The performance of spectral clustering heavily relies on the quality of affinity matrix. A variety of affinity-matrix-construction (AMC) methods have been proposed but they have hyperparameters to determine beforehand, which requires strong experience and lead to difficulty in real applications especially when the inter-cluster similarity is high or/and the dataset is large. In addition, we often need to choose different AMC methods for different datasets, which still depends on experience. To solve these two challenging problems, in this paper, we present a simple yet effective method for automated spectral clustering. The main idea is to find the most reliable affinity matrix among a set of candidates given by different AMC methods with different hyperparameters, where the reliability is quantified by the \textit{relative-eigen-gap} of graph Laplacian introduced in this paper. We also implement the method using Bayesian optimization.We extend the method to large-scale datasets such as MNIST, on which the time cost is less than 90s and the clustering accuracy is state-of-the-art. Extensive experiments of natural image clustering show that our method is more versatile, accurate, and efficient than baseline methods.
As scene segmentation systems reach visually accurate results, many recent papers focus on making these network architectures faster, smaller and more efficient. In particular, studies often aim at designingreal-time'systems. Achieving this goal is particularly relevant in the context of real-time video understanding for autonomous vehicles, and robots. In this paper, we argue that the commonly used performance metric of mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) does not fully capture the information required to estimate the true performance of these networks when they operate inreal-time'. We propose a change of objective in the segmentation task, and its associated metric that encapsulates this missing information in the following way: We propose to predict the future output segmentation map that will match the future input frame at the time when the network finishes the processing. We introduce the associated latency-aware metric, from which we can determine a ranking. We perform latency timing experiments of some recent networks on different hardware and assess the performances of these networks on our proposed task. We propose improvements to scene segmentation networks to better perform on our task by using multi-frames input and increasing capacity in the initial convolutional layers.
In this paper, we propose a depth-first search (DFS) algorithm for searching maximum matchings in general graphs. Unlike blossom shrinking algorithms, which store all possible alternative alternating paths in the super-vertices shrunk from blossoms, the newly proposed algorithm does not involve blossom shrinking. The basic idea is to deflect the alternating path when facing blossoms. The algorithm maintains detour information in an auxiliary stack to minimize the redundant data structures. A benefit of our technique is to avoid spending time on shrinking and expanding blossoms. This DFS algorithm can determine a maximum matching of a general graph with $m$ edges and $n$ vertices in $O(mn)$ time with space complexity $O(n)$.
Approximately 50% of development resources are devoted to UI development tasks [9]. Occupying a large proportion of development resources, developing icons can be a time-consuming task, because developers need to consider not only effective implementation methods but also easy-to-understand descriptions. In this paper, we present Auto-Icon+, an approach for automatically generating readable and efficient code for icons from design artifacts. According to our interviews to understand the gap between designers (icons are assembled from multiple components) and developers (icons as single images), we apply a heuristic clustering algorithm to compose the components into an icon image. We then propose an approach based on a deep learning model and computer vision methods to convert the composed icon image to fonts with descriptive labels, thereby reducing the laborious manual effort for developers and facilitating UI development. We quantitatively evaluate the quality of our method in the real world UI development environment and demonstrate that our method offers developers accurate, efficient, readable, and usable code for icon designs, in terms of saving 65.2% implementing time.
In this paper, we propose a one-stage online clustering method called Contrastive Clustering (CC) which explicitly performs the instance- and cluster-level contrastive learning. To be specific, for a given dataset, the positive and negative instance pairs are constructed through data augmentations and then projected into a feature space. Therein, the instance- and cluster-level contrastive learning are respectively conducted in the row and column space by maximizing the similarities of positive pairs while minimizing those of negative ones. Our key observation is that the rows of the feature matrix could be regarded as soft labels of instances, and accordingly the columns could be further regarded as cluster representations. By simultaneously optimizing the instance- and cluster-level contrastive loss, the model jointly learns representations and cluster assignments in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experimental results show that CC remarkably outperforms 17 competitive clustering methods on six challenging image benchmarks. In particular, CC achieves an NMI of 0.705 (0.431) on the CIFAR-10 (CIFAR-100) dataset, which is an up to 19\% (39\%) performance improvement compared with the best baseline.
Hashing has been widely used in approximate nearest search for large-scale database retrieval for its computation and storage efficiency. Deep hashing, which devises convolutional neural network architecture to exploit and extract the semantic information or feature of images, has received increasing attention recently. In this survey, several deep supervised hashing methods for image retrieval are evaluated and I conclude three main different directions for deep supervised hashing methods. Several comments are made at the end. Moreover, to break through the bottleneck of the existing hashing methods, I propose a Shadow Recurrent Hashing(SRH) method as a try. Specifically, I devise a CNN architecture to extract the semantic features of images and design a loss function to encourage similar images projected close. To this end, I propose a concept: shadow of the CNN output. During optimization process, the CNN output and its shadow are guiding each other so as to achieve the optimal solution as much as possible. Several experiments on dataset CIFAR-10 show the satisfying performance of SRH.
Spectral clustering (SC) is a popular clustering technique to find strongly connected communities on a graph. SC can be used in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to implement pooling operations that aggregate nodes belonging to the same cluster. However, the eigendecomposition of the Laplacian is expensive and, since clustering results are graph-specific, pooling methods based on SC must perform a new optimization for each new sample. In this paper, we propose a graph clustering approach that addresses these limitations of SC. We formulate a continuous relaxation of the normalized minCUT problem and train a GNN to compute cluster assignments that minimize this objective. Our GNN-based implementation is differentiable, does not require to compute the spectral decomposition, and learns a clustering function that can be quickly evaluated on out-of-sample graphs. From the proposed clustering method, we design a graph pooling operator that overcomes some important limitations of state-of-the-art graph pooling techniques and achieves the best performance in several supervised and unsupervised tasks.
Graph convolutional network (GCN) has been successfully applied to many graph-based applications; however, training a large-scale GCN remains challenging. Current SGD-based algorithms suffer from either a high computational cost that exponentially grows with number of GCN layers, or a large space requirement for keeping the entire graph and the embedding of each node in memory. In this paper, we propose Cluster-GCN, a novel GCN algorithm that is suitable for SGD-based training by exploiting the graph clustering structure. Cluster-GCN works as the following: at each step, it samples a block of nodes that associate with a dense subgraph identified by a graph clustering algorithm, and restricts the neighborhood search within this subgraph. This simple but effective strategy leads to significantly improved memory and computational efficiency while being able to achieve comparable test accuracy with previous algorithms. To test the scalability of our algorithm, we create a new Amazon2M data with 2 million nodes and 61 million edges which is more than 5 times larger than the previous largest publicly available dataset (Reddit). For training a 3-layer GCN on this data, Cluster-GCN is faster than the previous state-of-the-art VR-GCN (1523 seconds vs 1961 seconds) and using much less memory (2.2GB vs 11.2GB). Furthermore, for training 4 layer GCN on this data, our algorithm can finish in around 36 minutes while all the existing GCN training algorithms fail to train due to the out-of-memory issue. Furthermore, Cluster-GCN allows us to train much deeper GCN without much time and memory overhead, which leads to improved prediction accuracy---using a 5-layer Cluster-GCN, we achieve state-of-the-art test F1 score 99.36 on the PPI dataset, while the previous best result was 98.71 by [16]. Our codes are publicly available at //github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/cluster_gcn.
Attributed graph clustering is challenging as it requires joint modelling of graph structures and node attributes. Recent progress on graph convolutional networks has proved that graph convolution is effective in combining structural and content information, and several recent methods based on it have achieved promising clustering performance on some real attributed networks. However, there is limited understanding of how graph convolution affects clustering performance and how to properly use it to optimize performance for different graphs. Existing methods essentially use graph convolution of a fixed and low order that only takes into account neighbours within a few hops of each node, which underutilizes node relations and ignores the diversity of graphs. In this paper, we propose an adaptive graph convolution method for attributed graph clustering that exploits high-order graph convolution to capture global cluster structure and adaptively selects the appropriate order for different graphs. We establish the validity of our method by theoretical analysis and extensive experiments on benchmark datasets. Empirical results show that our method compares favourably with state-of-the-art methods.
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.
Spectral clustering is a leading and popular technique in unsupervised data analysis. Two of its major limitations are scalability and generalization of the spectral embedding (i.e., out-of-sample-extension). In this paper we introduce a deep learning approach to spectral clustering that overcomes the above shortcomings. Our network, which we call SpectralNet, learns a map that embeds input data points into the eigenspace of their associated graph Laplacian matrix and subsequently clusters them. We train SpectralNet using a procedure that involves constrained stochastic optimization. Stochastic optimization allows it to scale to large datasets, while the constraints, which are implemented using a special-purpose output layer, allow us to keep the network output orthogonal. Moreover, the map learned by SpectralNet naturally generalizes the spectral embedding to unseen data points. To further improve the quality of the clustering, we replace the standard pairwise Gaussian affinities with affinities leaned from unlabeled data using a Siamese network. Additional improvement can be achieved by applying the network to code representations produced, e.g., by standard autoencoders. Our end-to-end learning procedure is fully unsupervised. In addition, we apply VC dimension theory to derive a lower bound on the size of SpectralNet. State-of-the-art clustering results are reported on the Reuters dataset. Our implementation is publicly available at //github.com/kstant0725/SpectralNet .