Deep neural networks (DNNs) achieve excellent performance on standard classification tasks. However, under image quality distortions such as blur and noise, classification accuracy becomes poor. In this work, we compare the performance of DNNs with human subjects on distorted images. We show that, although DNNs perform better than or on par with humans on good quality images, DNN performance is still much lower than human performance on distorted images. We additionally find that there is little correlation in errors between DNNs and human subjects. This could be an indication that the internal representation of images are different between DNNs and the human visual system. These comparisons with human performance could be used to guide future development of more robust DNNs.
Fleuret al @cite_6 test human and computer performance on a range of synthetic classification tasks. The tasks are binary classification experiments on synthetic images where the difference between the two classes is determined by the spatial arrangement of the constituent parts. Even though these tasks are simple, machine performance is still well below human performance. Stabinger al @cite_5 test modern deep networks on these same classification tasks, but find that the networks can still not achieve human accuracy. While these tests are interesting, the experiments do not represent real data that is likely to occur in most applications.
@cite_5 @cite_6
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Video games are a compelling source of annotated data as they can readily provide fine-grained groundtruth for diverse tasks. However, it is not clear whether the synthetically generated data has enough resemblance to the real-world images to improve the performance of computer vision models in practice. We present experiments assessing the effectiveness on real-world data of systems trained on synthetic RGB images that are extracted from a video game. We collected over 60000 synthetic samples from a modern video game with similar conditions to the real-world CamVid and Cityscapes datasets. We provide several experiments to demonstrate that the synthetically generated RGB images can be used to improve the performance of deep neural networks on both image segmentation and depth estimation. These results show that a convolutional network trained on synthetic data achieves a similar test error to a network that is trained on real-world data for dense image classification. Furthermore, the synthetically generated RGB images can provide similar or better results compared to the real-world datasets if a simple domain adaptation technique is applied. Our results suggest that collaboration with game developers for an accessible interface to gather data is potentially a fruitful direction for future work in computer vision. We present a novel model for human action categorization. A video sequence is represented as a collection of spatial and spatial-temporal features by extracting static and dynamic interest points. We propose a hierarchical model that can be characterized as a constellation of bags-of-features and that is able to combine both spatial and spatial-temporal features. Given a novel video sequence, the model is able to categorize human actions in a frame-by-frame basis. We test the model on a publicly available human action dataset [2] and show that our new method performs well on the classification task. We also conducted control experiments to show that the use of the proposed mixture of hierarchical models improves the classification performance over bag of feature models. An additional experiment shows that using both dynamic and static features provides a richer representation of human actions when compared to the use of a single feature type, as demonstrated by our evaluation in the classification task. Deep neural networks (DNNs) achieve excellent performance on standard classification tasks. However, under image quality distortions such as blur and noise, classification accuracy becomes poor. In this work, we compare the performance of DNNs with human subjects on distorted images. We show that, although DNNs perform better than or on par with humans on good quality images, DNN performance is still much lower than human performance on distorted images. We additionally find that there is little correlation in errors between DNNs and human subjects. This could be an indication that the internal representation of images are different between DNNs and the human visual system. These comparisons with human performance could be used to guide future development of more robust DNNs. Automated scene interpretation has benefited from advances in machine learning, and restricted tasks, such as face detection, have been solved with sufficient accuracy for restricted settings. However, the performance of machines in providing rich semantic descriptions of natural scenes from digital images remains highly limited and hugely inferior to that of humans. Here we quantify this “semantic gap” in a particular setting: We compare the efficiency of human and machine learning in assigning an image to one of two categories determined by the spatial arrangement of constituent parts. The images are not real, but the category-defining rules reflect the compositional structure of real images and the type of “reasoning” that appears to be necessary for semantic parsing. Experiments demonstrate that human subjects grasp the separating principles from a handful of examples, whereas the error rates of computer programs fluctuate wildly and remain far behind that of humans even after exposure to thousands of examples. These observations lend support to current trends in computer vision such as integrating machine learning with parts-based modeling. Traffic signs are characterized by a wide variability in their visual appearance in real-world environments. For example, changes of illumination, varying weather conditions and partial occlusions impact the perception of road signs. In practice, a large number of different sign classes needs to be recognized with very high accuracy. Traffic signs have been designed to be easily readable for humans, who perform very well at this task. For computer systems, however, classifying traffic signs still seems to pose a challenging pattern recognition problem. Both image processing and machine learning algorithms are continuously refined to improve on this task. But little systematic comparison of such systems exist. What is the status quo? Do today's algorithms reach human performance? For assessing the performance of state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms, we present a publicly available traffic sign dataset with more than 50,000 images of German road signs in 43 classes. The data was considered in the second stage of the German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark held at IJCNN 2011. The results of this competition are reported and the best-performing algorithms are briefly described. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) showed particularly high classification accuracies in the competition. We measured the performance of human subjects on the same data-and the CNNs outperformed the human test persons. Detecting and classifying targets in video streams from surveillance cameras is a cumbersome, error-prone and expensive task. Often, the incurred costs are prohibitive for real-time monitoring. This leads to data being stored locally or transmitted to a central storage site for post-incident examination. The required communication links and archiving of the video data are still expensive and this setup excludes preemptive actions to respond to imminent threats. An effective way to overcome these limitations is to build a smart camera that analyzes the data on-site, close to the sensor, and transmits alerts when relevant video sequences are detected. Deep neural networks (DNNs) have come to outperform humans in visual classifications tasks and are also performing exceptionally well on other computer vision tasks. The concept of DNNs and Convolutional Networks (ConvNets) can easily be extended to make use of higher-dimensional input data such as multispectral data. We explore this opportunity in terms of achievable accuracy and required computational effort. To analyze the precision of DNNs for scene labeling in an urban surveillance scenario we have created a dataset with 8 classes obtained in a field experiment. We combine an RGB camera with a 25-channel VIS-NIR snapshot sensor to assess the potential of multispectral image data for target classification. We evaluate several new DNNs, showing that the spectral information fused together with the RGB frames can be used to improve the accuracy of the system or to achieve similar accuracy with a 3x smaller computation effort. We achieve a very high per-pixel accuracy of 99.1 . Even for scarcely occurring, but particularly interesting classes, such as cars, 75 of the pixels are labeled correctly with errors occurring only around the border of the objects. This high accuracy was obtained with a training set of only 30 labeled images, paving the way for fast adaptation to various application scenarios. Neural network architectures found by sophistic search algorithms achieve strikingly good test performance, surpassing most human-crafted network models by significant margins. Although computationally efficient, their design is often very complex, impairing execution speed. Additionally, finding models outside of the search space is not possible by design. While our space is still limited, we implement undiscoverable expert knowledge into the economic search algorithm Efficient Neural Architecture Search (ENAS), guided by the design principles and architecture of ShuffleNet V2. While maintaining baseline-like 2.85 test error on CIFAR-10, our ShuffleNASNets are significantly less complex, require fewer parameters, and are two times faster than the ENAS baseline in a classification task. These models also scale well to a low parameter space, achieving less than 5 test error with little regularization and only 236K parameters. Human visual object recognition is typically rapid and seemingly effortless, as well as largely independent of viewpoint and object orientation. Until very recently, animate visual systems were the only ones capable of this remarkable computational feat. This has changed with the rise of a class of computer vision algorithms called deep neural networks (DNNs) that achieve human-level classification performance on object recognition tasks. Furthermore, a growing number of studies report similarities in the way DNNs and the human visual system process objects, suggesting that current DNNs may be good models of human visual object recognition. Yet there clearly exist important architectural and processing differences between state-of-the-art DNNs and the primate visual system. The potential behavioural consequences of these differences are not well understood. We aim to address this issue by comparing human and DNN generalisation abilities towards image degradations. We find the human visual system to be more robust to image manipulations like contrast reduction, additive noise or novel eidolon-distortions. In addition, we find progressively diverging classification error-patterns between humans and DNNs when the signal gets weaker, indicating that there may still be marked differences in the way humans and current DNNs perform visual object recognition. We envision that our findings as well as our carefully measured and freely available behavioural datasets provide a new useful benchmark for the computer vision community to improve the robustness of DNNs and a motivation for neuroscientists to search for mechanisms in the brain that could facilitate this robustness. In this work, we explore the ability of artificial neural networks to judge the grammatical acceptability of a sentence. Machine learning research of this kind is well placed to answer important open questions about the role of prior linguistic bias in language acquisition by providing a test for the Poverty of the Stimulus Argument. In service of this goal, we introduce the Corpus of Linguistic Acceptability (CoLA), a set of 10,657 English sentences labeled as grammatical or ungrammatical by expert linguists. We train several recurrent neural networks to do binary acceptability classification. These models set a baseline for the task. Error-analysis testing the models on specific grammatical phenomena reveals that they learn some systematic grammatical generalizations like subject-verb-object word order without any grammatical supervision. We find that neural sequence models show promise on the acceptability classification task. However, human-like performance across a wide range of grammatical constructions remains far off. We introduce a seemingly impossible task: given only an audio clip of someone speaking, decide which of two face images is the speaker. In this paper we study this, and a number of related cross-modal tasks, aimed at answering the question: how much can we infer from the voice about the face and vice versa? We study this task "in the wild", employing the datasets that are now publicly available for face recognition from static images (VGGFace) and speaker identification from audio (VoxCeleb). These provide training and testing scenarios for both static and dynamic testing of cross-modal matching. We make the following contributions: (i) we introduce CNN architectures for both binary and multi-way cross-modal face and audio matching, (ii) we compare dynamic testing (where video information is available, but the audio is not from the same video) with static testing (where only a single still image is available), and (iii) we use human testing as a baseline to calibrate the difficulty of the task. We show that a CNN can indeed be trained to solve this task in both the static and dynamic scenarios, and is even well above chance on 10-way classification of the face given the voice. The CNN matches human performance on easy examples (e.g. different gender across faces) but exceeds human performance on more challenging examples (e.g. faces with the same gender, age and nationality). We introduce a seemingly impossible task: given only an audio clip of someone speaking, decide which of two face images is the speaker. In this paper we study this, and a number of related cross-modal tasks, aimed at answering the question: how much can we infer from the voice about the face and vice versa? We study this task "in the wild", employing the datasets that are now publicly available for face recognition from static images (VGGFace) and speaker identification from audio (VoxCeleb). These provide training and testing scenarios for both static and dynamic testing of cross-modal matching. We make the following contributions: (i) we introduce CNN architectures for both binary and multi-way cross-modal face and audio matching: (ii) we compare dynamic testing (where video information is available, but the audio is not from the same video) with static testing (where only a single still image is available): and (iii) we use human testing as a baseline to calibrate the difficulty of the task. We show that a CNN can indeed be trained to solve this task in both the static and dynamic scenarios, and is even well above chance on 10-way classification of the face given the voice. The CNN matches human performance on easy examples (e.g. different gender across faces) but exceeds human performance on more challenging examples (e.g. faces with the same gender, age and nationality). People learning new concepts can often generalize successfully from just a single example, yet machine learning algorithms typically require tens or hundreds of examples to perform with similar accuracy. People can also use learned concepts in richer ways than conventional algorithms—for action, imagination, and explanation. We present a computational model that captures these human learning abilities for a large class of simple visual concepts: handwritten characters from the world’s alphabets. The model represents concepts as simple programs that best explain observed examples under a Bayesian criterion. On a challenging one-shot classification task, the model achieves human-level performance while outperforming recent deep learning approaches. We also present several “visual Turing tests” probing the model’s creative generalization abilities, which in many cases are indistinguishable from human behavior. In human learning, it is common to use multiple sources of information jointly. However, most existing feature learning approaches learn from only a single task. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-task deep network to learn generalizable high-level visual representations. Since multitask learning requires annotations for multiple properties of the same training instance, we look to synthetic images to train our network. To overcome the domain difference between real and synthetic data, we employ an unsupervised feature space domain adaptation method based on adversarial learning. Given an input synthetic RGB image, our network simultaneously predicts its surface normal, depth, and instance contour, while also minimizing the feature space domain differences between real and synthetic data. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our network learns more transferable representations compared to single-task baselines. Our learned representation produces state-of-the-art transfer learning results on PASCAL VOC 2007 classification and 2012 detection. Deep learning has rapidly transformed the state of the art algorithms used to address a variety of problems in computer vision and robotics. These breakthroughs have relied upon massive amounts of human annotated training data. This time consuming process has begun impeding the progress of these deep learning efforts. This paper describes a method to incorporate photo-realistic computer images from a simulation engine to rapidly generate annotated data that can be used for the training of machine learning algorithms. We demonstrate that a state of the art architecture, which is trained only using these synthetic annotations, performs better than the identical architecture trained on human annotated real-world data, when tested on the KITTI data set for vehicle detection. By training machine learning algorithms on a rich virtual world, real objects in real scenes can be learned and classified using synthetic data. This approach offers the possibility of accelerating deep learning's application to sensor-based classification problems like those that appear in self-driving cars. The source code and data to train and validate the networks described in this paper are made available for researchers. There is a broad range of BioNLP tasks for which active learning (AL) can significantly reduce annotation costs and a specific AL algorithm we have developed is particularly effective in reducing annotation costs for these tasks. We have previously developed an AL algorithm called ClosestInitPA that works best with tasks that have the following characteristics: redundancy in training material, burdensome annotation costs, Support Vector Machines (SVMs) work well for the task, and imbalanced datasets (i.e. when set up as a binary classification problem, one class is substantially rarer than the other). Many BioNLP tasks have these characteristics and thus our AL algorithm is a natural approach to apply to BioNLP tasks. In this paper, we propose a new multi-task, deep learning architecture for malware classification for the binary i.e. malware versus benign malware classification task. All models are trained with data extracted from dynamic analysis of malicious and benign files. For the first time, we see improvements using multiple layers in a deep neural network architecture for malware classification. The system is trained on 4.5 million files and tested on a holdout test set of 2 million files which is the largest study to date. To achieve a binary classification error rate of 0.358i¾? , the objective functions for the binary classification task and malware family classification task are combined in the multi-task architecture. In addition, we propose a standard i.e. non multi-task malware family classification architecture which also achieves a malware family classification error rate of 2.94i¾? . To create a new IR test collection at minimal cost, we must carefully select which documents merit human relevance judgments. Shared task campaigns such as NIST TREC determine this by pooling search results from many participating systems (and often interactive runs as well), thereby identifying the most likely relevant documents in a given collection. While effective, it would be preferable to be able to build a new test collection without needing to run an entire shared task. Toward this end, we investigate multiple active learning (AL) strategies which, without reliance on system rankings: 1) select which documents human assessors should judge; and 2) automatically classify the relevance of remaining unjudged documents. Because scarcity of relevant documents tends to yield highly imbalanced training data for model estimation, we investigate sampling strategies to mitigate class imbalance. We report experiments on four TREC collections with varying scarcity of relevant documents, reporting labeling accuracy achieved, as well as rank correlation when evaluating participant systems using these labels vs. NIST judgments. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, coupled with further analysis showing how varying relevance scarcity, within and across collections, impacts findings. Humans are generally good at learning abstract concepts about objects and scenes (e.g. spatial orientation, relative sizes, etc.). Over the last years convolutional neural networks have achieved almost human performance in recognizing concrete classes (i.e. specific object categories). This paper tests the performance of a current CNN (GoogLeNet) on the task of differentiating between abstract classes which are trivially differentiable for humans. We trained and tested the CNN on the two abstract classes of horizontal and vertical orientation and determined how well the network is able to transfer the learned classes to other, previously unseen objects. We propose a new active learning (AL) method for text classification with convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In AL, one selects the instances to be manually labeled with the aim of maximizing model performance with minimal effort. Neural models capitalize on word embeddings as representations (features), tuning these to the task at hand. We argue that AL strategies for multi-layered neural models should focus on selecting instances that most affect the embedding space (i.e., induce discriminative word representations). This is in contrast to traditional AL approaches (e.g., entropy-based uncertainty sampling), which specify higher level objectives. We propose a simple approach for sentence classification that selects instances containing words whose embeddings are likely to be updated with the greatest magnitude, thereby rapidly learning discriminative, task-specific embeddings. We extend this approach to document classification by jointly considering: (1) the expected changes to the constituent word representations; and (2) the model's current overall uncertainty regarding the instance. The relative emphasis placed on these criteria is governed by a stochastic process that favors selecting instances likely to improve representations at the outset of learning, and then shifts toward general uncertainty sampling as AL progresses. Empirical results show that our method outperforms baseline AL approaches on both sentence and document classification tasks. We also show that, as expected, the method quickly learns discriminative word embeddings. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on AL addressing neural models for text classification. CNN-based optical flow estimation has attracted attention recently, mainly due to its impressively high frame rates. These networks perform well on synthetic datasets, but they are still far behind the classical methods in real-world videos. This is because there is no ground truth optical flow for training these networks on real data. In this paper, we boost CNN-based optical flow estimation in real scenes with the help of the freely available self-supervised task of next-frame prediction. To this end, we train the network in a hybrid way, providing it with a mixture of synthetic and real videos. With the help of a sample-variant multi-tasking architecture, the network is trained on different tasks depending on the availability of ground-truth. We also experiment with the prediction of "next-flow" instead of estimation of the current flow, which is intuitively closer to the task of next-frame prediction and yields favorable results. We demonstrate the improvement in optical flow estimation on the real-world KITTI benchmark. Additionally, we test the optical flow indirectly in an action classification scenario. As a side product of this work, we report significant improvements over state-of-the-art in the task of next-frame prediction.