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- All Subjects: Machine Learning
- Genre: Doctoral Dissertation
- Creators: Turaga, Pavan
Description
Effective modeling of high dimensional data is crucial in information processing and machine learning. Classical subspace methods have been very effective in such applications. However, over the past few decades, there has been considerable research towards the development of new modeling paradigms that go beyond subspace methods. This dissertation focuses on the study of sparse models and their interplay with modern machine learning techniques such as manifold, ensemble and graph-based methods, along with their applications in image analysis and recovery. By considering graph relations between data samples while learning sparse models, graph-embedded codes can be obtained for use in unsupervised, supervised and semi-supervised problems. Using experiments on standard datasets, it is demonstrated that the codes obtained from the proposed methods outperform several baseline algorithms. In order to facilitate sparse learning with large scale data, the paradigm of ensemble sparse coding is proposed, and different strategies for constructing weak base models are developed. Experiments with image recovery and clustering demonstrate that these ensemble models perform better when compared to conventional sparse coding frameworks. When examples from the data manifold are available, manifold constraints can be incorporated with sparse models and two approaches are proposed to combine sparse coding with manifold projection. The improved performance of the proposed techniques in comparison to sparse coding approaches is demonstrated using several image recovery experiments. In addition to these approaches, it might be required in some applications to combine multiple sparse models with different regularizations. In particular, combining an unconstrained sparse model with non-negative sparse coding is important in image analysis, and it poses several algorithmic and theoretical challenges. A convex and an efficient greedy algorithm for recovering combined representations are proposed. Theoretical guarantees on sparsity thresholds for exact recovery using these algorithms are derived and recovery performance is also demonstrated using simulations on synthetic data. Finally, the problem of non-linear compressive sensing, where the measurement process is carried out in feature space obtained using non-linear transformations, is considered. An optimized non-linear measurement system is proposed, and improvements in recovery performance are demonstrated in comparison to using random measurements as well as optimized linear measurements.
ContributorsNatesan Ramamurthy, Karthikeyan (Author) / Spanias, Andreas (Thesis advisor) / Tsakalis, Konstantinos (Committee member) / Karam, Lina (Committee member) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Image understanding has been playing an increasingly crucial role in vision applications. Sparse models form an important component in image understanding, since the statistics of natural images reveal the presence of sparse structure. Sparse methods lead to parsimonious models, in addition to being efficient for large scale learning. In sparse modeling, data is represented as a sparse linear combination of atoms from a "dictionary" matrix. This dissertation focuses on understanding different aspects of sparse learning, thereby enhancing the use of sparse methods by incorporating tools from machine learning. With the growing need to adapt models for large scale data, it is important to design dictionaries that can model the entire data space and not just the samples considered. By exploiting the relation of dictionary learning to 1-D subspace clustering, a multilevel dictionary learning algorithm is developed, and it is shown to outperform conventional sparse models in compressed recovery, and image denoising. Theoretical aspects of learning such as algorithmic stability and generalization are considered, and ensemble learning is incorporated for effective large scale learning. In addition to building strategies for efficiently implementing 1-D subspace clustering, a discriminative clustering approach is designed to estimate the unknown mixing process in blind source separation. By exploiting the non-linear relation between the image descriptors, and allowing the use of multiple features, sparse methods can be made more effective in recognition problems. The idea of multiple kernel sparse representations is developed, and algorithms for learning dictionaries in the feature space are presented. Using object recognition experiments on standard datasets it is shown that the proposed approaches outperform other sparse coding-based recognition frameworks. Furthermore, a segmentation technique based on multiple kernel sparse representations is developed, and successfully applied for automated brain tumor identification. Using sparse codes to define the relation between data samples can lead to a more robust graph embedding for unsupervised clustering. By performing discriminative embedding using sparse coding-based graphs, an algorithm for measuring the glomerular number in kidney MRI images is developed. Finally, approaches to build dictionaries for local sparse coding of image descriptors are presented, and applied to object recognition and image retrieval.
ContributorsJayaraman Thiagarajan, Jayaraman (Author) / Spanias, Andreas (Thesis advisor) / Frakes, David (Committee member) / Tepedelenlioğlu, Cihan (Committee member) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This thesis encompasses a comprehensive research effort dedicated to overcoming the critical bottlenecks that hinder the current generation of neural networks, thereby significantly advancing their reliability and performance. Deep neural networks, with their millions of parameters, suffer from over-parameterization and lack of constraints, leading to limited generalization capabilities. In other words, the complex architecture and millions of parameters present challenges in finding the right balance between capturing useful patterns and avoiding noise in the data. To address these issues, this thesis explores novel solutions based on knowledge distillation, enabling the learning of robust representations. Leveraging the capabilities of large-scale networks, effective learning strategies are developed. Moreover, the limitations of dependency on external networks in the distillation process, which often require large-scale models, are effectively overcome by proposing a self-distillation strategy. The proposed approach empowers the model to generate high-level knowledge within a single network, pushing the boundaries of knowledge distillation. The effectiveness of the proposed method is not only demonstrated across diverse applications, including image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation but also explored in practical considerations such as handling data scarcity and assessing the transferability of the model to other learning tasks. Another major obstacle hindering the development of reliable and robust models lies in their black-box nature, impeding clear insights into the contributions toward the final predictions and yielding uninterpretable feature representations. To address this challenge, this thesis introduces techniques that incorporate simple yet powerful deep constraints rooted in Riemannian geometry. These constraints confer geometric qualities upon the latent representation, thereby fostering a more interpretable and insightful representation. In addition to its primary focus on general tasks like image classification and activity recognition, this strategy offers significant benefits in real-world applications where data scarcity is prevalent. Moreover, its robustness in feature removal showcases its potential for edge applications. By successfully tackling these challenges, this research contributes to advancing the field of machine learning and provides a foundation for building more reliable and robust systems across various application domains.
ContributorsChoi, Hongjun (Author) / Turaga, Pavan (Thesis advisor) / Jayasuriya, Suren (Committee member) / Li, Wenwen (Committee member) / Fazli, Pooyan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
The rapid growth of social media in recent years provides a large amount of user-generated visual objects, e.g., images and videos. Advanced semantic understanding approaches on such visual objects are desired to better serve applications such as human-machine interaction, image retrieval, etc. Semantic visual attributes have been proposed and utilized in multiple visual computing tasks to bridge the so-called "semantic gap" between extractable low-level feature representations and high-level semantic understanding of the visual objects.
Despite years of research, there are still some unsolved problems on semantic attribute learning. First, real-world applications usually involve hundreds of attributes which requires great effort to acquire sufficient amount of labeled data for model learning. Second, existing attribute learning work for visual objects focuses primarily on images, with semantic analysis on videos left largely unexplored.
In this dissertation I conduct innovative research and propose novel approaches to tackling the aforementioned problems. In particular, I propose robust and accurate learning frameworks on both attribute ranking and prediction by exploring the correlation among multiple attributes and utilizing various types of label information. Furthermore, I propose a video-based skill coaching framework by extending attribute learning to the video domain for robust motion skill analysis. Experiments on various types of applications and datasets and comparisons with multiple state-of-the-art baseline approaches confirm that my proposed approaches can achieve significant performance improvements for the general attribute learning problem.
Despite years of research, there are still some unsolved problems on semantic attribute learning. First, real-world applications usually involve hundreds of attributes which requires great effort to acquire sufficient amount of labeled data for model learning. Second, existing attribute learning work for visual objects focuses primarily on images, with semantic analysis on videos left largely unexplored.
In this dissertation I conduct innovative research and propose novel approaches to tackling the aforementioned problems. In particular, I propose robust and accurate learning frameworks on both attribute ranking and prediction by exploring the correlation among multiple attributes and utilizing various types of label information. Furthermore, I propose a video-based skill coaching framework by extending attribute learning to the video domain for robust motion skill analysis. Experiments on various types of applications and datasets and comparisons with multiple state-of-the-art baseline approaches confirm that my proposed approaches can achieve significant performance improvements for the general attribute learning problem.
ContributorsChen, Lin (Author) / Li, Baoxin (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Wang, Yalin (Committee member) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
The data explosion in the past decade is in part due to the widespread use of rich sensors that measure various physical phenomenon -- gyroscopes that measure orientation in phones and fitness devices, the Microsoft Kinect which measures depth information, etc. A typical application requires inferring the underlying physical phenomenon from data, which is done using machine learning. A fundamental assumption in training models is that the data is Euclidean, i.e. the metric is the standard Euclidean distance governed by the L-2 norm. However in many cases this assumption is violated, when the data lies on non Euclidean spaces such as Riemannian manifolds. While the underlying geometry accounts for the non-linearity, accurate analysis of human activity also requires temporal information to be taken into account. Human movement has a natural interpretation as a trajectory on the underlying feature manifold, as it evolves smoothly in time. A commonly occurring theme in many emerging problems is the need to \emph{represent, compare, and manipulate} such trajectories in a manner that respects the geometric constraints. This dissertation is a comprehensive treatise on modeling Riemannian trajectories to understand and exploit their statistical and dynamical properties. Such properties allow us to formulate novel representations for Riemannian trajectories. For example, the physical constraints on human movement are rarely considered, which results in an unnecessarily large space of features, making search, classification and other applications more complicated. Exploiting statistical properties can help us understand the \emph{true} space of such trajectories. In applications such as stroke rehabilitation where there is a need to differentiate between very similar kinds of movement, dynamical properties can be much more effective. In this regard, we propose a generalization to the Lyapunov exponent to Riemannian manifolds and show its effectiveness for human activity analysis. The theory developed in this thesis naturally leads to several benefits in areas such as data mining, compression, dimensionality reduction, classification, and regression.
ContributorsAnirudh, Rushil (Author) / Turaga, Pavan (Thesis advisor) / Cochran, Douglas (Committee member) / Runger, George C. (Committee member) / Taylor, Thomas (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Today's world is seeing a rapid technological advancement in various fields, having access to faster computers and better sensing devices. With such advancements, the task of recognizing human activities has been acknowledged as an important problem, with a wide range of applications such as surveillance, health monitoring and animation. Traditional approaches to dynamical modeling have included linear and nonlinear methods with their respective drawbacks. An alternative idea I propose is the use of descriptors of the shape of the dynamical attractor as a feature representation for quantification of nature of dynamics. The framework has two main advantages over traditional approaches: a) representation of the dynamical system is derived directly from the observational data, without any inherent assumptions, and b) the proposed features show stability under different time-series lengths where traditional dynamical invariants fail.
Approximately 1\% of the total world population are stroke survivors, making it the most common neurological disorder. This increasing demand for rehabilitation facilities has been seen as a significant healthcare problem worldwide. The laborious and expensive process of visual monitoring by physical therapists has motivated my research to invent novel strategies to supplement therapy received in hospital in a home-setting. In this direction, I propose a general framework for tuning component-level kinematic features using therapists’ overall impressions of movement quality, in the context of a Home-based Adaptive Mixed Reality Rehabilitation (HAMRR) system.
The rapid technological advancements in computing and sensing has resulted in large amounts of data which requires powerful tools to analyze. In the recent past, topological data analysis methods have been investigated in various communities, and the work by Carlsson establishes that persistent homology can be used as a powerful topological data analysis approach for effectively analyzing large datasets. I have explored suitable topological data analysis methods and propose a framework for human activity analysis utilizing the same for applications such as action recognition.
Approximately 1\% of the total world population are stroke survivors, making it the most common neurological disorder. This increasing demand for rehabilitation facilities has been seen as a significant healthcare problem worldwide. The laborious and expensive process of visual monitoring by physical therapists has motivated my research to invent novel strategies to supplement therapy received in hospital in a home-setting. In this direction, I propose a general framework for tuning component-level kinematic features using therapists’ overall impressions of movement quality, in the context of a Home-based Adaptive Mixed Reality Rehabilitation (HAMRR) system.
The rapid technological advancements in computing and sensing has resulted in large amounts of data which requires powerful tools to analyze. In the recent past, topological data analysis methods have been investigated in various communities, and the work by Carlsson establishes that persistent homology can be used as a powerful topological data analysis approach for effectively analyzing large datasets. I have explored suitable topological data analysis methods and propose a framework for human activity analysis utilizing the same for applications such as action recognition.
ContributorsVenkataraman, Vinay (Author) / Turaga, Pavan (Thesis advisor) / Papandreou-Suppappol, Antonia (Committee member) / Krishnamurthi, Narayanan (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
The tradition of building musical robots and automata is thousands of years old. Despite this rich history, even today musical robots do not play with as much nuance and subtlety as human musicians. In particular, most instruments allow the player to manipulate timbre while playing; if a violinist is told to sustain an E, they will select which string to play it on, how much bow pressure and velocity to use, whether to use the entire bow or only the portion near the tip or the frog, how close to the bridge or fingerboard to contact the string, whether or not to use a mute, and so forth. Each one of these choices affects the resulting timbre, and navigating this timbre space is part of the art of playing the instrument. Nonetheless, this type of timbral nuance has been largely ignored in the design of musical robots. Therefore, this dissertation introduces a suite of techniques that deal with timbral nuance in musical robots. Chapter 1 provides the motivating ideas and introduces Kiki, a robot designed by the author to explore timbral nuance. Chapter 2 provides a long history of musical robots, establishing the under-researched nature of timbral nuance. Chapter 3 is a comprehensive treatment of dynamic timbre production in percussion robots and, using Kiki as a case-study, provides a variety of techniques for designing striking mechanisms that produce a range of timbres similar to those produced by human players. Chapter 4 introduces a machine-learning algorithm for recognizing timbres, so that a robot can transcribe timbres played by a human during live performance. Chapter 5 introduces a technique that allows a robot to learn how to produce isolated instances of particular timbres by listening to a human play an examples of those timbres. The 6th and final chapter introduces a method that allows a robot to learn the musical context of different timbres; this is done in realtime during interactive improvisation between a human and robot, wherein the robot builds a statistical model of which timbres the human plays in which contexts, and uses this to inform its own playing.
ContributorsKrzyzaniak, Michael Joseph (Author) / Coleman, Grisha (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Artemiadis, Panagiotis (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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
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
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