature vectors each associated with the original bag's label. Extensive experiments show that Bamic could effectively discover the underlying structure of the data set and Bartmip works quite well on various kinds of multi-instance prediction problems. Neural net classifiers trained on data with annotated class labels can also capture apparent visual similarity among categories without being directed to do so. We study whether this observation can be extended beyond the conventional domain of supervised learning: Can we learn a good feature representation that captures apparent similarity among instances, instead of classes, by merely asking the feature to be discriminative of individual instances? We formulate this intuition as a non-parametric classification problem at the instance-level, and use noise-contrastive estimation to tackle the computational challenges imposed by the large number of instance classes. Our experimental results demonstrate that, under unsupervised learning settings, our method surpasses the state-of-the-art on ImageNet classification by a large margin. Our method is also remarkable for consistently improving test performance with more training data and better network architectures. By fine-tuning the learned feature, we further obtain competitive results for semi-supervised learning and object detection tasks. Our non-parametric model is highly compact: With 128 features per image, our method requires only 600MB storage for a million images, enabling fast nearest neighbour retrieval at the run time. Storing and using specific instances improves the performance of several supervised learning algorithms. These include algorithms that learn decision trees, classification rules, and distributed networks. However, no investigation has analyzed algorithms that use only specific instances to solve incremental learning tasks. In this paper, we describe a framework and methodology, called instance-based learning, that generates classification predictions using only specific instances. Instance-based learning algorithms do not maintain a set of abstractions derived from specific instances. This approach extends the nearest neighbor algorithm, which has large storage requirements. We describe how storage requirements can be significantly reduced with, at most, minor sacrifices in learning rate and classification accuracy. While the storage-reducing algorithm performs well on several real-world databases, its performance degrades rapidly with the level of attribute noise in training instances. Therefore, we extended it with a significance test to distinguish noisy instances. This extended algorithm's performance degrades gracefully with increasing noise levels and compares favorably with a noise-tolerant decision tree algorithm.