In this work we present a novel unsupervised framework for hard training example mining. The only input to the method is a collection of images relevant to the target application and a meaningful initial representation, provided e.g. by pre-trained CNN. Positive examples are distant points on a single manifold, while negative examples are nearby points on different manifolds. Both types of examples are revealed by disagreements between Euclidean and manifold similarities. The discovered examples can be used in training with any discriminative loss. The method is applied to unsupervised fine-tuning of pre-trained networks for fine-grained classification and particular object retrieval. Our models are on par or are outperforming prior models that are fully or partially supervised.
Few-shot Learning aims to learn classifiers for new classes with only a few training examples per class. Existing meta-learning or metric-learning based few-shot learning approaches are limited in handling diverse domains with various number of labels. The meta-learning approaches train a meta learner to predict weights of homogeneous-structured task-specific networks, requiring a uniform number of classes across tasks. The metric-learning approaches learn one task-invariant metric for all the tasks, and they fail if the tasks diverge. We propose to deal with these limitations with meta metric learning. Our meta metric learning approach consists of task-specific learners, that exploit metric learning to handle flexible labels, and a meta learner, that discovers good parameters and gradient decent to specify the metrics in task-specific learners. Thus the proposed model is able to handle unbalanced classes as well as to generate task-specific metrics. We test our approach in the `$k$-shot $N$-way' few-shot learning setting used in previous work and new realistic few-shot setting with diverse multi-domain tasks and flexible label numbers. Experiments show that our approach attains superior performances in both settings.
This work presents a new strategy for multi-class classification that requires no class-specific labels, but instead leverages pairwise similarity between examples, which is a weaker form of annotation. The proposed method, meta classification learning, optimizes a binary classifier for pairwise similarity prediction and through this process learns a multi-class classifier as a submodule. We formulate this approach, present a probabilistic graphical model for it, and derive a surprisingly simple loss function that can be used to learn neural network-based models. We then demonstrate that this same framework generalizes to the supervised, unsupervised cross-task, and semi-supervised settings. Our method is evaluated against state of the art in all three learning paradigms and shows a superior or comparable accuracy, providing evidence that learning multi-class classification without multi-class labels is a viable learning option.
We study object recognition under the constraint that each object class is only represented by very few observations. In such cases, naive supervised learning would lead to severe over-fitting in deep neural networks due to limited training data. We tackle this problem by creating much more training data through label propagation from the few labeled examples to a vast collection of unannotated images. Our main insight is that such a label propagation scheme can be highly effective when the similarity metric used for propagation is learned and transferred from other related domains with lots of data. We test our approach on semi-supervised learning, transfer learning and few-shot recognition, where we learn our similarity metric using various supervised/unsupervised pretraining methods, and transfer it to unlabeled data across different data distributions. By taking advantage of unlabeled data in this way, we achieve significant improvements on all three tasks. Notably, our approach outperforms current state-of-the-art techniques by an absolute $20\%$ for semi-supervised learning on CIFAR10, $10\%$ for transfer learning from ImageNet to CIFAR10, and $6\%$ for few-shot recognition on mini-ImageNet, when labeled examples are limited.
Deep learning has made remarkable achievement in many fields. However, learning the parameters of neural networks usually demands a large amount of labeled data. The algorithms of deep learning, therefore, encounter difficulties when applied to supervised learning where only little data are available. This specific task is called few-shot learning. To address it, we propose a novel algorithm for few-shot learning using discrete geometry, in the sense that the samples in a class are modeled as a reduced simplex. The volume of the simplex is used for the measurement of class scatter. During testing, combined with the test sample and the points in the class, a new simplex is formed. Then the similarity between the test sample and the class can be quantized with the ratio of volumes of the new simplex to the original class simplex. Moreover, we present an approach to constructing simplices using local regions of feature maps yielded by convolutional neural networks. Experiments on Omniglot and miniImageNet verify the effectiveness of our simplex algorithm on few-shot learning.
Tracking by detection is a common approach to solving the Multiple Object Tracking problem. In this paper we show how deep metric learning can be used to improve three aspects of tracking by detection. We train a convolutional neural network to learn an embedding function in a Siamese configuration on a large person re-identification dataset offline. It is then used to improve the online performance of tracking while retaining a high frame rate. We use this learned appearance metric to robustly build estimates of pedestrian's trajectories in the MOT16 dataset. In breaking with the tracking by detection model, we use our appearance metric to propose detections using the predicted state of a tracklet as a prior in the case where the detector fails. This method achieves competitive results in evaluation, especially among online, real-time approaches. We present an ablative study showing the impact of each of the three uses of our deep appearance metric.
A major goal of unsupervised learning is to discover data representations that are useful for subsequent tasks, without access to supervised labels during training. Typically, this goal is approached by minimizing a surrogate objective, such as the negative log likelihood of a generative model, with the hope that representations useful for subsequent tasks will arise incidentally. In this work, we propose instead to directly target a later desired task by meta-learning an unsupervised learning rule, which leads to representations useful for that task. Here, our desired task (meta-objective) is the performance of the representation on semi-supervised classification, and we meta-learn an algorithm -- an unsupervised weight update rule -- that produces representations that perform well under this meta-objective. Additionally, we constrain our unsupervised update rule to a be a biologically-motivated, neuron-local function, which enables it to generalize to novel neural network architectures. We show that the meta-learned update rule produces useful features and sometimes outperforms existing unsupervised learning techniques. We further show that the meta-learned unsupervised update rule generalizes to train networks with different widths, depths, and nonlinearities. It also generalizes to train on data with randomly permuted input dimensions and even generalizes from image datasets to a text task.
Metric learning learns a metric function from training data to calculate the similarity or distance between samples. From the perspective of feature learning, metric learning essentially learns a new feature space by feature transformation (e.g., Mahalanobis distance metric). However, traditional metric learning algorithms are shallow, which just learn one metric space (feature transformation). Can we further learn a better metric space from the learnt metric space? In other words, can we learn metric progressively and nonlinearly like deep learning by just using the existing metric learning algorithms? To this end, we present a hierarchical metric learning scheme and implement an online deep metric learning framework, namely ODML. Specifically, we take one online metric learning algorithm as a metric layer, followed by a nonlinear layer (i.e., ReLU), and then stack these layers modelled after the deep learning. The proposed ODML enjoys some nice properties, indeed can learn metric progressively and performs superiorly on some datasets. Various experiments with different settings have been conducted to verify these properties of the proposed ODML.
Clustering and classification critically rely on distance metrics that provide meaningful comparisons between data points. We present mixed-integer optimization approaches to find optimal distance metrics that generalize the Mahalanobis metric extensively studied in the literature. Additionally, we generalize and improve upon leading methods by removing reliance on pre-designated "target neighbors," "triplets," and "similarity pairs." Another salient feature of our method is its ability to enable active learning by recommending precise regions to sample after an optimal metric is computed to improve classification performance. This targeted acquisition can significantly reduce computational burden by ensuring training data completeness, representativeness, and economy. We demonstrate classification and computational performance of the algorithms through several simple and intuitive examples, followed by results on real image and medical datasets.
In recent years, person re-identification (re-id) catches great attention in both computer vision community and industry. In this paper, we propose a new framework for person re-identification with a triplet-based deep similarity learning using convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The network is trained with triplet input: two of them have the same class labels and the other one is different. It aims to learn the deep feature representation, with which the distance within the same class is decreased, while the distance between the different classes is increased as much as possible. Moreover, we trained the model jointly on six different datasets, which differs from common practice - one model is just trained on one dataset and tested also on the same one. However, the enormous number of possible triplet data among the large number of training samples makes the training impossible. To address this challenge, a double-sampling scheme is proposed to generate triplets of images as effective as possible. The proposed framework is evaluated on several benchmark datasets. The experimental results show that, our method is effective for the task of person re-identification and it is comparable or even outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.