In general, neural networks are not currently capable of learning tasks in a sequential fashion. When a novel, unrelated task is learnt by a neural network, it substantially forgets how to solve previously learnt tasks. One of the original solutions to this problem is pseudo-rehearsal, which involves learning the new task while rehearsing generated items representative of the previous task s. This is very effective for simple tasks. However, pseudo-rehearsal has not yet been successfully applied to very complex tasks because in these tasks it is difficult to generate representative items. We accomplish pseudo-rehearsal by using a Generative Adversarial Network to generate items so that our deep network can learn to sequentially classify the CIFAR-10, SVHN and MNIST datasets. After training on all tasks, our network loses only 1.67 absolute accuracy on CIFAR-10 and gains 0.24 absolute accuracy on SVHN. Our model's performance is a substantial improvement compared to the current state of the art solution.
A recent review of methods for overcoming CF concluded that current algorithms do not solve CF @cite_14 . They also found that EWC performed the best for learning multiple tasks and thus, we compare pseudo-recursal to EWC. The main contributions of our paper are; we show that pseudo-recursal can be used to overcome the CF problem in DNNs, sequentially learning CIFAR-10, SVHN and MNIST and we demonstrate that pseudo-rehearsal can be applied recursively to a separate classification and generative model. This architecture also satisfies the previously mentioned criteria. Although we limit ourselves to image classification in this paper, our techniques are applicable to other problems.
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We propose introspective convolutional networks (ICN) that emphasize the importance of having convolutional neural networks empowered with generative capabilities. We employ a reclassification-by-synthesis algorithm to perform training using a formulation stemmed from the Bayes theory. Our ICN tries to iteratively: (1) synthesize pseudo-negative samples; and (2) enhance itself by improving the classification. The single CNN classifier learned is at the same time generative --- being able to directly synthesize new samples within its own discriminative model. We conduct experiments on benchmark datasets including MNIST, CIFAR-10, and SVHN using state-of-the-art CNN architectures, and observe improved classification results. This paper introduces a regularization method called Correlative Filter (CF) for Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), which takes advantage of the relevance between the convolutional kernels belonging to the same convolutional layer. During the process of training with the proposed CF method, several pairs of filters are designed in a manner of randomness to contain opposite weights in low-level layers. Regarding higher level layers where synthetical features are processed, the relation between correlative filters is explored as translation of various directions. The proposed CF method attempts to optimize the inner structure of convolutional layers and it can work jointly with other regularization techniques, such as stochastic pooling, Dropout, etc. The experimental results on the competitive image classification benchmark dataset CIFAR-10 demonstrates the performance of the proposed CF method, additionally, it is also verified that the proposed CF method is wonderful to be employed to enhance several state-of-the-art regularization models. Collaborative Filtering (CF) is widely used in large-scale recommendation engines because of its efficiency, accuracy and scalability. However, in practice, the fact that recommendation engines based on CF require interactions between users and items before making recommendations, make it inappropriate for new items which haven't been exposed to the end users to interact with. This is known as the cold-start problem. In this paper we introduce a novel approach which employs deep learning to tackle this problem in any CF based recommendation engine. One of the most important features of the proposed technique is the fact that it can be applied on top of any existing CF based recommendation engine without changing the CF core. We successfully applied this technique to overcome the item cold-start problem in Careerbuilder's CF based recommendation engine. Our experiments show that the proposed technique is very efficient to resolve the cold-start problem while maintaining high accuracy of the CF recommendations. As a tremendous number of mobile applications (apps) are readily available, users have difficulty in identifying apps that are relevant to their interests. Recommender systems that depend on previous user ratings (i.e., collaborative filtering, or CF) can address this problem for apps that have sufficient ratings from past users. But for apps that are newly released, CF does not have any user ratings to base recommendations on, which leads to the cold-start problem. In this paper, we describe a method that accounts for nascent information culled from Twitter to provide relevant recommendation in such cold-start situations. We use Twitter handles to access an app's Twitter account and extract the IDs of their Twitter-followers. We create pseudo-documents that contain the IDs of Twitter users interested in an app and then apply latent Dirichlet allocation to generate latent groups. At test time, a target user seeking recommendations is mapped to these latent groups. By using the transitive relationship of latent groups to apps, we estimate the probability of the user liking the app. We show that by incorporating information from Twitter, our approach overcomes the difficulty of cold-start app recommendation and significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art recommendation techniques by up to 33 . Neural networks with recurrent or recursive architecture have shown promising results on various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. The recurrent and recursive architectures have their own strength and limitations. The recurrent networks process input text sequentially and model the conditional transition between word tokens. In contrast, the recursive networks explicitly model the compositionality and the recursive structure of natural language. Current recursive architecture is based on syntactic tree, thus limiting its practical applicability in different NLP applications. In this paper, we introduce a class of tree structured model, Neural Tree Indexers (NTI) that provides a middle ground between the sequential RNNs and the syntactic tree-based recursive models. NTI constructs a full n-ary tree by processing the input text with its node function in a bottom-up fashion. Attention mechanism can then be applied to both structure and different forms of node function. We demonstrated the effectiveness and the flexibility of a binary-tree model of NTI, showing the model achieved the state-of-the-art performance on three different NLP tasks: natural language inference, answer sentence selection, and sentence classification. In many personalised recommendation problems, there are examples of items users prefer or like, but no examples of items they dislike. A state-of-the-art method for such implicit feedback, or one-class collaborative filtering (OC-CF), problems is SLIM, which makes recommendations based on a learned item-item similarity matrix. While SLIM has been shown to perform well on implicit feedback tasks, we argue that it is hindered by two limitations: first, it does not produce user-personalised predictions, which hampers recommendation performance; second, it involves solving a constrained optimisation problem, which impedes fast training. In this paper, we propose LRec, a variant of SLIM that overcomes these limitations without sacrificing any of SLIM's strengths. At its core, LRec employs linear logistic regression; despite this simplicity, LRec consistently and significantly outperforms all existing methods on a range of datasets. Our results thus illustrate that the OC-CF problem can be effectively tackled via linear classification models. We present a variety of new architectural features and training procedures that we apply to the generative adversarial networks (GANs) framework. Using our new techniques, we achieve state-of-the-art results in semi-supervised classification on MNIST, CIFAR-10 and SVHN. The generated images are of high quality as confirmed by a visual Turing test: our model generates MNIST samples that humans cannot distinguish from real data, and CIFAR-10 samples that yield a human error rate of 21.3 . We also present ImageNet samples with unprecedented resolution and show that our methods enable the model to learn recognizable features of ImageNet classes. Limited angular resolution has become the main bottleneck of microlens-based plenoptic cameras towards practical vision applications. Existing view synthesis methods mainly break the task into two steps, i.e. depth estimating and view warping, which are usually inefficient and produce artifacts over depth ambiguities. In this paper, an end-to-end deep learning framework is proposed to solve these problems by exploring Pseudo 4DCNN. Specifically, 2D strided convolutions operated on stacked EPIs and detail-restoration 3D CNNs connected with angular conversion are assembled to build the Pseudo 4DCNN. The key advantage is to efficiently synthesize dense 4D light fields from a sparse set of input views. The learning framework is well formulated as an entirely trainable problem, and all the weights can be recursively updated with standard backpropagation. The proposed framework is compared with state-of-the-art approaches on both genuine and synthetic light field databases, which achieves significant improvements of both image quality (+2 dB higher) and computational efficiency (over 10X faster). Furthermore, the proposed framework shows good performances in real-world applications such as biometrics and depth estimation. Collaborative filtering (CF) has been widely employed within recommender systems to solve many real-world problems. Learning effective latent factors plays the most important role in collaborative filtering. Traditional CF methods based upon matrix factorization techniques learn the latent factors from the user-item ratings and suffer from the cold start problem as well as the sparsity problem. Some improved CF methods enrich the priors on the latent factors by incorporating side information as regularization. However, the learned latent factors may not be very effective due to the sparse nature of the ratings and the side information. To tackle this problem, we learn effective latent representations via deep learning. Deep learning models have emerged as very appealing in learning effective representations in many applications. In particular, we propose a general deep architecture for CF by integrating matrix factorization with deep feature learning. We provide a natural instantiations of our architecture by combining probabilistic matrix factorization with marginalized denoising stacked auto-encoders. The combined framework leads to a parsimonious fit over the latent features as indicated by its improved performance in comparison to prior state-of-art models over four large datasets for the tasks of movie book recommendation and response prediction. We present a variety of new architectural features and training procedures that we apply to the generative adversarial networks (GANs) framework. We focus on two applications of GANs: semi-supervised learning, and the generation of images that humans find visually realistic. Unlike most work on generative models, our primary goal is not to train a model that assigns high likelihood to test data, nor do we require the model to be able to learn well without using any labels. Using our new techniques, we achieve state-of-the-art results in semi-supervised classification on MNIST, CIFAR-10 and SVHN. The generated images are of high quality as confirmed by a visual Turing test: our model generates MNIST samples that humans cannot distinguish from real data, and CIFAR-10 samples that yield a human error rate of 21.3 . We also present ImageNet samples with unprecedented resolution and show that our methods enable the model to learn recognizable features of ImageNet classes. Incremental learning (il) has received a lot of attention recently, however, the literature lacks a precise problem definition, proper evaluation settings, and metrics tailored specifically for the il problem. One of the main objectives of this work is to fill these gaps so as to provide a common ground for better understanding of il. The main challenge for an il algorithm is to update the classifier whilst preserving existing knowledge. We observe that, in addition to forgetting, a known issue while preserving knowledge, il also suffers from a problem we call intransigence, its inability to update knowledge. We introduce two metrics to quantify forgetting and intransigence that allow us to understand, analyse, and gain better insights into the behaviour of il algorithms. Furthermore, we present RWalk, a generalization of ewc++ (our efficient version of ewc [6]) and Path Integral [25] with a theoretically grounded KL-divergence based perspective. We provide a thorough analysis of various il algorithms on MNIST and CIFAR-100 datasets. In these experiments, RWalk obtains superior results in terms of accuracy, and also provides a better trade-off for forgetting and intransigence. In this paper, we study coloring problems related to frequency assignment problems in cellular networks. In abstract setting, the problems are of the following two types:CF-coloring of regions: Given a finite family S of n regions of some fixed type (such as discs, pseudo-discs, axis-parallel rectangles, etc.), what is the minimum integer k, such that one can assign a color to each region of S, using a total of at most k colors, such that the resulting coloring has the following property: For each point p ∈b∈S b there is at least one region b∈S that contains p in its interior, whose color is unique among all regions in S that contain p in their interior (in this case we say that p is being served' by that color). We refer to such a coloring as a conflict-free coloring of S (CF-coloring in short).CF-coloring of a range space: Given a set P of n points in Rd and a set R of ranges (for example, the set of all discs in the plane), what is the minimum integer k, such that one can color the points of P by k colors, so that for any r ∈ R with P∩r∈≠O, there is at least one point q ∈ P ∩ r that is assigned a unique color among all colors assigned to points of P ∩ r (in this case we say that r is 'served' by that color). We refer to such a coloring as a conflict-free coloring of (P,R) (CF-coloring in short). A central problem in machine learning is identifying a representative set of features from which to construct a classification model for a particular task. This thesis addresses the problem of feature selection for machine learning through a correlation based approach. The central hypothesis is that good feature sets contain features that are highly correlated with the class, yet uncorrelated with each other. A feature evaluation formula, based on ideas from test theory, provides an operational definition of this hypothesis. CFS (Correlation based Feature Selection) is an algorithm that couples this evaluation formula with an appropriate correlation measure and a heuristic search strategy. CFS was evaluated by experiments on artificial and natural datasets. Three machine learning algorithms were used: C4.5 (a decision tree learner), IB1 (an instance based learner), and naive Bayes. Experiments on artificial datasets showed that CFS quickly identifies and screens irrelevant, redundant, and noisy features, and identifies relevant features as long as their relevance does not strongly depend on other features. On natural domains, CFS typically eliminated well over half the features. In most cases, classification accuracy using the reduced feature set equaled or bettered accuracy using the complete feature set. Feature selection degraded machine learning performance in cases where some features were eliminated which were highly predictive of very small areas of the instance space. Further experiments compared CFS with a wrapper—a well known approach to feature selection that employs the target learning algorithm to evaluate feature sets. In many cases CFS gave comparable results to the wrapper, and in general, outperformed the wrapper on small datasets. CFS executes many times faster than the wrapper, which allows it to scale to larger datasets. Two methods of extending CFS to handle feature interaction are presented and experimentally evaluated. The first considers pairs of features and the second incorporates iii feature weights calculated by the RELIEF algorithm. Experiments on artificial domains showed that both methods were able to identify interacting features. On natural domains, the pairwise method gave more reliable results than using weights provided by RELIEF. We present a general approach for collaborative filtering (CF) using spectral regularization to learn linear operators mapping a set of "users" to a set of possibly desired "objects". In particular, several recent low-rank type matrix-completion methods for CF are shown to be special cases of our proposed framework. Unlike existing regularization-based CF, our approach can be used to incorporate additional information such as attributes of the users objects---a feature currently lacking in existing regularization-based CF approaches---using popular and well-known kernel methods. We provide novel representer theorems that we use to develop new estimation methods. We then provide learning algorithms based on low-rank decompositions and test them on a standard CF data set. The experiments indicate the advantages of generalizing the existing regularization-based CF methods to incorporate related information about users and objects. Finally, we show that certain multi-task learning methods can be also seen as special cases of our proposed approach. Recursive neural models, which use syntactic parse trees to recursively generate representations bottom-up, are a popular architecture. But there have not been rigorous evaluations showing for exactly which tasks this syntax-based method is appropriate. In this paper we benchmark recursive neural models against sequential recurrent neural models (simple recurrent and LSTM models), enforcing apples-to-apples comparison as much as possible. We investigate 4 tasks: (1) sentiment classification at the sentence level and phrase level; (2) matching questions to answer-phrases; (3) discourse parsing; (4) semantic relation extraction (e.g., component-whole between nouns). Our goal is to understand better when, and why, recursive models can outperform simpler models. We find that recursive models help mainly on tasks (like semantic relation extraction) that require associating headwords across a long distance, particularly on very long sequences. We then introduce a method for allowing recurrent models to achieve similar performance: breaking long sentences into clause-like units at punctuation and processing them separately before combining. Our results thus help understand the limitations of both classes of models, and suggest directions for improving recurrent models. We introduce the Kronecker factored online Laplace approximation for overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks. The method is grounded in a Bayesian online learning framework, where we recursively approximate the posterior after every task with a Gaussian, leading to a quadratic penalty on changes to the weights. The Laplace approximation requires calculating the Hessian around a mode, which is typically intractable for modern architectures. In order to make our method scalable, we leverage recent block-diagonal Kronecker factored approximations to the curvature. Our algorithm achieves over 90 test accuracy across a sequence of 50 instantiations of the permuted MNIST dataset, substantially outperforming related methods for overcoming catastrophic forgetting. Abstract There is an increasing interest in applying deep learning to 3D mesh segmentation. We observe that 1) existing feature-based techniques are often slow or sensitive to feature resizing, 2) there are minimal comparative studies and 3) techniques often suffer from reproducibility issue. This study contributes in two ways. First, we propose a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) for mesh segmentation. It uses 1D data, filters and a multi-branch architecture for separate training of multi-scale features. Together with a novel way of computing conformal factor (CF), our technique clearly out-performs existing work. Secondly, we publicly provide implementations of several deep learning techniques, namely, neural networks (NNs), autoencoders (AEs) and CNNs, whose architectures are at least two layers deep. The significance of this study is that it proposes a robust form of CF, offers a novel and accurate CNN technique, and a comprehensive study of several deep learning techniques for baseline comparison. Weakly-supervised object detection has attracted much attention lately, since it does not require bounding box annotations for training. Although significant progress has also been made, there is still a large gap in performance between weakly-supervised and fully-supervised object detection. Recently, some works use pseudo ground-truths which are generated by a weakly-supervised detector to train a supervised detector. Such approaches incline to find the most representative parts of objects, and only seek one ground-truth box per class even though many same-class instances exist. To overcome these issues, we propose a weakly-supervised to fully-supervised framework, where a weakly-supervised detector is implemented using multiple instance learning. Then, we propose a pseudo ground-truth excavation (PGE) algorithm to find the pseudo ground-truth of each instance in the image. Moreover, the pseudo ground-truth adaptation (PGA) algorithm is designed to further refine the pseudo ground-truths from PGE. Finally, we use these pseudo ground-truths to train a fully-supervised detector. Extensive experiments on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2012 benchmarks strongly demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. We obtain 52.4 and 47.8 mAP on VOC2007 and VOC2012 respectively, a significant improvement over previous state-of-the-art methods. Abstract In large-scale visual recognition tasks, researchers are usually faced with some challenging problems, such as the extreme imbalance in the number of training data between classes or the lack of annotated data for some classes. In this paper, we propose a novel neural network architecture that automatically synthesizes pseudo feature representations for the classes in lack of annotated images. With the supply of semantic attributes for classes, the proposed Attribute-Based Synthetic Network (ABS-Net) can be applied to zero-shot learning (ZSL) scenario and conventional supervised learning (CSL) scenario as well. For ZSL tasks, the pseudo feature representations can be viewed as annotated feature-level instances for novel concepts, which facilitates the construction of unseen class predictor. For CSL tasks, the pseudo feature representations can be viewed as products of data augmentation on training set, which enriches the interpretation capacity of CSL systems. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed ABS-Net in ZSL and CSL settings on a synthetic colored MNIST dataset (C-MNIST). For several popular ZSL benchmark datasets, our architecture also shows competitive results on zero-shot recognition task, especially leading to tremendous improvement to state-of-the-art mAP on zero-shot retrieval task. Collaborative filtering (CF) is a successful approach commonly used by many recommender systems. Conventional CF-based methods use the ratings given to items by users as the sole source of information for learning to make recommendation. However, the ratings are often very sparse in many applications, causing CF-based methods to degrade significantly in their recommendation performance. To address this sparsity problem, auxiliary information such as item content information may be utilized. Collaborative topic regression (CTR) is an appealing recent method taking this approach which tightly couples the two components that learn from two different sources of information. Nevertheless, the latent representation learned by CTR may not be very effective when the auxiliary information is very sparse. To address this problem, we generalize recent advances in deep learning from i.i.d. input to non-i.i.d. (CF-based) input and propose in this paper a hierarchical Bayesian model called collaborative deep learning (CDL), which jointly performs deep representation learning for the content information and collaborative filtering for the ratings (feedback) matrix. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets from different domains show that CDL can significantly advance the state of the art.