Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes both ASU Theses and Dissertations, submitted by graduate students, and the Barrett, Honors College theses submitted by undergraduate students.
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- Creators: Li, Baoxin
Description
The rapid escalation of technology and the widespread emergence of modern technological equipments have resulted in the generation of humongous amounts of digital data (in the form of images, videos and text). This has expanded the possibility of solving real world problems using computational learning frameworks. However, while gathering a large amount of data is cheap and easy, annotating them with class labels is an expensive process in terms of time, labor and human expertise. This has paved the way for research in the field of active learning. Such algorithms automatically select the salient and exemplar instances from large quantities of unlabeled data and are effective in reducing human labeling effort in inducing classification models. To utilize the possible presence of multiple labeling agents, there have been attempts towards a batch mode form of active learning, where a batch of data instances is selected simultaneously for manual annotation. This dissertation is aimed at the development of novel batch mode active learning algorithms to reduce manual effort in training classification models in real world multimedia pattern recognition applications. Four major contributions are proposed in this work: $(i)$ a framework for dynamic batch mode active learning, where the batch size and the specific data instances to be queried are selected adaptively through a single formulation, based on the complexity of the data stream in question, $(ii)$ a batch mode active learning strategy for fuzzy label classification problems, where there is an inherent imprecision and vagueness in the class label definitions, $(iii)$ batch mode active learning algorithms based on convex relaxations of an NP-hard integer quadratic programming (IQP) problem, with guaranteed bounds on the solution quality and $(iv)$ an active matrix completion algorithm and its application to solve several variants of the active learning problem (transductive active learning, multi-label active learning, active feature acquisition and active learning for regression). These contributions are validated on the face recognition and facial expression recognition problems (which are commonly encountered in real world applications like robotics, security and assistive technology for the blind and the visually impaired) and also on collaborative filtering applications like movie recommendation.
ContributorsChakraborty, Shayok (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / Balasubramanian, Vineeth N. (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Mittelmann, Hans (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
How to teach a machine to understand natural language? This question is a long-standing challenge in Artificial Intelligence. Several tasks are designed to measure the progress of this challenge. Question Answering is one such task that evaluates a machine's ability to understand natural language, where it reads a passage of text or an image and answers comprehension questions. In recent years, the development of transformer-based language models and large-scale human-annotated datasets has led to remarkable progress in the field of question answering. However, several disadvantages of fully supervised question answering systems have been observed. Such as generalizing to unseen out-of-distribution domains, linguistic style differences in questions, and adversarial samples. This thesis proposes implicitly supervised question answering systems trained using knowledge acquisition from external knowledge sources and new learning methods that provide inductive biases to learn question answering. In particular, the following research projects are discussed: (1) Knowledge Acquisition methods: these include semantic and abductive information retrieval for seeking missing knowledge, a method to represent unstructured text corpora as a knowledge graph, and constructing a knowledge base for implicit commonsense reasoning. (2) Learning methods: these include Knowledge Triplet Learning, a method over knowledge graphs; Test-Time Learning, a method to generalize to an unseen out-of-distribution context; WeaQA, a method to learn visual question answering using image captions without strong supervision; WeaSel, weakly supervised method for relative spatial reasoning; and a new paradigm for unsupervised natural language inference. These methods potentially provide a new research direction to overcome the pitfalls of direct supervision.
ContributorsBanerjee, Pratyay (Author) / Baral, Chitta (Thesis advisor) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Blanco, Eduardo (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
In many fields one needs to build predictive models for a set of related machine learning tasks, such as information retrieval, computer vision and biomedical informatics. Traditionally these tasks are treated independently and the inference is done separately for each task, which ignores important connections among the tasks. Multi-task learning aims at simultaneously building models for all tasks in order to improve the generalization performance, leveraging inherent relatedness of these tasks. In this thesis, I firstly propose a clustered multi-task learning (CMTL) formulation, which simultaneously learns task models and performs task clustering. I provide theoretical analysis to establish the equivalence between the CMTL formulation and the alternating structure optimization, which learns a shared low-dimensional hypothesis space for different tasks. Then I present two real-world biomedical informatics applications which can benefit from multi-task learning. In the first application, I study the disease progression problem and present multi-task learning formulations for disease progression. In the formulations, the prediction at each point is a regression task and multiple tasks at different time points are learned simultaneously, leveraging the temporal smoothness among the tasks. The proposed formulations have been tested extensively on predicting the progression of the Alzheimer's disease, and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed models. In the second application, I present a novel data-driven framework for densifying the electronic medical records (EMR) to overcome the sparsity problem in predictive modeling using EMR. The densification of each patient is a learning task, and the proposed algorithm simultaneously densify all patients. As such, the densification of one patient leverages useful information from other patients.
ContributorsZhou, Jiayu (Author) / Ye, Jieping (Thesis advisor) / Mittelmann, Hans (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Wang, Yalin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014