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- All Subjects: artificial intelligence
- All Subjects: Semantic computing
- Creators: Li, Baoxin
- Member of: ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
- Status: Published
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
Many learning models have been proposed for various tasks in visual computing. Popular examples include hidden Markov models and support vector machines. Recently, sparse-representation-based learning methods have attracted a lot of attention in the computer vision field, largely because of their impressive performance in many applications. In the literature, many of such sparse learning methods focus on designing or application of some learning techniques for certain feature space without much explicit consideration on possible interaction between the underlying semantics of the visual data and the employed learning technique. Rich semantic information in most visual data, if properly incorporated into algorithm design, should help achieving improved performance while delivering intuitive interpretation of the algorithmic outcomes. My study addresses the problem of how to explicitly consider the semantic information of the visual data in the sparse learning algorithms. In this work, we identify four problems which are of great importance and broad interest to the community. Specifically, a novel approach is proposed to incorporate label information to learn a dictionary which is not only reconstructive but also discriminative; considering the formation process of face images, a novel image decomposition approach for an ensemble of correlated images is proposed, where a subspace is built from the decomposition and applied to face recognition; based on the observation that, the foreground (or salient) objects are sparse in input domain and the background is sparse in frequency domain, a novel and efficient spatio-temporal saliency detection algorithm is proposed to identify the salient regions in video; and a novel hidden Markov model learning approach is proposed by utilizing a sparse set of pairwise comparisons among the data, which is easier to obtain and more meaningful, consistent than tradition labels, in many scenarios, e.g., evaluating motion skills in surgical simulations. In those four problems, different types of semantic information are modeled and incorporated in designing sparse learning algorithms for the corresponding visual computing tasks. Several real world applications are selected to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods, including, face recognition, spatio-temporal saliency detection, abnormality detection, spatio-temporal interest point detection, motion analysis and emotion recognition. In those applications, data of different modalities are involved, ranging from audio signal, image to video. Experiments on large scale real world data with comparisons to state-of-art methods confirm the proposed approaches deliver salient advantages, showing adding those semantic information dramatically improve the performances of the general sparse learning methods.
ContributorsZhang, Qiang (Author) / Li, Baoxin (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Wang, Yalin (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Bridging semantic gap is one of the fundamental problems in multimedia computing and pattern recognition. The challenge of associating low-level signal with their high-level semantic interpretation is mainly due to the fact that semantics are often conveyed implicitly in a context, relying on interactions among multiple levels of concepts or low-level data entities. Also, additional domain knowledge may often be indispensable for uncovering the underlying semantics, but in most cases such domain knowledge is not readily available from the acquired media streams. Thus, making use of various types of contextual information and leveraging corresponding domain knowledge are vital for effectively associating high-level semantics with low-level signals with higher accuracies in multimedia computing problems. In this work, novel computational methods are explored and developed for incorporating contextual information/domain knowledge in different forms for multimedia computing and pattern recognition problems. Specifically, a novel Bayesian approach with statistical-sampling-based inference is proposed for incorporating a special type of domain knowledge, spatial prior for the underlying shapes; cross-modality correlations via Kernel Canonical Correlation Analysis is explored and the learnt space is then used for associating multimedia contents in different forms; model contextual information as a graph is leveraged for regulating interactions among high-level semantic concepts (e.g., category labels), low-level input signal (e.g., spatial/temporal structure). Four real-world applications, including visual-to-tactile face conversion, photo tag recommendation, wild web video classification and unconstrained consumer video summarization, are selected to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approaches. These applications range from classic research challenges to emerging tasks in multimedia computing. Results from experiments on large-scale real-world data with comparisons to other state-of-the-art methods and subjective evaluations with end users confirmed that the developed approaches exhibit salient advantages, suggesting that they are promising for leveraging contextual information/domain knowledge for a wide range of multimedia computing and pattern recognition problems.
ContributorsWang, Zhesheng (Author) / Li, Baoxin (Thesis advisor) / Sundaram, Hari (Committee member) / Qian, Gang (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Real-world environments are characterized by non-stationary and continuously evolving data. Learning a classification model on this data would require a framework that is able to adapt itself to newer circumstances. Under such circumstances, transfer learning has come to be a dependable methodology for improving classification performance with reduced training costs and without the need for explicit relearning from scratch. In this thesis, a novel instance transfer technique that adapts a "Cost-sensitive" variation of AdaBoost is presented. The method capitalizes on the theoretical and functional properties of AdaBoost to selectively reuse outdated training instances obtained from a "source" domain to effectively classify unseen instances occurring in a different, but related "target" domain. The algorithm is evaluated on real-world classification problems namely accelerometer based 3D gesture recognition, smart home activity recognition and text categorization. The performance on these datasets is analyzed and evaluated against popular boosting-based instance transfer techniques. In addition, supporting empirical studies, that investigate some of the less explored bottlenecks of boosting based instance transfer methods, are presented, to understand the suitability and effectiveness of this form of knowledge transfer.
ContributorsVenkatesan, Ashok (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
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
Image Understanding is a long-established discipline in computer vision, which encompasses a body of advanced image processing techniques, that are used to locate (“where”), characterize and recognize (“what”) objects, regions, and their attributes in the image. However, the notion of “understanding” (and the goal of artificial intelligent machines) goes beyond factual recall of the recognized components and includes reasoning and thinking beyond what can be seen (or perceived). Understanding is often evaluated by asking questions of increasing difficulty. Thus, the expected functionalities of an intelligent Image Understanding system can be expressed in terms of the functionalities that are required to answer questions about an image. Answering questions about images require primarily three components: Image Understanding, question (natural language) understanding, and reasoning based on knowledge. Any question, asking beyond what can be directly seen, requires modeling of commonsense (or background/ontological/factual) knowledge and reasoning.
Knowledge and reasoning have seen scarce use in image understanding applications. In this thesis, we demonstrate the utilities of incorporating background knowledge and using explicit reasoning in image understanding applications. We first present a comprehensive survey of the previous work that utilized background knowledge and reasoning in understanding images. This survey outlines the limited use of commonsense knowledge in high-level applications. We then present a set of vision and reasoning-based methods to solve several applications and show that these approaches benefit in terms of accuracy and interpretability from the explicit use of knowledge and reasoning. We propose novel knowledge representations of image, knowledge acquisition methods, and a new implementation of an efficient probabilistic logical reasoning engine that can utilize publicly available commonsense knowledge to solve applications such as visual question answering, image puzzles. Additionally, we identify the need for new datasets that explicitly require external commonsense knowledge to solve. We propose the new task of Image Riddles, which requires a combination of vision, and reasoning based on ontological knowledge; and we collect a sufficiently large dataset to serve as an ideal testbed for vision and reasoning research. Lastly, we propose end-to-end deep architectures that can combine vision, knowledge and reasoning modules together and achieve large performance boosts over state-of-the-art methods.
Knowledge and reasoning have seen scarce use in image understanding applications. In this thesis, we demonstrate the utilities of incorporating background knowledge and using explicit reasoning in image understanding applications. We first present a comprehensive survey of the previous work that utilized background knowledge and reasoning in understanding images. This survey outlines the limited use of commonsense knowledge in high-level applications. We then present a set of vision and reasoning-based methods to solve several applications and show that these approaches benefit in terms of accuracy and interpretability from the explicit use of knowledge and reasoning. We propose novel knowledge representations of image, knowledge acquisition methods, and a new implementation of an efficient probabilistic logical reasoning engine that can utilize publicly available commonsense knowledge to solve applications such as visual question answering, image puzzles. Additionally, we identify the need for new datasets that explicitly require external commonsense knowledge to solve. We propose the new task of Image Riddles, which requires a combination of vision, and reasoning based on ontological knowledge; and we collect a sufficiently large dataset to serve as an ideal testbed for vision and reasoning research. Lastly, we propose end-to-end deep architectures that can combine vision, knowledge and reasoning modules together and achieve large performance boosts over state-of-the-art methods.
ContributorsAditya, Somak (Author) / Baral, Chitta (Thesis advisor) / Yang, Yezhou (Thesis advisor) / Aloimonos, Yiannis (Committee member) / Lee, Joohyung (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
With the emergence of edge computing paradigm, many applications such as image recognition and augmented reality require to perform machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) tasks on edge devices. Most AI and ML models are large and computational heavy, whereas edge devices are usually equipped with limited computational and storage resources. Such models can be compressed and reduced in order to be placed on edge devices, but they may loose their capability and may not generalize and perform well compared to large models. Recent works used knowledge transfer techniques to transfer information from a large network (termed teacher) to a small one (termed student) in order to improve the performance of the latter. This approach seems to be promising for learning on edge devices, but a thorough investigation on its effectiveness is lacking.
The purpose of this work is to provide an extensive study on the performance (both in terms of accuracy and convergence speed) of knowledge transfer, considering different student-teacher architectures, datasets and different techniques for transferring knowledge from teacher to student.
A good performance improvement is obtained by transferring knowledge from both the intermediate layers and last layer of the teacher to a shallower student. But other architectures and transfer techniques do not fare so well and some of them even lead to negative performance impact. For example, a smaller and shorter network, trained with knowledge transfer on Caltech 101 achieved a significant improvement of 7.36\% in the accuracy and converges 16 times faster compared to the same network trained without knowledge transfer. On the other hand, smaller network which is thinner than the teacher network performed worse with an accuracy drop of 9.48\% on Caltech 101, even with utilization of knowledge transfer.
The purpose of this work is to provide an extensive study on the performance (both in terms of accuracy and convergence speed) of knowledge transfer, considering different student-teacher architectures, datasets and different techniques for transferring knowledge from teacher to student.
A good performance improvement is obtained by transferring knowledge from both the intermediate layers and last layer of the teacher to a shallower student. But other architectures and transfer techniques do not fare so well and some of them even lead to negative performance impact. For example, a smaller and shorter network, trained with knowledge transfer on Caltech 101 achieved a significant improvement of 7.36\% in the accuracy and converges 16 times faster compared to the same network trained without knowledge transfer. On the other hand, smaller network which is thinner than the teacher network performed worse with an accuracy drop of 9.48\% on Caltech 101, even with utilization of knowledge transfer.
ContributorsSistla, Ragini (Author) / Zhao, Ming (Thesis advisor, Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Tong, Hanghang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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
In this thesis, a new approach to learning-based planning is presented where critical regions of an environment with low probability measure are learned from a given set of motion plans. Critical regions are learned using convolutional neural networks (CNN) to improve sampling processes for motion planning (MP).
In addition to an identification network, a new sampling-based motion planner, Learn and Link, is introduced. This planner leverages critical regions to overcome the limitations of uniform sampling while still maintaining guarantees of correctness inherent to sampling-based algorithms. Learn and Link is evaluated against planners from the Open Motion Planning Library (OMPL) on an extensive suite of challenging navigation planning problems. This work shows that critical areas of an environment are learnable, and can be used by Learn and Link to solve MP problems with far less planning time than existing sampling-based planners.
In addition to an identification network, a new sampling-based motion planner, Learn and Link, is introduced. This planner leverages critical regions to overcome the limitations of uniform sampling while still maintaining guarantees of correctness inherent to sampling-based algorithms. Learn and Link is evaluated against planners from the Open Motion Planning Library (OMPL) on an extensive suite of challenging navigation planning problems. This work shows that critical areas of an environment are learnable, and can be used by Learn and Link to solve MP problems with far less planning time than existing sampling-based planners.
ContributorsMolina, Daniel, M.S (Author) / Srivastava, Siddharth (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Zhang, Yu (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
Computational visual aesthetics has recently become an active research area. Existing state-of-art methods formulate this as a binary classification task where a given image is predicted to be beautiful or not. In many applications such as image retrieval and enhancement, it is more important to rank images based on their aesthetic quality instead of binary-categorizing them. Furthermore, in such applications, it may be possible that all images belong to the same category. Hence determining the aesthetic ranking of the images is more appropriate. To this end, a novel problem of ranking images with respect to their aesthetic quality is formulated in this work. A new data-set of image pairs with relative labels is constructed by carefully selecting images from the popular AVA data-set. Unlike in aesthetics classification, there is no single threshold which would determine the ranking order of the images across the entire data-set.
This problem is attempted using a deep neural network based approach that is trained on image pairs by incorporating principles from relative learning. Results show that such relative training procedure allows the network to rank the images with a higher accuracy than a state-of-art network trained on the same set of images using binary labels. Further analyzing the results show that training a model using the image pairs learnt better aesthetic features than training on same number of individual binary labelled images.
Additionally, an attempt is made at enhancing the performance of the system by incorporating saliency related information. Given an image, humans might fixate their vision on particular parts of the image, which they might be subconsciously intrigued to. I therefore tried to utilize the saliency information both stand-alone as well as in combination with the global and local aesthetic features by performing two separate sets of experiments. In both the cases, a standard saliency model is chosen and the generated saliency maps are convoluted with the images prior to passing them to the network, thus giving higher importance to the salient regions as compared to the remaining. Thus generated saliency-images are either used independently or along with the global and the local features to train the network. Empirical results show that the saliency related aesthetic features might already be learnt by the network as a sub-set of the global features from automatic feature extraction, thus proving the redundancy of the additional saliency module.
This problem is attempted using a deep neural network based approach that is trained on image pairs by incorporating principles from relative learning. Results show that such relative training procedure allows the network to rank the images with a higher accuracy than a state-of-art network trained on the same set of images using binary labels. Further analyzing the results show that training a model using the image pairs learnt better aesthetic features than training on same number of individual binary labelled images.
Additionally, an attempt is made at enhancing the performance of the system by incorporating saliency related information. Given an image, humans might fixate their vision on particular parts of the image, which they might be subconsciously intrigued to. I therefore tried to utilize the saliency information both stand-alone as well as in combination with the global and local aesthetic features by performing two separate sets of experiments. In both the cases, a standard saliency model is chosen and the generated saliency maps are convoluted with the images prior to passing them to the network, thus giving higher importance to the salient regions as compared to the remaining. Thus generated saliency-images are either used independently or along with the global and the local features to train the network. Empirical results show that the saliency related aesthetic features might already be learnt by the network as a sub-set of the global features from automatic feature extraction, thus proving the redundancy of the additional saliency module.
ContributorsGattupalli, Jaya Vijetha (Author) / Li, Baoxin (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Liang, Jianming (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016