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- All Subjects: artificial intelligence
- Genre: Academic theses
- Creators: Turaga, Pavan
- Member of: ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Description
This study investigates how well prominent behavioral theories from social psychology explain green purchasing behavior (GPB). I assess three prominent theories in terms of their suitability for GPB research, their attractiveness to GPB empiricists, and the strength of their empirical evidence when applied to GPB. First, a qualitative assessment of the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), Norm Activation Theory (NAT), and Value-Belief-Norm Theory (VBN) is conducted to evaluate a) how well the phenomenon and concepts in each theory match the characteristics of pro-environmental behavior and b) how well the assumptions made in each theory match common assumptions made in purchasing theory. Second, a quantitative assessment of these three theories is conducted in which r2 values and methodological parameters (e.g., sample size) are collected from a sample of 21 empirical studies on GPB to evaluate the accuracy and generalize-ability of empirical evidence. In the qualitative assessment, the results show each theory has its advantages and disadvantages. The results also provide a theoretically-grounded roadmap for modifying each theory to be more suitable for GPB research. In the quantitative assessment, the TPB outperforms the other two theories in every aspect taken into consideration. It proves to 1) create the most accurate models 2) be supported by the most generalize-able empirical evidence and 3) be the most attractive theory to empiricists. Although the TPB establishes itself as the best foundational theory for an empiricist to start from, it's clear that a more comprehensive model is needed to achieve consistent results and improve our understanding of GPB. NAT and the Theory of Interpersonal Behavior (TIB) offer pathways to extend the TPB. The TIB seems particularly apt for this endeavor, while VBN does not appear to have much to offer. Overall, the TPB has already proven to hold a relatively high predictive value. But with the state of ecosystem services continuing to decline on a global scale, it's important for models of GPB to become more accurate and reliable. Better models have the capacity to help marketing professionals, product developers, and policy makers develop strategies for encouraging consumers to buy green products.
ContributorsRedd, Thomas Christopher (Author) / Dooley, Kevin (Thesis advisor) / Basile, George (Committee member) / Darnall, Nicole (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
In contemporary society, sustainability and public well-being have been pressing challenges. Some of the important questions are:how can sustainable practices, such as reducing carbon emission, be encouraged? , How can a healthy lifestyle be maintained?Even though individuals are interested, they are unable to adopt these behaviors due to resource constraints. Developing a framework to enable cooperative behavior adoption and to sustain it for a long period of time is a major challenge. As a part of developing this framework, I am focusing on methods to understand behavior diffusion over time. Facilitating behavior diffusion with resource constraints in a large population is qualitatively different from promoting cooperation in small groups. Previous work in social sciences has derived conditions for sustainable cooperative behavior in small homogeneous groups. However, how groups of individuals having resource constraint co-operate over extended periods of time is not well understood, and is the focus of my thesis. I develop models to analyze behavior diffusion over time through the lens of epidemic models with the condition that individuals have resource constraint. I introduce an epidemic model SVRS ( Susceptible-Volatile-Recovered-Susceptible) to accommodate multiple behavior adoption. I investigate the longitudinal effects of behavior diffusion by varying different properties of an individual such as resources,threshold and cost of behavior adoption. I also consider how behavior adoption of an individual varies with her knowledge of global adoption. I evaluate my models on several synthetic topologies like complete regular graph, preferential attachment and small-world and make some interesting observations. Periodic injection of early adopters can help in boosting the spread of behaviors and sustain it for a longer period of time. Also, behavior propagation for the classical epidemic model SIRS (Susceptible-Infected-Recovered-Susceptible) does not continue for an infinite period of time as per conventional wisdom. One interesting future direction is to investigate how behavior adoption is affected when number of individuals in a network changes. The affects on behavior adoption when availability of behavior changes with time can also be examined.
ContributorsDey, Anindita (Author) / Sundaram, Hari (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
The performance of most of the visual computing tasks depends on the quality of the features extracted from the raw data. Insightful feature representation increases the performance of many learning algorithms by exposing the underlying explanatory factors of the output for the unobserved input. A good representation should also handle anomalies in the data such as missing samples and noisy input caused by the undesired, external factors of variation. It should also reduce the data redundancy. Over the years, many feature extraction processes have been invented to produce good representations of raw images and videos.
The feature extraction processes can be categorized into three groups. The first group contains processes that are hand-crafted for a specific task. Hand-engineering features requires the knowledge of domain experts and manual labor. However, the feature extraction process is interpretable and explainable. Next group contains the latent-feature extraction processes. While the original feature lies in a high-dimensional space, the relevant factors for a task often lie on a lower dimensional manifold. The latent-feature extraction employs hidden variables to expose the underlying data properties that cannot be directly measured from the input. Latent features seek a specific structure such as sparsity or low-rank into the derived representation through sophisticated optimization techniques. The last category is that of deep features. These are obtained by passing raw input data with minimal pre-processing through a deep network. Its parameters are computed by iteratively minimizing a task-based loss.
In this dissertation, I present four pieces of work where I create and learn suitable data representations. The first task employs hand-crafted features to perform clinically-relevant retrieval of diabetic retinopathy images. The second task uses latent features to perform content-adaptive image enhancement. The third task ranks a pair of images based on their aestheticism. The goal of the last task is to capture localized image artifacts in small datasets with patch-level labels. For both these tasks, I propose novel deep architectures and show significant improvement over the previous state-of-art approaches. A suitable combination of feature representations augmented with an appropriate learning approach can increase performance for most visual computing tasks.
The feature extraction processes can be categorized into three groups. The first group contains processes that are hand-crafted for a specific task. Hand-engineering features requires the knowledge of domain experts and manual labor. However, the feature extraction process is interpretable and explainable. Next group contains the latent-feature extraction processes. While the original feature lies in a high-dimensional space, the relevant factors for a task often lie on a lower dimensional manifold. The latent-feature extraction employs hidden variables to expose the underlying data properties that cannot be directly measured from the input. Latent features seek a specific structure such as sparsity or low-rank into the derived representation through sophisticated optimization techniques. The last category is that of deep features. These are obtained by passing raw input data with minimal pre-processing through a deep network. Its parameters are computed by iteratively minimizing a task-based loss.
In this dissertation, I present four pieces of work where I create and learn suitable data representations. The first task employs hand-crafted features to perform clinically-relevant retrieval of diabetic retinopathy images. The second task uses latent features to perform content-adaptive image enhancement. The third task ranks a pair of images based on their aestheticism. The goal of the last task is to capture localized image artifacts in small datasets with patch-level labels. For both these tasks, I propose novel deep architectures and show significant improvement over the previous state-of-art approaches. A suitable combination of feature representations augmented with an appropriate learning approach can increase performance for most visual computing tasks.
ContributorsChandakkar, Parag Shridhar (Author) / Li, Baoxin (Thesis advisor) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
Mixture of experts is a machine learning ensemble approach that consists of individual models that are trained to be ``experts'' on subsets of the data, and a gating network that provides weights to output a combination of the expert predictions. Mixture of experts models do not currently see wide use due to difficulty in training diverse experts and high computational requirements. This work presents modifications of the mixture of experts formulation that use domain knowledge to improve training, and incorporate parameter sharing among experts to reduce computational requirements.
First, this work presents an application of mixture of experts models for quality robust visual recognition. First it is shown that human subjects outperform deep neural networks on classification of distorted images, and then propose a model, MixQualNet, that is more robust to distortions. The proposed model consists of ``experts'' that are trained on a particular type of image distortion. The final output of the model is a weighted sum of the expert models, where the weights are determined by a separate gating network. The proposed model also incorporates weight sharing to reduce the number of parameters, as well as increase performance.
Second, an application of mixture of experts to predict visual saliency is presented. A computational saliency model attempts to predict where humans will look in an image. In the proposed model, each expert network is trained to predict saliency for a set of closely related images. The final saliency map is computed as a weighted mixture of the expert networks' outputs, with weights determined by a separate gating network. The proposed model achieves better performance than several other visual saliency models and a baseline non-mixture model.
Finally, this work introduces a saliency model that is a weighted mixture of models trained for different levels of saliency. Levels of saliency include high saliency, which corresponds to regions where almost all subjects look, and low saliency, which corresponds to regions where some, but not all subjects look. The weighted mixture shows improved performance compared with baseline models because of the diversity of the individual model predictions.
First, this work presents an application of mixture of experts models for quality robust visual recognition. First it is shown that human subjects outperform deep neural networks on classification of distorted images, and then propose a model, MixQualNet, that is more robust to distortions. The proposed model consists of ``experts'' that are trained on a particular type of image distortion. The final output of the model is a weighted sum of the expert models, where the weights are determined by a separate gating network. The proposed model also incorporates weight sharing to reduce the number of parameters, as well as increase performance.
Second, an application of mixture of experts to predict visual saliency is presented. A computational saliency model attempts to predict where humans will look in an image. In the proposed model, each expert network is trained to predict saliency for a set of closely related images. The final saliency map is computed as a weighted mixture of the expert networks' outputs, with weights determined by a separate gating network. The proposed model achieves better performance than several other visual saliency models and a baseline non-mixture model.
Finally, this work introduces a saliency model that is a weighted mixture of models trained for different levels of saliency. Levels of saliency include high saliency, which corresponds to regions where almost all subjects look, and low saliency, which corresponds to regions where some, but not all subjects look. The weighted mixture shows improved performance compared with baseline models because of the diversity of the individual model predictions.
ContributorsDodge, Samuel Fuller (Author) / Karam, Lina (Thesis advisor) / Jayasuriya, Suren (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
The human motion is defined as an amalgamation of several physical traits such as bipedal locomotion, posture and manual dexterity, and mental expectation. In addition to the “positive” body form defined by these traits, casting light on the body produces a “negative” of the body: its shadow. We often interchangeably use with silhouettes in the place of shadow to emphasize indifference to interior features. In a manner of speaking, the shadow is an alter ego that imitates the individual.
The principal value of shadow is its non-invasive behaviour of reflecting precisely the actions of the individual it is attached to. Nonetheless we can still think of the body’s shadow not as the body but its alter ego.
Based on this premise, my thesis creates an experiential system that extracts the data related to the contour of your human shape and gives it a texture and life of its own, so as to emulate your movements and postures, and to be your extension. In technical terms, my thesis extracts abstraction from a pre-indexed database that could be generated from an offline data set or in real time to complement these actions of a user in front of a low-cost optical motion capture device like the Microsoft Kinect. This notion could be the system’s interpretation of the action which creates modularized art through the abstraction’s ‘similarity’ to the live action.
Through my research, I have developed a stable system that tackles various connotations associated with shadows and the need to determine the ideal features that contribute to the relevance of the actions performed. The implication of Factor Oracle [3] pattern interpretation is tested with a feature bin of videos. The system also is flexible towards several methods of Nearest Neighbours searches and a machine learning module to derive the same output. The overall purpose is to establish this in real time and provide a constant feedback to the user. This can be expanded to handle larger dynamic data.
In addition to estimating human actions, my thesis best tries to test various Nearest Neighbour search methods in real time depending upon the data stream. This provides a basis to understand varying parameters that complement human activity recognition and feature matching in real time.
The principal value of shadow is its non-invasive behaviour of reflecting precisely the actions of the individual it is attached to. Nonetheless we can still think of the body’s shadow not as the body but its alter ego.
Based on this premise, my thesis creates an experiential system that extracts the data related to the contour of your human shape and gives it a texture and life of its own, so as to emulate your movements and postures, and to be your extension. In technical terms, my thesis extracts abstraction from a pre-indexed database that could be generated from an offline data set or in real time to complement these actions of a user in front of a low-cost optical motion capture device like the Microsoft Kinect. This notion could be the system’s interpretation of the action which creates modularized art through the abstraction’s ‘similarity’ to the live action.
Through my research, I have developed a stable system that tackles various connotations associated with shadows and the need to determine the ideal features that contribute to the relevance of the actions performed. The implication of Factor Oracle [3] pattern interpretation is tested with a feature bin of videos. The system also is flexible towards several methods of Nearest Neighbours searches and a machine learning module to derive the same output. The overall purpose is to establish this in real time and provide a constant feedback to the user. This can be expanded to handle larger dynamic data.
In addition to estimating human actions, my thesis best tries to test various Nearest Neighbour search methods in real time depending upon the data stream. This provides a basis to understand varying parameters that complement human activity recognition and feature matching in real time.
ContributorsSeshasayee, Sudarshan Prashanth (Author) / Sha, Xin Wei (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Thesis advisor) / Tinapple, David A (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
This dissertation presents novel solutions for improving the generalization capabilities of deep learning based computer vision models. Neural networks are known to suffer a large drop in performance when tested on samples from a different distribution than the one on which they were trained. The proposed solutions, based on latent space geometry and meta-learning, address this issue by improving the robustness of these models to distribution shifts. Through the use of geometrical alignment, state-of-the-art domain adaptation and source-free test-time adaptation strategies are developed. Additionally, geometrical alignment can allow classifiers to be progressively adapted to new, unseen test domains without requiring retraining of the feature extractors. The dissertation also presents algorithms for enabling in-the-wild generalization without needing access to any samples from the target domain. Other causes of poor generalization, such as data scarcity in critical applications and training data with high levels of noise and variance, are also explored. To address data scarcity in fine-grained computer vision tasks such as object detection, novel context-aware augmentations are suggested. While the first four chapters focus on general-purpose computer vision models, strategies are also developed to improve robustness in specific applications. The efficiency of training autonomous agents for visual navigation is improved by incorporating semantic knowledge, and the integration of domain experts' knowledge allows for the realization of a low-cost, minimally invasive generalizable automated rehabilitation system. Lastly, new tools for explainability and model introspection using counter-factual explainers trained through interval-based uncertainty calibration objectives are presented.
ContributorsThopalli, Kowshik (Author) / Turaga, Pavan (Thesis advisor) / Thiagarajan, Jayaraman J (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Millimeter-wave (mmWave) and sub-terahertz (sub-THz) systems aim to utilize the large bandwidth available at these frequencies. This has the potential to enable several future applications that require high data rates, such as autonomous vehicles and digital twins. These systems, however, have several challenges that need to be addressed to realize their gains in practice. First, they need to deploy large antenna arrays and use narrow beams to guarantee sufficient receive power. Adjusting the narrow beams of the large antenna arrays incurs massive beam training overhead. Second, the sensitivity to blockages is a key challenge for mmWave and THz networks. Since these networks mainly rely on line-of-sight (LOS) links, sudden link blockages highly threaten the reliability of the networks. Further, when the LOS link is blocked, the network typically needs to hand off the user to another LOS basestation, which may incur critical time latency, especially if a search over a large codebook of narrow beams is needed. A promising way to tackle both these challenges lies in leveraging additional side information such as visual, LiDAR, radar, and position data. These sensors provide rich information about the wireless environment, which can be utilized for fast beam and blockage prediction. This dissertation presents a machine-learning framework for sensing-aided beam and blockage prediction. In particular, for beam prediction, this work proposes to utilize visual and positional data to predict the optimal beam indices. For the first time, this work investigates the sensing-aided beam prediction task in a real-world vehicle-to-infrastructure and drone communication scenario. Similarly, for blockage prediction, this dissertation proposes a multi-modal wireless communication solution that utilizes bimodal machine learning to perform proactive blockage prediction and user hand-off. Evaluations on both real-world and synthetic datasets illustrate the promising performance of the proposed solutions and highlight their potential for next-generation communication and sensing systems.
ContributorsCharan, Gouranga (Author) / Alkhateeb, Ahmed (Thesis advisor) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Committee member) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Michelusi, Nicolò (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
Description
In recent years, the widespread use of deep neural networks (DNNs) has facilitated great improvements in performance for computer vision tasks like image classification and object recognition. In most realistic computer vision applications, an input image undergoes some form of image distortion such as blur and additive noise during image acquisition or transmission. Deep networks trained on pristine images perform poorly when tested on such distortions. DNN predictions have also been shown to be vulnerable to carefully crafted adversarial perturbations. Specifically, so-called universal adversarial perturbations are image-agnostic perturbations that can be added to any image and can fool a target network into making erroneous predictions. This work proposes selective DNN feature regeneration to improve the robustness of existing DNNs to image distortions and universal adversarial perturbations.
In the context of common naturally occurring image distortions, a metric is proposed to identify the most susceptible DNN convolutional filters and rank them in order of the highest gain in classification accuracy upon correction. The proposed approach called DeepCorrect applies small stacks of convolutional layers with residual connections at the output of these ranked filters and trains them to correct the most distortion-affected filter activations, whilst leaving the rest of the pre-trained filter outputs in the network unchanged. Performance results show that applying DeepCorrect models for common vision tasks significantly improves the robustness of DNNs against distorted images and outperforms other alternative approaches.
In the context of universal adversarial perturbations, departing from existing defense strategies that work mostly in the image domain, a novel and effective defense which only operates in the DNN feature domain is presented. This approach identifies pre-trained convolutional features that are most vulnerable to adversarial perturbations and deploys trainable feature regeneration units which transform these DNN filter activations into resilient features that are robust to universal perturbations. Regenerating only the top 50% adversarially susceptible activations in at most 6 DNN layers and leaving all remaining DNN activations unchanged can outperform existing defense strategies across different network architectures and across various universal attacks.
In the context of common naturally occurring image distortions, a metric is proposed to identify the most susceptible DNN convolutional filters and rank them in order of the highest gain in classification accuracy upon correction. The proposed approach called DeepCorrect applies small stacks of convolutional layers with residual connections at the output of these ranked filters and trains them to correct the most distortion-affected filter activations, whilst leaving the rest of the pre-trained filter outputs in the network unchanged. Performance results show that applying DeepCorrect models for common vision tasks significantly improves the robustness of DNNs against distorted images and outperforms other alternative approaches.
In the context of universal adversarial perturbations, departing from existing defense strategies that work mostly in the image domain, a novel and effective defense which only operates in the DNN feature domain is presented. This approach identifies pre-trained convolutional features that are most vulnerable to adversarial perturbations and deploys trainable feature regeneration units which transform these DNN filter activations into resilient features that are robust to universal perturbations. Regenerating only the top 50% adversarially susceptible activations in at most 6 DNN layers and leaving all remaining DNN activations unchanged can outperform existing defense strategies across different network architectures and across various universal attacks.
ContributorsBorkar, Tejas Shyam (Author) / Karam, Lina J (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Jayasuriya, Suren (Committee member) / Tepedelenlioğlu, Cihan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
Over the past decade, machine learning research has made great strides and significant impact in several fields. Its success is greatly attributed to the development of effective machine learning algorithms like deep neural networks (a.k.a. deep learning), availability of large-scale databases and access to specialized hardware like Graphic Processing Units. When designing and training machine learning systems, researchers often assume access to large quantities of data that capture different possible variations. Variations in the data is needed to incorporate desired invariance and robustness properties in the machine learning system, especially in the case of deep learning algorithms. However, it is very difficult to gather such data in a real-world setting. For example, in certain medical/healthcare applications, it is very challenging to have access to data from all possible scenarios or with the necessary amount of variations as required to train the system. Additionally, the over-parameterized and unconstrained nature of deep neural networks can cause them to be poorly trained and in many cases over-confident which, in turn, can hamper their reliability and generalizability. This dissertation is a compendium of my research efforts to address the above challenges. I propose building invariant feature representations by wedding concepts from topological data analysis and Riemannian geometry, that automatically incorporate the desired invariance properties for different computer vision applications. I discuss how deep learning can be used to address some of the common challenges faced when working with topological data analysis methods. I describe alternative learning strategies based on unsupervised learning and transfer learning to address issues like dataset shifts and limited training data. Finally, I discuss my preliminary work on applying simple orthogonal constraints on deep learning feature representations to help develop more reliable and better calibrated models.
ContributorsSom, Anirudh (Author) / Turaga, Pavan (Thesis advisor) / Krishnamurthi, Narayanan (Committee member) / Spanias, Andreas (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
Cameras have become commonplace with wide-ranging applications of phone photography, computer vision, and medical imaging. With a growing need to reduce size and costs while maintaining image quality, the need to look past traditional style of cameras is becoming more apparent. Several non-traditional cameras have shown to be promising options for size-constraint applications, and while they may offer several advantages, they also usually are limited by image quality degradation due to optical or a need to reconstruct a captured image. In this thesis, we take a look at three of these non-traditional cameras: a pinhole camera, a diffusion-mask lensless camera, and an under-display camera (UDC).
For each of these cases, I present a feasible image restoration pipeline to correct for their particular limitations. For the pinhole camera, I present an early pipeline to allow for practical pinhole photography by reducing noise levels caused by low-light imaging, enhancing exposure levels, and sharpening the blur caused by the pinhole. For lensless cameras, we explore a neural network architecture that performs joint image reconstruction and point spread function (PSF) estimation to robustly recover images captured with multiple PSFs from different cameras. Using adversarial learning, this approach achieves improved reconstruction results that do not require explicit knowledge of the PSF at test-time and shows an added improvement in the reconstruction model’s ability to generalize to variations in the camera’s PSF. This allows lensless cameras to be utilized in a wider range of applications that require multiple cameras without the need to explicitly train a separate model for each new camera. For UDCs, we utilize a multi-stage approach to correct for low light transmission, blur, and haze. This pipeline uses a PyNET deep neural network architecture to perform a majority of the restoration, while additionally using a traditional optimization approach which is then fused in a learned manner in the second stage to improve high-frequency features. I show results from this novel fusion approach that is on-par with the state of the art.
For each of these cases, I present a feasible image restoration pipeline to correct for their particular limitations. For the pinhole camera, I present an early pipeline to allow for practical pinhole photography by reducing noise levels caused by low-light imaging, enhancing exposure levels, and sharpening the blur caused by the pinhole. For lensless cameras, we explore a neural network architecture that performs joint image reconstruction and point spread function (PSF) estimation to robustly recover images captured with multiple PSFs from different cameras. Using adversarial learning, this approach achieves improved reconstruction results that do not require explicit knowledge of the PSF at test-time and shows an added improvement in the reconstruction model’s ability to generalize to variations in the camera’s PSF. This allows lensless cameras to be utilized in a wider range of applications that require multiple cameras without the need to explicitly train a separate model for each new camera. For UDCs, we utilize a multi-stage approach to correct for low light transmission, blur, and haze. This pipeline uses a PyNET deep neural network architecture to perform a majority of the restoration, while additionally using a traditional optimization approach which is then fused in a learned manner in the second stage to improve high-frequency features. I show results from this novel fusion approach that is on-par with the state of the art.
ContributorsRego, Joshua D (Author) / Jayasuriya, Suren (Thesis advisor) / Blain Christen, Jennifer (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020