Deep metric learning (DML) based methods have been found very effective for content-based image retrieval (CBIR) in remote sensing (RS). For accurately learning the model parameters of deep neural networks, most of the DML methods require a high number of annotated training images, which can be costly to gather. To address this problem, in this paper we present an annotation cost efficient active learning (AL) method (denoted as ANNEAL). The proposed method aims to iteratively enrich the training set by annotating the most informative image pairs as similar or dissimilar, %answering a simple yes/no question, while accurately modelling a deep metric space. This is achieved by two consecutive steps. In the first step the pairwise image similarity is modelled based on the available training set. Then, in the second step the most uncertain and diverse (i.e., informative) image pairs are selected to be annotated. Unlike the existing AL methods for CBIR, at each AL iteration of ANNEAL a human expert is asked to annotate the most informative image pairs as similar/dissimilar. This significantly reduces the annotation cost compared to annotating images with land-use/land cover class labels. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our method. The code of ANNEAL is publicly available at //git.tu-berlin.de/rsim/ANNEAL.
The performance of graph representation learning is affected by the quality of graph input. While existing research usually pursues a globally smoothed graph embedding, we believe the rarely observed anomalies are as well harmful to an accurate prediction. This work establishes a graph learning scheme that automatically detects (locally) corrupted feature attributes and recovers robust embedding for prediction tasks. The detection operation leverages a graph autoencoder, which does not make any assumptions about the distribution of the local corruptions. It pinpoints the positions of the anomalous node attributes in an unbiased mask matrix, where robust estimations are recovered with sparsity promoting regularizer. The optimizer approaches a new embedding that is sparse in the framelet domain and conditionally close to input observations. Extensive experiments are provided to validate our proposed model can recover a robust graph representation from black-box poisoning and achieve excellent performance.
Machine learning (ML) is widely used today, especially through deep neural networks (DNNs), however, increasing computational load and resource requirements have led to cloud-based solutions. To address this problem, a new generation of networks called Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) has emerged, which mimic the behavior of the human brain to improve efficiency and reduce energy consumption. These networks often process large amounts of sensitive information, such as confidential data, and thus privacy issues arise. Homomorphic encryption (HE) offers a solution, allowing calculations to be performed on encrypted data without decrypting it. This research compares traditional DNNs and SNNs using the Brakerski/Fan-Vercauteren (BFV) encryption scheme. The LeNet-5 model, a widely-used convolutional architecture, is used for both DNN and SNN models based on the LeNet-5 architecture, and the networks are trained and compared using the FashionMNIST dataset. The results show that SNNs using HE achieve up to 40% higher accuracy than DNNs for low values of the plaintext modulus t, although their execution time is longer due to their time-coding nature with multiple time-steps.
Compressed Neural Networks have the potential to enable deep learning across new applications and smaller computational environments. However, understanding the range of learning tasks in which such models can succeed is not well studied. In this work, we apply sparse and binary-weighted Transformers to multivariate time series problems, showing that the lightweight models achieve accuracy comparable to that of dense floating-point Transformers of the same structure. Our model achieves favorable results across three time series learning tasks: classification, anomaly detection, and single-step forecasting. Additionally, to reduce the computational complexity of the attention mechanism, we apply two modifications, which show little to no decline in model performance: 1) in the classification task, we apply a fixed mask to the query, key, and value activations, and 2) for forecasting and anomaly detection, which rely on predicting outputs at a single point in time, we propose an attention mask to allow computation only at the current time step. Together, each compression technique and attention modification substantially reduces the number of non-zero operations necessary in the Transformer. We measure the computational savings of our approach over a range of metrics including parameter count, bit size, and floating point operation (FLOPs) count, showing up to a 53x reduction in storage size and up to 10.5x reduction in FLOPs.
Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely used for document classification. However, most existing methods are based on static word co-occurrence graphs without sentence-level information, which poses three challenges:(1) word ambiguity, (2) word synonymity, and (3) dynamic contextual dependency. To address these challenges, we propose a novel GNN-based sparse structure learning model for inductive document classification. Specifically, a document-level graph is initially generated by a disjoint union of sentence-level word co-occurrence graphs. Our model collects a set of trainable edges connecting disjoint words between sentences and employs structure learning to sparsely select edges with dynamic contextual dependencies. Graphs with sparse structures can jointly exploit local and global contextual information in documents through GNNs. For inductive learning, the refined document graph is further fed into a general readout function for graph-level classification and optimization in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments on several real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms most state-of-the-art results, and reveal the necessity to learn sparse structures for each document.
Contrastive learning models have achieved great success in unsupervised visual representation learning, which maximize the similarities between feature representations of different views of the same image, while minimize the similarities between feature representations of views of different images. In text summarization, the output summary is a shorter form of the input document and they have similar meanings. In this paper, we propose a contrastive learning model for supervised abstractive text summarization, where we view a document, its gold summary and its model generated summaries as different views of the same mean representation and maximize the similarities between them during training. We improve over a strong sequence-to-sequence text generation model (i.e., BART) on three different summarization datasets. Human evaluation also shows that our model achieves better faithfulness ratings compared to its counterpart without contrastive objectives.
Recent contrastive representation learning methods rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between multiple views of an underlying context. E.g., we can derive multiple views of a given image by applying data augmentation, or we can split a sequence into views comprising the past and future of some step in the sequence. Contrastive lower bounds on MI are easy to optimize, but have a strong underestimation bias when estimating large amounts of MI. We propose decomposing the full MI estimation problem into a sum of smaller estimation problems by splitting one of the views into progressively more informed subviews and by applying the chain rule on MI between the decomposed views. This expression contains a sum of unconditional and conditional MI terms, each measuring modest chunks of the total MI, which facilitates approximation via contrastive bounds. To maximize the sum, we formulate a contrastive lower bound on the conditional MI which can be approximated efficiently. We refer to our general approach as Decomposed Estimation of Mutual Information (DEMI). We show that DEMI can capture a larger amount of MI than standard non-decomposed contrastive bounds in a synthetic setting, and learns better representations in a vision domain and for dialogue generation.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a popular class of machine learning models whose major advantage is their ability to incorporate a sparse and discrete dependency structure between data points. Unfortunately, GNNs can only be used when such a graph-structure is available. In practice, however, real-world graphs are often noisy and incomplete or might not be available at all. With this work, we propose to jointly learn the graph structure and the parameters of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) by approximately solving a bilevel program that learns a discrete probability distribution on the edges of the graph. This allows one to apply GCNs not only in scenarios where the given graph is incomplete or corrupted but also in those where a graph is not available. We conduct a series of experiments that analyze the behavior of the proposed method and demonstrate that it outperforms related methods by a significant margin.
Deep learning has revolutionized many machine learning tasks in recent years, ranging from image classification and video processing to speech recognition and natural language understanding. The data in these tasks are typically represented in the Euclidean space. However, there is an increasing number of applications where data are generated from non-Euclidean domains and are represented as graphs with complex relationships and interdependency between objects. The complexity of graph data has imposed significant challenges on existing machine learning algorithms. Recently, many studies on extending deep learning approaches for graph data have emerged. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of graph neural networks (GNNs) in data mining and machine learning fields. We propose a new taxonomy to divide the state-of-the-art graph neural networks into different categories. With a focus on graph convolutional networks, we review alternative architectures that have recently been developed; these learning paradigms include graph attention networks, graph autoencoders, graph generative networks, and graph spatial-temporal networks. We further discuss the applications of graph neural networks across various domains and summarize the open source codes and benchmarks of the existing algorithms on different learning tasks. Finally, we propose potential research directions in this fast-growing field.
We advocate the use of implicit fields for learning generative models of shapes and introduce an implicit field decoder for shape generation, aimed at improving the visual quality of the generated shapes. An implicit field assigns a value to each point in 3D space, so that a shape can be extracted as an iso-surface. Our implicit field decoder is trained to perform this assignment by means of a binary classifier. Specifically, it takes a point coordinate, along with a feature vector encoding a shape, and outputs a value which indicates whether the point is outside the shape or not. By replacing conventional decoders by our decoder for representation learning and generative modeling of shapes, we demonstrate superior results for tasks such as shape autoencoding, generation, interpolation, and single-view 3D reconstruction, particularly in terms of visual quality.
Deep learning has yielded state-of-the-art performance on many natural language processing tasks including named entity recognition (NER). However, this typically requires large amounts of labeled data. In this work, we demonstrate that the amount of labeled training data can be drastically reduced when deep learning is combined with active learning. While active learning is sample-efficient, it can be computationally expensive since it requires iterative retraining. To speed this up, we introduce a lightweight architecture for NER, viz., the CNN-CNN-LSTM model consisting of convolutional character and word encoders and a long short term memory (LSTM) tag decoder. The model achieves nearly state-of-the-art performance on standard datasets for the task while being computationally much more efficient than best performing models. We carry out incremental active learning, during the training process, and are able to nearly match state-of-the-art performance with just 25\% of the original training data.