Nowadays, most classification networks use one-hot encoding to represent categorical data because of its simplicity. However, one-hot encoding may affect the generalization ability as it neglects inter-class correlations. We observe that, even when a neural network trained with one-hot labels produces incorrect predictions, it still pays attention to the target image region and reveals which classes confuse the network. Inspired by this observation, we propose a confusion-focusing mechanism to address the class-confusion issue. Our confusion-focusing mechanism is implemented by a two-branch network architecture. Its baseline branch generates confusing classes, and its FocusNet branch, whose architecture is flexible, discriminates correct labels from these confusing classes. We also introduce a novel focus-picking loss function to improve classification accuracy by encouraging FocusNet to focus on the most confusing classes. The experimental results validate that our FocusNet is effective for image classification on common datasets, and that our focus-picking loss function can also benefit the current neural networks in improving their classification accuracy.
Deep learning models have shown their potential for several applications. However, most of the models are opaque and difficult to trust due to their complex reasoning - commonly known as the black-box problem. Some fields, such as medicine, require a high degree of transparency to accept and adopt such technologies. Consequently, creating explainable/interpretable models or applying post-hoc methods on classifiers to build trust in deep learning models are required. Moreover, deep learning methods can be used for segmentation tasks, which typically require hard-to-obtain, time-consuming manually-annotated segmentation labels for training. This paper introduces three inherently-explainable classifiers to tackle both of these problems as one. The localisation heatmaps provided by the networks -- representing the models' focus areas and being used in classification decision-making -- can be directly interpreted, without requiring any post-hoc methods to derive information for model explanation. The models are trained by using the input image and only the classification labels as ground-truth in a supervised fashion - without using any information about the location of the region of interest (i.e. the segmentation labels), making the segmentation training of the models weakly-supervised through classification labels. The final segmentation is obtained by thresholding these heatmaps. The models were employed for the task of multi-class brain tumour classification using two different datasets, resulting in the best F1-score of 0.93 for the supervised classification task while securing a median Dice score of 0.67$\pm$0.08 for the weakly-supervised segmentation task. Furthermore, the obtained accuracy on a subset of tumour-only images outperformed the state-of-the-art glioma tumour grading binary classifiers with the best model achieving 98.7\% accuracy.
Supervised learning methods can solve the given problem in the presence of a large set of labeled data. However, the acquisition of a dataset covering all the target classes typically requires manual labeling which is expensive and time-consuming. Zero-shot learning models are capable of classifying the unseen concepts by utilizing their semantic information. The present study introduces image embeddings as side information on zero-shot audio classification by using a nonlinear acoustic-semantic projection. We extract the semantic image representations from the Open Images dataset and evaluate the performance of the models on an audio subset of AudioSet using semantic information in different domains; image, audio, and textual. We demonstrate that the image embeddings can be used as semantic information to perform zero-shot audio classification. The experimental results show that the image and textual embeddings display similar performance both individually and together. We additionally calculate the semantic acoustic embeddings from the test samples to provide an upper limit to the performance. The results show that the classification performance is highly sensitive to the semantic relation between test and training classes and textual and image embeddings can reach up to the semantic acoustic embeddings when the seen and unseen classes are semantically similar.
Recent work has demonstrated the successful extraction of training data from generative language models. However, it is not evident whether such extraction is feasible in text classification models since the training objective is to predict the class label as opposed to next-word prediction. This poses an interesting challenge and raises an important question regarding the privacy of training data in text classification settings. Therefore, we study the potential privacy leakage in the text classification domain by investigating the problem of unintended memorization of training data that is not pertinent to the learning task. We propose an algorithm to extract missing tokens of a partial text by exploiting the likelihood of the class label provided by the model. We test the effectiveness of our algorithm by inserting canaries into the training set and attempting to extract tokens in these canaries post-training. In our experiments, we demonstrate that successful extraction is possible to some extent. This can also be used as an auditing strategy to assess any potential unauthorized use of personal data without consent.
Wireless sensor networks are among the most promising technologies of the current era because of their small size, lower cost, and ease of deployment. With the increasing number of wireless sensors, the probability of generating missing data also rises. This incomplete data could lead to disastrous consequences if used for decision-making. There is rich literature dealing with this problem. However, most approaches show performance degradation when a sizable amount of data is lost. Inspired by the emerging field of graph signal processing, this paper performs a new study of a Sobolev reconstruction algorithm in wireless sensor networks. Experimental comparisons on several publicly available datasets demonstrate that the algorithm surpasses multiple state-of-the-art techniques by a maximum margin of 54%. We further show that this algorithm consistently retrieves the missing data even during massive data loss situations.
Many modern deep-learning techniques do not work without enormous datasets. At the same time, several fields demand methods working in scarcity of data. This problem is even more complex when the samples have varying structures, as in the case of graphs. Graph representation learning techniques have recently proven successful in a variety of domains. Nevertheless, the employed architectures perform miserably when faced with data scarcity. On the other hand, few-shot learning allows employing modern deep learning models in scarce data regimes without waiving their effectiveness. In this work, we tackle the problem of few-shot graph classification, showing that equipping a simple distance metric learning baseline with a state-of-the-art graph embedder allows to obtain competitive results on the task.While the simplicity of the architecture is enough to outperform more complex ones, it also allows straightforward additions. To this end, we show that additional improvements may be obtained by encouraging a task-conditioned embedding space. Finally, we propose a MixUp-based online data augmentation technique acting in the latent space and show its effectiveness on the task.
In this paper, we propose a general framework for image classification using the attention mechanism and global context, which could incorporate with various network architectures to improve their performance. To investigate the capability of the global context, we compare four mathematical models and observe the global context encoded in the category disentangled conditional generative model could give more guidance as "know what is task irrelevant will also know what is relevant". Based on this observation, we define a novel Category Disentangled Global Context (CDGC) and devise a deep network to obtain it. By attending CDGC, the baseline networks could identify the objects of interest more accurately, thus improving the performance. We apply the framework to many different network architectures and compare with the state-of-the-art on four publicly available datasets. Extensive results validate the effectiveness and superiority of our approach. Code will be made public upon paper acceptance.
In Multi-Label Text Classification (MLTC), one sample can belong to more than one class. It is observed that most MLTC tasks, there are dependencies or correlations among labels. Existing methods tend to ignore the relationship among labels. In this paper, a graph attention network-based model is proposed to capture the attentive dependency structure among the labels. The graph attention network uses a feature matrix and a correlation matrix to capture and explore the crucial dependencies between the labels and generate classifiers for the task. The generated classifiers are applied to sentence feature vectors obtained from the text feature extraction network (BiLSTM) to enable end-to-end training. Attention allows the system to assign different weights to neighbor nodes per label, thus allowing it to learn the dependencies among labels implicitly. The results of the proposed model are validated on five real-world MLTC datasets. The proposed model achieves similar or better performance compared to the previous state-of-the-art models.
Many tasks in natural language processing can be viewed as multi-label classification problems. However, most of the existing models are trained with the standard cross-entropy loss function and use a fixed prediction policy (e.g., a threshold of 0.5) for all the labels, which completely ignores the complexity and dependencies among different labels. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning method to capture these complex label dependencies. More specifically, our method utilizes a meta-learner to jointly learn the training policies and prediction policies for different labels. The training policies are then used to train the classifier with the cross-entropy loss function, and the prediction policies are further implemented for prediction. Experimental results on fine-grained entity typing and text classification demonstrate that our proposed method can obtain more accurate multi-label classification results.
Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have been successfully applied in node classification tasks of network mining. However, most of these models based on neighborhood aggregation are usually shallow and lack the "graph pooling" mechanism, which prevents the model from obtaining adequate global information. In order to increase the receptive field, we propose a novel deep Hierarchical Graph Convolutional Network (H-GCN) for semi-supervised node classification. H-GCN first repeatedly aggregates structurally similar nodes to hyper-nodes and then refines the coarsened graph to the original to restore the representation for each node. Instead of merely aggregating one- or two-hop neighborhood information, the proposed coarsening procedure enlarges the receptive field for each node, hence more global information can be learned. Comprehensive experiments conducted on public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method over the state-of-art methods. Notably, our model gains substantial improvements when only a few labeled samples are provided.
High spectral dimensionality and the shortage of annotations make hyperspectral image (HSI) classification a challenging problem. Recent studies suggest that convolutional neural networks can learn discriminative spatial features, which play a paramount role in HSI interpretation. However, most of these methods ignore the distinctive spectral-spatial characteristic of hyperspectral data. In addition, a large amount of unlabeled data remains an unexploited gold mine for efficient data use. Therefore, we proposed an integration of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and probabilistic graphical models for HSI classification. Specifically, we used a spectral-spatial generator and a discriminator to identify land cover categories of hyperspectral cubes. Moreover, to take advantage of a large amount of unlabeled data, we adopted a conditional random field to refine the preliminary classification results generated by GANs. Experimental results obtained using two commonly studied datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieved encouraging classification accuracy using a small number of data for training.