We present a new representation learning framework, Intensity Profile Projection, for continuous-time dynamic network data. Given triples $(i,j,t)$, each representing a time-stamped ($t$) interaction between two entities ($i,j$), our procedure returns a continuous-time trajectory for each node, representing its behaviour over time. The framework consists of three stages: estimating pairwise intensity functions, e.g. via kernel smoothing; learning a projection which minimises a notion of intensity reconstruction error; and constructing evolving node representations via the learned projection. The trajectories satisfy two properties, known as structural and temporal coherence, which we see as fundamental for reliable inference. Moreoever, we develop estimation theory providing tight control on the error of any estimated trajectory, indicating that the representations could even be used in quite noise-sensitive follow-on analyses. The theory also elucidates the role of smoothing as a bias-variance trade-off, and shows how we can reduce the level of smoothing as the signal-to-noise ratio increases on account of the algorithm `borrowing strength' across the network.
We present ELSA, a practical solution for creating deep networks that can easily be deployed at different levels of sparsity. The core idea is to embed one or more sparse networks within a single dense network as a proper subset of the weights. At prediction time, any sparse model can be extracted effortlessly simply be zeroing out weights according to a predefined mask. ELSA is simple, powerful and highly flexible. It can use essentially any existing technique for network sparsification and network training. In particular, it does not restrict the loss function, architecture or the optimization technique. Our experiments show that ELSA's advantages of flexible deployment comes with no or just a negligible reduction in prediction quality compared to the standard way of using multiple sparse networks that are trained and stored independently.
We present a novel deep learning-based framework: Embedded Feature Similarity Optimization with Specific Parameter Initialization (SOPI) for 2D/3D medical image registration which is a most challenging problem due to the difficulty such as dimensional mismatch, heavy computation load and lack of golden evaluation standard. The framework we design includes a parameter specification module to efficiently choose initialization pose parameter and a fine-registration module to align images. The proposed framework takes extracting multi-scale features into consideration using a novel composite connection encoder with special training techniques. We compare the method with both learning-based methods and optimization-based methods on a in-house CT/X-ray dataset as well as simulated data to further evaluate performance. Our experiments demonstrate that the method in this paper has improved the registration performance, and thereby outperforms the existing methods in terms of accuracy and running time. We also show the potential of the proposed method as an initial pose estimator. The code is available at //github.com/m1nhengChen/SOPI
In this letter, we present a neural field-based real-time monocular mapping framework for accurate and dense Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). Recent neural mapping frameworks show promising results, but rely on RGB-D or pose inputs, or cannot run in real-time. To address these limitations, our approach integrates dense-SLAM with neural implicit fields. Specifically, our dense SLAM approach runs parallel tracking and global optimization, while a neural field-based map is constructed incrementally based on the latest SLAM estimates. For the efficient construction of neural fields, we employ multi-resolution grid encoding and signed distance function (SDF) representation. This allows us to keep the map always up-to-date and adapt instantly to global updates via loop closing. For global consistency, we propose an efficient Sim(3)-based pose graph bundle adjustment (PGBA) approach to run online loop closing and mitigate the pose and scale drift. To enhance depth accuracy further, we incorporate learned monocular depth priors. We propose a novel joint depth and scale adjustment (JDSA) module to solve the scale ambiguity inherent in depth priors. Extensive evaluations across synthetic and real-world datasets validate that our approach outperforms existing methods in accuracy and map completeness while preserving real-time performance.
This paper addresses the growing interest in deploying deep learning models directly in-sensor. We present "Q-Segment", a quantized real-time segmentation algorithm, and conduct a comprehensive evaluation on two low-power edge vision platforms, namely Sony IMX500, which has an in-sensors processor, and Sony Spresense, a low-power multi-core ARM Cortex-M microcontroller. One of the main goals of the model is to achieve end-to-end image segmentation for vessel-based medical diagnosis. Deployed on the IMX500 platform, Q-Segment achieves ultra-low inference time in-sensor of only 1.9 ms and energy consumption of only 5.7 mJ. We compare the proposed network with outperforming existing networks on various platforms by a factor of 75x (compared to ERFNet). The network architecture employs an encoder-decoder structure with skip connections, and results in a binary accuracy of 97.25% and an Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC) of 96.97% on the CHASE dataset. This research contributes valuable insights into edge-based image segmentation, laying the foundation for efficient algorithms tailored to low-power environments.
Support vector machines (SVMs) are well-studied supervised learning models for binary classification. In many applications, large amounts of samples can be cheaply and easily obtained. What is often a costly and error-prone process is to manually label these instances. Semi-supervised support vector machines (S3VMs) extend the well-known SVM classifiers to the semi-supervised approach, aiming at maximizing the margin between samples in the presence of unlabeled data. By leveraging both labeled and unlabeled data, S3VMs attempt to achieve better accuracy and robustness compared to traditional SVMs. Unfortunately, the resulting optimization problem is non-convex and hence difficult to solve exactly. In this paper, we present a new branch-and-cut approach for S3VMs using semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations. We apply optimality-based bound tightening to bound the feasible set. Box constraints allow us to include valid inequalities, strengthening the lower bound. The resulting SDP relaxation provides bounds significantly stronger than the ones available in the literature. For the upper bound, instead, we define a local search exploiting the solution of the SDP relaxation. Computational results highlight the efficiency of the algorithm, showing its capability to solve instances with a number of data points 10 times larger than the ones solved in the literature.
Different from Composed Image Retrieval task that requires expensive labels for training task-specific models, Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval (ZS-CIR) involves diverse tasks with a broad range of visual content manipulation intent that could be related to domain, scene, object, and attribute. The key challenge for ZS-CIR tasks is to learn a more accurate image representation that has adaptive attention to the reference image for various manipulation descriptions. In this paper, we propose a novel context-dependent mapping network, named Context-I2W, for adaptively converting description-relevant Image information into a pseudo-word token composed of the description for accurate ZS-CIR. Specifically, an Intent View Selector first dynamically learns a rotation rule to map the identical image to a task-specific manipulation view. Then a Visual Target Extractor further captures local information covering the main targets in ZS-CIR tasks under the guidance of multiple learnable queries. The two complementary modules work together to map an image to a context-dependent pseudo-word token without extra supervision. Our model shows strong generalization ability on four ZS-CIR tasks, including domain conversion, object composition, object manipulation, and attribute manipulation. It obtains consistent and significant performance boosts ranging from 1.88% to 3.60% over the best methods and achieves new state-of-the-art results on ZS-CIR. Our code is available at //github.com/Pter61/context-i2w.
We present VeriX, a first step towards verified explainability of machine learning models in safety-critical applications. Specifically, our sound and optimal explanations can guarantee prediction invariance against bounded perturbations. We utilise constraint solving techniques together with feature sensitivity ranking to efficiently compute these explanations. We evaluate our approach on image recognition benchmarks and a real-world scenario of autonomous aircraft taxiing.
As an effective strategy, data augmentation (DA) alleviates data scarcity scenarios where deep learning techniques may fail. It is widely applied in computer vision then introduced to natural language processing and achieves improvements in many tasks. One of the main focuses of the DA methods is to improve the diversity of training data, thereby helping the model to better generalize to unseen testing data. In this survey, we frame DA methods into three categories based on the diversity of augmented data, including paraphrasing, noising, and sampling. Our paper sets out to analyze DA methods in detail according to the above categories. Further, we also introduce their applications in NLP tasks as well as the challenges.
Meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) extracts knowledge from previous tasks and achieves fast adaptation to new tasks. Despite recent progress, efficient exploration in meta-RL remains a key challenge in sparse-reward tasks, as it requires quickly finding informative task-relevant experiences in both meta-training and adaptation. To address this challenge, we explicitly model an exploration policy learning problem for meta-RL, which is separated from exploitation policy learning, and introduce a novel empowerment-driven exploration objective, which aims to maximize information gain for task identification. We derive a corresponding intrinsic reward and develop a new off-policy meta-RL framework, which efficiently learns separate context-aware exploration and exploitation policies by sharing the knowledge of task inference. Experimental evaluation shows that our meta-RL method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on various sparse-reward MuJoCo locomotion tasks and more complex sparse-reward Meta-World tasks.
This paper describes a general framework for learning Higher-Order Network Embeddings (HONE) from graph data based on network motifs. The HONE framework is highly expressive and flexible with many interchangeable components. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of learning higher-order network representations. In all cases, HONE outperforms recent embedding methods that are unable to capture higher-order structures with a mean relative gain in AUC of $19\%$ (and up to $75\%$ gain) across a wide variety of networks and embedding methods.