There are various cluster validity indices used for evaluating clustering results. One of the main objectives of using these indices is to seek the optimal unknown number of clusters. Some indices work well for clusters with different densities, sizes, and shapes. Yet, one shared weakness of those validity indices is that they often provide only one optimal number of clusters. That number is unknown in real-world problems, and there might be more than one possible option. We develop a new cluster validity index based on a correlation between an actual distance between a pair of data points and a centroid distance of clusters that the two points occupy. Our proposed index constantly yields several local peaks and overcomes the previously stated weakness. Several experiments in different scenarios, including UCI real-world data sets, have been conducted to compare the proposed validity index with several well-known ones. An R package related to this new index called NCvalid is available at //github.com/nwiroonsri/NCvalid.
Studying the properties of stochastic noise to optimize complex non-convex functions has been an active area of research in the field of machine learning. Prior work has shown that the noise of stochastic gradient descent improves optimization by overcoming undesirable obstacles in the landscape. Moreover, injecting artificial Gaussian noise has become a popular idea to quickly escape saddle points. Indeed, in the absence of reliable gradient information, the noise is used to explore the landscape, but it is unclear what type of noise is optimal in terms of exploration ability. In order to narrow this gap in our knowledge, we study a general type of continuous-time non-Markovian process, based on fractional Brownian motion, that allows for the increments of the process to be correlated. This generalizes processes based on Brownian motion, such as the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. We demonstrate how to discretize such processes which gives rise to the new algorithm fPGD. This method is a generalization of the known algorithms PGD and Anti-PGD. We study the properties of fPGD both theoretically and empirically, demonstrating that it possesses exploration abilities that, in some cases, are favorable over PGD and Anti-PGD. These results open the field to novel ways to exploit noise for training machine learning models.
Deep metric learning (DML) aims to minimize empirical expected loss of the pairwise intra-/inter- class proximity violations in the embedding image. We relate DML to feasibility problem of finite chance constraints. We show that minimizer of proxy-based DML satisfies certain chance constraints, and that the worst case generalization performance of the proxy-based methods can be characterized by the radius of the smallest ball around a class proxy to cover the entire domain of the corresponding class samples, suggesting multiple proxies per class helps performance. To provide a scalable algorithm as well as exploiting more proxies, we consider the chance constraints implied by the minimizers of proxy-based DML instances and reformulate DML as finding a feasible point in intersection of such constraints, resulting in a problem to be approximately solved by iterative projections. Simply put, we repeatedly train a regularized proxy-based loss and re-initialize the proxies with the embeddings of the deliberately selected new samples. We apply our method with the well-accepted losses and evaluate on four popular benchmark datasets for image retrieval. Outperforming state-of-the-art, our method consistently improves the performance of the applied losses. Code is available at: //github.com/yetigurbuz/ccp-dml
Conformal prediction is a popular, modern technique for providing valid predictive inference for arbitrary machine learning models. Its validity relies on the assumptions of exchangeability of the data, and symmetry of the given model fitting algorithm as a function of the data. However, exchangeability is often violated when predictive models are deployed in practice. For example, if the data distribution drifts over time, then the data points are no longer exchangeable; moreover, in such settings, we might want to use a nonsymmetric algorithm that treats recent observations as more relevant. This paper generalizes conformal prediction to deal with both aspects: we employ weighted quantiles to introduce robustness against distribution drift, and design a new randomization technique to allow for algorithms that do not treat data points symmetrically. Our new methods are provably robust, with substantially less loss of coverage when exchangeability is violated due to distribution drift or other challenging features of real data, while also achieving the same coverage guarantees as existing conformal prediction methods if the data points are in fact exchangeable. We demonstrate the practical utility of these new tools with simulations and real-data experiments on electricity and election forecasting.
Feature transformation aims to extract a good representation (feature) space by mathematically transforming existing features. It is crucial to address the curse of dimensionality, enhance model generalization, overcome data sparsity, and expand the availability of classic models. Current research focuses on domain knowledge-based feature engineering or learning latent representations; nevertheless, these methods are not entirely automated and cannot produce a traceable and optimal representation space. When rebuilding a feature space for a machine learning task, can these limitations be addressed concurrently? In this extension study, we present a self-optimizing framework for feature transformation. To achieve a better performance, we improved the preliminary work by (1) obtaining an advanced state representation for enabling reinforced agents to comprehend the current feature set better; and (2) resolving Q-value overestimation in reinforced agents for learning unbiased and effective policies. Finally, to make experiments more convincing than the preliminary work, we conclude by adding the outlier detection task with five datasets, evaluating various state representation approaches, and comparing different training strategies. Extensive experiments and case studies show that our work is more effective and superior.
Joint synthesis of images and segmentation masks with generative adversarial networks (GANs) is promising to reduce the effort needed for collecting image data with pixel-wise annotations. However, to learn high-fidelity image-mask synthesis, existing GAN approaches first need a pre-training phase requiring large amounts of image data, which limits their utilization in restricted image domains. In this work, we take a step to reduce this limitation, introducing the task of one-shot image-mask synthesis. We aim to generate diverse images and their segmentation masks given only a single labelled example, and assuming, contrary to previous models, no access to any pre-training data. To this end, inspired by the recent architectural developments of single-image GANs, we introduce our OSMIS model which enables the synthesis of segmentation masks that are precisely aligned to the generated images in the one-shot regime. Besides achieving the high fidelity of generated masks, OSMIS outperforms state-of-the-art single-image GAN models in image synthesis quality and diversity. In addition, despite not using any additional data, OSMIS demonstrates an impressive ability to serve as a source of useful data augmentation for one-shot segmentation applications, providing performance gains that are complementary to standard data augmentation techniques. Code is available at //github.com/ boschresearch/one-shot-synthesis
Facial 3D Morphable Models are a main computer vision subject with countless applications and have been highly optimized in the last two decades. The tremendous improvements of deep generative networks have created various possibilities for improving such models and have attracted wide interest. Moreover, the recent advances in neural radiance fields, are revolutionising novel-view synthesis of known scenes. In this work, we present a facial 3D Morphable Model, which exploits both of the above, and can accurately model a subject's identity, pose and expression and render it in arbitrary illumination. This is achieved by utilizing a powerful deep style-based generator to overcome two main weaknesses of neural radiance fields, their rigidity and rendering speed. We introduce a style-based generative network that synthesizes in one pass all and only the required rendering samples of a neural radiance field. We create a vast labelled synthetic dataset of facial renders, and train the network on these data, so that it can accurately model and generalize on facial identity, pose and appearance. Finally, we show that this model can accurately be fit to "in-the-wild" facial images of arbitrary pose and illumination, extract the facial characteristics, and be used to re-render the face in controllable conditions.
We introduce two new tools to assess the validity of statistical distributions. These tools are based on components derived from a new statistical quantity, the $comparison$ $curve$. The first tool is a graphical representation of these components on a $bar$ $plot$ (B plot), which can provide a detailed appraisal of the validity of the statistical model, in particular when supplemented by acceptance regions related to the model. The knowledge gained from this representation can sometimes suggest an existing $goodness$-$of$-$fit$ test to supplement this visual assessment with a control of the type I error. Otherwise, an adaptive test may be preferable and the second tool is the combination of these components to produce a powerful $\chi^2$-type goodness-of-fit test. Because the number of these components can be large, we introduce a new selection rule to decide, in a data driven fashion, on their proper number to take into consideration. In a simulation, our goodness-of-fit tests are seen to be powerwise competitive with the best solutions that have been recommended in the context of a fully specified model as well as when some parameters must be estimated. Practical examples show how to use these tools to derive principled information about where the model departs from the data.
Unsupervised domain adaptation has recently emerged as an effective paradigm for generalizing deep neural networks to new target domains. However, there is still enormous potential to be tapped to reach the fully supervised performance. In this paper, we present a novel active learning strategy to assist knowledge transfer in the target domain, dubbed active domain adaptation. We start from an observation that energy-based models exhibit free energy biases when training (source) and test (target) data come from different distributions. Inspired by this inherent mechanism, we empirically reveal that a simple yet efficient energy-based sampling strategy sheds light on selecting the most valuable target samples than existing approaches requiring particular architectures or computation of the distances. Our algorithm, Energy-based Active Domain Adaptation (EADA), queries groups of targe data that incorporate both domain characteristic and instance uncertainty into every selection round. Meanwhile, by aligning the free energy of target data compact around the source domain via a regularization term, domain gap can be implicitly diminished. Through extensive experiments, we show that EADA surpasses state-of-the-art methods on well-known challenging benchmarks with substantial improvements, making it a useful option in the open world. Code is available at //github.com/BIT-DA/EADA.
Since real-world objects and their interactions are often multi-modal and multi-typed, heterogeneous networks have been widely used as a more powerful, realistic, and generic superclass of traditional homogeneous networks (graphs). Meanwhile, representation learning (\aka~embedding) has recently been intensively studied and shown effective for various network mining and analytical tasks. In this work, we aim to provide a unified framework to deeply summarize and evaluate existing research on heterogeneous network embedding (HNE), which includes but goes beyond a normal survey. Since there has already been a broad body of HNE algorithms, as the first contribution of this work, we provide a generic paradigm for the systematic categorization and analysis over the merits of various existing HNE algorithms. Moreover, existing HNE algorithms, though mostly claimed generic, are often evaluated on different datasets. Understandable due to the application favor of HNE, such indirect comparisons largely hinder the proper attribution of improved task performance towards effective data preprocessing and novel technical design, especially considering the various ways possible to construct a heterogeneous network from real-world application data. Therefore, as the second contribution, we create four benchmark datasets with various properties regarding scale, structure, attribute/label availability, and \etc.~from different sources, towards handy and fair evaluations of HNE algorithms. As the third contribution, we carefully refactor and amend the implementations and create friendly interfaces for 13 popular HNE algorithms, and provide all-around comparisons among them over multiple tasks and experimental settings.
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.