While convolutional neural networks need large labeled sets for training images, expert human supervision of such datasets can be very laborious. Proposed solutions propagate labels from a small set of supervised images to a large set of unsupervised ones to obtain sufficient truly-and-artificially labeled samples to train a deep neural network model. Yet, such solutions need many supervised images for validation. We present a loop in which a deep neural network (VGG-16) is trained from a set with more correctly labeled samples along iterations, created by using t-SNE to project the features of its last max-pooling layer into a 2D embedded space in which labels are propagated using the Optimum-Path Forest semi-supervised classifier. As the labeled set improves along iterations, it improves the features of the neural network. We show that this can significantly improve classification results on test data (using only 1\% to 5\% of supervised samples) of three private challenging datasets and two public ones.
We extend this idea further to explicitly model the distribution-level relation of one example to all other examples in a 1-vs-N manner. We propose a novel approach named distribution propagation graph network (DPGN) for few-shot learning. It conveys both the distribution-level relations and instance-level relations in each few-shot learning task. To combine the distribution-level relations and instance-level relations for all examples, we construct a dual complete graph network which consists of a point graph and a distribution graph with each node standing for an example. Equipped with dual graph architecture, DPGN propagates label information from labeled examples to unlabeled examples within several update generations. In extensive experiments on few-shot learning benchmarks, DPGN outperforms state-of-the-art results by a large margin in 5% $\sim$ 12% under supervised settings and 7% $\sim$ 13% under semi-supervised settings.
Label Propagation (LPA) and Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (GCN) are both message passing algorithms on graphs. Both solve the task of node classification but LPA propagates node label information across the edges of the graph, while GCN propagates and transforms node feature information. However, while conceptually similar, theoretical relation between LPA and GCN has not yet been investigated. Here we study the relationship between LPA and GCN in terms of two aspects: (1) feature/label smoothing where we analyze how the feature/label of one node is spread over its neighbors; And, (2) feature/label influence of how much the initial feature/label of one node influences the final feature/label of another node. Based on our theoretical analysis, we propose an end-to-end model that unifies GCN and LPA for node classification. In our unified model, edge weights are learnable, and the LPA serves as regularization to assist the GCN in learning proper edge weights that lead to improved classification performance. Our model can also be seen as learning attention weights based on node labels, which is more task-oriented than existing feature-based attention models. In a number of experiments on real-world graphs, our model shows superiority over state-of-the-art GCN-based methods in terms of node classification accuracy.
In this paper, we aim to improve the performance of semantic image segmentation in a semi-supervised setting in which training is effectuated with a reduced set of annotated images and additional non-annotated images. We present a method based on an ensemble of deep segmentation models. Each model is trained on a subset of the annotated data, and uses the non-annotated images to exchange information with the other models, similar to co-training. Even if each model learns on the same non-annotated images, diversity is preserved with the use of adversarial samples. Our results show that this ability to simultaneously train models, which exchange knowledge while preserving diversity, leads to state-of-the-art results on two challenging medical image datasets.
Meta-learning extracts the common knowledge acquired from learning different tasks and uses it for unseen tasks. It demonstrates a clear advantage on tasks that have insufficient training data, e.g., few-shot learning. In most meta-learning methods, tasks are implicitly related via the shared model or optimizer. In this paper, we show that a meta-learner that explicitly relates tasks on a graph describing the relations of their output dimensions (e.g., classes) can significantly improve the performance of few-shot learning. This type of graph is usually free or cheap to obtain but has rarely been explored in previous works. We study the prototype based few-shot classification, in which a prototype is generated for each class, such that the nearest neighbor search between the prototypes produces an accurate classification. We introduce "Gated Propagation Network (GPN)", which learns to propagate messages between prototypes of different classes on the graph, so that learning the prototype of each class benefits from the data of other related classes. In GPN, an attention mechanism is used for the aggregation of messages from neighboring classes, and a gate is deployed to choose between the aggregated messages and the message from the class itself. GPN is trained on a sequence of tasks from many-shot to few-shot generated by subgraph sampling. During training, it is able to reuse and update previously achieved prototypes from the memory in a life-long learning cycle. In experiments, we change the training-test discrepancy and test task generation settings for thorough evaluations. GPN outperforms recent meta-learning methods on two benchmark datasets in all studied cases.
The graph convolution network (GCN) is a widely-used facility to realize graph-based semi-supervised learning, which usually integrates node features and graph topologic information to build learning models. However, as for multi-label learning tasks, the supervision part of GCN simply minimizes the cross-entropy loss between the last layer outputs and the ground-truth label distribution, which tends to lose some useful information such as label correlations, so that prevents from obtaining high performance. In this paper, we pro-pose a novel GCN-based semi-supervised learning approach for multi-label classification, namely ML-GCN. ML-GCN first uses a GCN to embed the node features and graph topologic information. Then, it randomly generates a label matrix, where each row (i.e., label vector) represents a kind of labels. The dimension of the label vector is the same as that of the node vector before the last convolution operation of GCN. That is, all labels and nodes are embedded in a uniform vector space. Finally, during the ML-GCN model training, label vectors and node vectors are concatenated to serve as the inputs of the relaxed skip-gram model to detect the node-label correlation as well as the label-label correlation. Experimental results on several graph classification datasets show that the proposed ML-GCN outperforms four state-of-the-art methods.
Recently, label consistent k-svd(LC-KSVD) algorithm has been successfully applied in image classification. The objective function of LC-KSVD is consisted of reconstruction error, classification error and discriminative sparse codes error with l0-norm sparse regularization term. The l0-norm, however, leads to NP-hard issue. Despite some methods such as orthogonal matching pursuit can help solve this problem to some extent, it is quite difficult to find the optimum sparse solution. To overcome this limitation, we propose a label embedded dictionary learning(LEDL) method to utilise the $\ell_1$-norm as the sparse regularization term so that we can avoid the hard-to-optimize problem by solving the convex optimization problem. Alternating direction method of multipliers and blockwise coordinate descent algorithm are then used to optimize the corresponding objective function. Extensive experimental results on six benchmark datasets illustrate that the proposed algorithm has achieved superior performance compared to some conventional classification algorithms.
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.
Recently popularized graph neural networks achieve the state-of-the-art accuracy on a number of standard benchmark datasets for graph-based semi-supervised learning, improving significantly over existing approaches. These architectures alternate between a propagation layer that aggregates the hidden states of the local neighborhood and a fully-connected layer. Perhaps surprisingly, we show that a linear model, that removes all the intermediate fully-connected layers, is still able to achieve a performance comparable to the state-of-the-art models. This significantly reduces the number of parameters, which is critical for semi-supervised learning where number of labeled examples are small. This in turn allows a room for designing more innovative propagation layers. Based on this insight, we propose a novel graph neural network that removes all the intermediate fully-connected layers, and replaces the propagation layers with attention mechanisms that respect the structure of the graph. The attention mechanism allows us to learn a dynamic and adaptive local summary of the neighborhood to achieve more accurate predictions. In a number of experiments on benchmark citation networks datasets, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms competing methods. By examining the attention weights among neighbors, we show that our model provides some interesting insights on how neighbors influence each other.
In a weakly-supervised scenario object detectors need to be trained using image-level annotation alone. Since bounding-box-level ground truth is not available, most of the solutions proposed so far are based on an iterative, Multiple Instance Learning framework in which the current classifier is used to select the highest-confidence boxes in each image, which are treated as pseudo-ground truth in the next training iteration. However, the errors of an immature classifier can make the process drift, usually introducing many of false positives in the training dataset. To alleviate this problem, we propose in this paper a training protocol based on the self-paced learning paradigm. The main idea is to iteratively select a subset of images and boxes that are the most reliable, and use them for training. While in the past few years similar strategies have been adopted for SVMs and other classifiers, we are the first showing that a self-paced approach can be used with deep-network-based classifiers in an end-to-end training pipeline. The method we propose is built on the fully-supervised Fast-RCNN architecture and can be applied to similar architectures which represent the input image as a bag of boxes. We show state-of-the-art results on Pascal VOC 2007, Pascal VOC 2010 and ILSVRC 2013. On ILSVRC 2013 our results based on a low-capacity AlexNet network outperform even those weakly-supervised approaches which are based on much higher-capacity networks.
A novel multi-atlas based image segmentation method is proposed by integrating a semi-supervised label propagation method and a supervised random forests method in a pattern recognition based label fusion framework. The semi-supervised label propagation method takes into consideration local and global image appearance of images to be segmented and segments the images by propagating reliable segmentation results obtained by the supervised random forests method. Particularly, the random forests method is used to train a regression model based on image patches of atlas images for each voxel of the images to be segmented. The regression model is used to obtain reliable segmentation results to guide the label propagation for the segmentation. The proposed method has been compared with state-of-the-art multi-atlas based image segmentation methods for segmenting the hippocampus in MR images. The experiment results have demonstrated that our method obtained superior segmentation performance.