In the research area of anomaly detection, novel and promising methods are frequently developed. However, most existing studies, especially those leveraging deep neural networks, exclusively focus on the detection task only and ignore the interpretability of the underlying models as well as their detection results. However, anomaly interpretation, which aims to provide explanation of why specific data instances are identified as anomalies, is an equally (if not more) important task in many real-world applications. In this work, we pursue highly interpretable anomaly detection via invariant rule mining. Specifically, we leverage decision tree learning and association rule mining to automatically generate invariant rules that are consistently satisfied by the underlying data generation process. The generated invariant rules can provide explicit explanation of anomaly detection results and thus are extremely useful for subsequent decision-making. Furthermore, our empirical evaluation shows that the proposed method can also achieve comparable performance in terms of AUC and partial AUC with popular anomaly detection models in various benchmark datasets.
Though anomaly detection (AD) can be viewed as a classification problem (nominal vs. anomalous) it is usually treated in an unsupervised manner since one typically does not have access to, or it is infeasible to utilize, a dataset that sufficiently characterizes what it means to be "anomalous." In this paper we present results demonstrating that this intuition surprisingly seems not to extend to deep AD on images. For a recent AD benchmark on ImageNet, classifiers trained to discern between normal samples and just a few (64) random natural images are able to outperform the current state of the art in deep AD. Experimentally we discover that the multiscale structure of image data makes example anomalies exceptionally informative.
Conventional rule learning algorithms aim at finding a set of simple rules, where each rule covers as many examples as possible. In this paper, we argue that the rules found in this way may not be the optimal explanations for each of the examples they cover. Instead, we propose an efficient algorithm that aims at finding the best rule covering each training example in a greedy optimization consisting of one specialization and one generalization loop. These locally optimal rules are collected and then filtered for a final rule set, which is much larger than the sets learned by conventional rule learning algorithms. A new example is classified by selecting the best among the rules that cover this example. In our experiments on small to very large datasets, the approach's average classification accuracy is higher than that of state-of-the-art rule learning algorithms. Moreover, the algorithm is highly efficient and can inherently be processed in parallel without affecting the learned rule set and so the classification accuracy. We thus believe that it closes an important gap for large-scale classification rule induction.
Active Learning (AL) aims to reduce the labeling burden by interactively querying the most informative observations from a data pool. Despite extensive research on improving AL query methods in the past years, recent studies have questioned the advantages of AL, especially in the light of emerging alternative training paradigms such as semi-supervised (Semi-SL) and self-supervised learning (Self-SL). Thus, today's AL literature paints an inconsistent picture and leaves practitioners wondering whether and how to employ AL in their tasks. We argue that this heterogeneous landscape is caused by a lack of a systematic and realistic evaluation of AL algorithms, including key parameters such as complex and imbalanced datasets, realistic labeling scenarios, systematic method configuration, and integration of Semi-SL and Self-SL. To this end, we present an AL benchmarking suite and run extensive experiments on five datasets shedding light on the questions: when and how to apply AL?
Backward compatibility of model predictions is a desired property when updating a machine learning driven application. It allows to seamlessly improve the underlying model without introducing regression bugs. In classification tasks these bugs occur in the form of negative flips. This means an instance that was correctly classified by the old model is now classified incorrectly by the updated model. This has direct negative impact on the user experience of such systems e.g. a frequently used voice assistant query is suddenly misclassified. A common reason to update the model is when new training data becomes available and needs to be incorporated. Simply retraining the model with the updated data introduces the unwanted negative flips. We study the problem of regression during data updates and propose Backward Compatible Weight Interpolation (BCWI). This method interpolates between the weights of the old and new model and we show in extensive experiments that it reduces negative flips without sacrificing the improved accuracy of the new model. BCWI is straight forward to implement and does not increase inference cost. We also explore the use of importance weighting during interpolation and averaging the weights of multiple new models in order to further reduce negative flips.
The automated detection of cancerous tumors has attracted interest mainly during the last decade, due to the necessity of early and efficient diagnosis that will lead to the most effective possible treatment of the impending risk. Several machine learning and artificial intelligence methodologies has been employed aiming to provide trustworthy helping tools that will contribute efficiently to this attempt. In this article, we present a low-complexity convolutional neural network architecture for tumor classification enhanced by a robust image augmentation methodology. The effectiveness of the presented deep learning model has been investigated based on 3 datasets containing brain, kidney and lung images, showing remarkable diagnostic efficiency with classification accuracies of 99.33%, 100% and 99.7% for the 3 datasets respectively. The impact of the augmentation preprocessing step has also been extensively examined using 4 evaluation measures. The proposed low-complexity scheme, in contrast to other models in the literature, renders our model quite robust to cases of overfitting that typically accompany small datasets frequently encountered in medical classification challenges. Finally, the model can be easily re-trained in case additional volume images are included, as its simplistic architecture does not impose a significant computational burden.
In human-robot collaboration, one challenging task is to teach a robot new yet unknown objects enabling it to interact with them. Thereby, gaze can contain valuable information. We investigate if it is possible to detect objects (object or no object) merely from gaze data and determine their bounding box parameters. For this purpose, we explore different sizes of temporal windows, which serve as a basis for the computation of heatmaps, i.e., the spatial distribution of the gaze data. Additionally, we analyze different grid sizes of these heatmaps, and demonstrate the functionality in a proof of concept using different machine learning techniques. Our method is characterized by its speed and resource efficiency compared to conventional object detectors. In order to generate the required data, we conducted a study with five subjects who could move freely and thus, turn towards arbitrary objects. This way, we chose a scenario for our data collection that is as realistic as possible. Since the subjects move while facing objects, the heatmaps also contain gaze data trajectories, complicating the detection and parameter regression. We make our data set publicly available to the research community for download.
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is critical to ensuring the reliability and safety of machine learning systems. For instance, in autonomous driving, we would like the driving system to issue an alert and hand over the control to humans when it detects unusual scenes or objects that it has never seen before and cannot make a safe decision. This problem first emerged in 2017 and since then has received increasing attention from the research community, leading to a plethora of methods developed, ranging from classification-based to density-based to distance-based ones. Meanwhile, several other problems are closely related to OOD detection in terms of motivation and methodology. These include anomaly detection (AD), novelty detection (ND), open set recognition (OSR), and outlier detection (OD). Despite having different definitions and problem settings, these problems often confuse readers and practitioners, and as a result, some existing studies misuse terms. In this survey, we first present a generic framework called generalized OOD detection, which encompasses the five aforementioned problems, i.e., AD, ND, OSR, OOD detection, and OD. Under our framework, these five problems can be seen as special cases or sub-tasks, and are easier to distinguish. Then, we conduct a thorough review of each of the five areas by summarizing their recent technical developments. We conclude this survey with open challenges and potential research directions.
Classic machine learning methods are built on the $i.i.d.$ assumption that training and testing data are independent and identically distributed. However, in real scenarios, the $i.i.d.$ assumption can hardly be satisfied, rendering the sharp drop of classic machine learning algorithms' performances under distributional shifts, which indicates the significance of investigating the Out-of-Distribution generalization problem. Out-of-Distribution (OOD) generalization problem addresses the challenging setting where the testing distribution is unknown and different from the training. This paper serves as the first effort to systematically and comprehensively discuss the OOD generalization problem, from the definition, methodology, evaluation to the implications and future directions. Firstly, we provide the formal definition of the OOD generalization problem. Secondly, existing methods are categorized into three parts based on their positions in the whole learning pipeline, namely unsupervised representation learning, supervised model learning and optimization, and typical methods for each category are discussed in detail. We then demonstrate the theoretical connections of different categories, and introduce the commonly used datasets and evaluation metrics. Finally, we summarize the whole literature and raise some future directions for OOD generalization problem. The summary of OOD generalization methods reviewed in this survey can be found at //out-of-distribution-generalization.com.
Weakly-Supervised Object Detection (WSOD) and Localization (WSOL), i.e., detecting multiple and single instances with bounding boxes in an image using image-level labels, are long-standing and challenging tasks in the CV community. With the success of deep neural networks in object detection, both WSOD and WSOL have received unprecedented attention. Hundreds of WSOD and WSOL methods and numerous techniques have been proposed in the deep learning era. To this end, in this paper, we consider WSOL is a sub-task of WSOD and provide a comprehensive survey of the recent achievements of WSOD. Specifically, we firstly describe the formulation and setting of the WSOD, including the background, challenges, basic framework. Meanwhile, we summarize and analyze all advanced techniques and training tricks for improving detection performance. Then, we introduce the widely-used datasets and evaluation metrics of WSOD. Lastly, we discuss the future directions of WSOD. We believe that these summaries can help pave a way for future research on WSOD and WSOL.
It is important to detect anomalous inputs when deploying machine learning systems. The use of larger and more complex inputs in deep learning magnifies the difficulty of distinguishing between anomalous and in-distribution examples. At the same time, diverse image and text data are available in enormous quantities. We propose leveraging these data to improve deep anomaly detection by training anomaly detectors against an auxiliary dataset of outliers, an approach we call Outlier Exposure (OE). This enables anomaly detectors to generalize and detect unseen anomalies. In extensive experiments on natural language processing and small- and large-scale vision tasks, we find that Outlier Exposure significantly improves detection performance. We also observe that cutting-edge generative models trained on CIFAR-10 may assign higher likelihoods to SVHN images than to CIFAR-10 images; we use OE to mitigate this issue. We also analyze the flexibility and robustness of Outlier Exposure, and identify characteristics of the auxiliary dataset that improve performance.