Numerous fields, such as ecology, biology, and neuroscience, use animal recordings to track and measure animal behaviour. Over time, a significant volume of such data has been produced, but some computer vision techniques cannot explore it due to the lack of annotations. To address this, we propose an approach for estimating 2D mouse body pose from unlabelled images using a synthetically generated empirical pose prior. Our proposal is based on a recent self-supervised method for estimating 2D human pose that uses single images and a set of unpaired typical 2D poses within a GAN framework. We adapt this method to the limb structure of the mouse and generate the empirical prior of 2D poses from a synthetic 3D mouse model, thereby avoiding manual annotation. In experiments on a new mouse video dataset, we evaluate the performance of the approach by comparing pose predictions to a manually obtained ground truth. We also compare predictions with those from a supervised state-of-the-art method for animal pose estimation. The latter evaluation indicates promising results despite the lack of paired training data. Finally, qualitative results using a dataset of horse images show the potential of the setting to adapt to other animal species.
In neural network training, RMSProp and ADAM remain widely favoured optimization algorithms. One of the keys to their performance lies in selecting the correct step size, which can significantly influence their effectiveness. It is worth noting that these algorithms performance can vary considerably, depending on the chosen step sizes. Additionally, questions about their theoretical convergence properties continue to be a subject of interest. In this paper, we theoretically analyze a constant stepsize version of ADAM in the non-convex setting. We show sufficient conditions for the stepsize to achieve almost sure asymptotic convergence of the gradients to zero with minimal assumptions. We also provide runtime bounds for deterministic ADAM to reach approximate criticality when working with smooth, non-convex functions.
Variable selection on the large-scale networks has been extensively studied in the literature. While most of the existing methods are limited to the local functionals especially the graph edges, this paper focuses on selecting the discrete hub structures of the networks. Specifically, we propose an inferential method, called StarTrek filter, to select the hub nodes with degrees larger than a certain thresholding level in the high dimensional graphical models and control the false discovery rate (FDR). Discovering hub nodes in the networks is challenging: there is no straightforward statistic for testing the degree of a node due to the combinatorial structures; complicated dependence in the multiple testing problem is hard to characterize and control. In methodology, the StarTrek filter overcomes this by constructing p-values based on the maximum test statistics via the Gaussian multiplier bootstrap. In theory, we show that the StarTrek filter can control the FDR by providing accurate bounds on the approximation errors of the quantile estimation and addressing the dependence structures among the maximal statistics. To this end, we establish novel Cram\'er-type comparison bounds for the high dimensional Gaussian random vectors. Comparing to the Gaussian comparison bound via the Kolmogorov distance established by \citet{chernozhukov2014anti}, our Cram\'er-type comparison bounds establish the relative difference between the distribution functions of two high dimensional Gaussian random vectors. We illustrate the validity of the StarTrek filter in a series of numerical experiments and apply it to the genotype-tissue expression dataset to discover central regulator genes.
Inverse rendering methods aim to estimate geometry, materials and illumination from multi-view RGB images. In order to achieve better decomposition, recent approaches attempt to model indirect illuminations reflected from different materials via Spherical Gaussians (SG), which, however, tends to blur the high-frequency reflection details. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end inverse rendering pipeline that decomposes materials and illumination from multi-view images, while considering near-field indirect illumination. In a nutshell, we introduce the Monte Carlo sampling based path tracing and cache the indirect illumination as neural radiance, enabling a physics-faithful and easy-to-optimize inverse rendering method. To enhance efficiency and practicality, we leverage SG to represent the smooth environment illuminations and apply importance sampling techniques. To supervise indirect illuminations from unobserved directions, we develop a novel radiance consistency constraint between implicit neural radiance and path tracing results of unobserved rays along with the joint optimization of materials and illuminations, thus significantly improving the decomposition performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art on multiple synthetic and real datasets, especially in terms of inter-reflection decomposition.Our code and data are available at //woolseyyy.github.io/nefii/.
Visual as well as genetic biometrics are routinely employed to identify species and individuals in biological applications. However, no attempts have been made in this domain to computationally enhance visual classification of rare classes with little image data via genetics. In this paper, we thus propose aligned visual-genetic inference spaces with the aim to implicitly encode cross-domain associations for improved performance. We demonstrate for the first time that such alignment can be achieved via deep embedding models and that the approach is directly applicable to boosting long-tailed recognition (LTR) particularly for rare species. We experimentally demonstrate the efficacy of the concept via application to microscopic imagery of 30k+ planktic foraminifer shells across 32 species when used together with independent genetic data samples. Most importantly for practitioners, we show that visual-genetic alignment can significantly benefit visual-only recognition of the rarest species. Technically, we pre-train a visual ResNet50 deep learning model using triplet loss formulations to create an initial embedding space. We re-structure this space based on genetic anchors embedded via a Sequence Graph Transform (SGT) and linked to visual data by cross-domain cosine alignment. We show that an LTR approach improves the state-of-the-art across all benchmarks and that adding our visual-genetic alignment improves per-class and particularly rare tail class benchmarks significantly further. We conclude that visual-genetic alignment can be a highly effective tool for complementing visual biological data containing rare classes. The concept proposed may serve as an important future tool for integrating genetics and imageomics towards a more complete scientific representation of taxonomic spaces and life itself. Code, weights, and data splits are published for full reproducibility.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are widely used for analyzing graph-structured data. Most GNN methods are highly sensitive to the quality of graph structures and usually require a perfect graph structure for learning informative embeddings. However, the pervasiveness of noise in graphs necessitates learning robust representations for real-world problems. To improve the robustness of GNN models, many studies have been proposed around the central concept of Graph Structure Learning (GSL), which aims to jointly learn an optimized graph structure and corresponding representations. Towards this end, in the presented survey, we broadly review recent progress of GSL methods for learning robust representations. Specifically, we first formulate a general paradigm of GSL, and then review state-of-the-art methods classified by how they model graph structures, followed by applications that incorporate the idea of GSL in other graph tasks. Finally, we point out some issues in current studies and discuss future directions.
Deep neural networks have been able to outperform humans in some cases like image recognition and image classification. However, with the emergence of various novel categories, the ability to continuously widen the learning capability of such networks from limited samples, still remains a challenge. Techniques like Meta-Learning and/or few-shot learning showed promising results, where they can learn or generalize to a novel category/task based on prior knowledge. In this paper, we perform a study of the existing few-shot meta-learning techniques in the computer vision domain based on their method and evaluation metrics. We provide a taxonomy for the techniques and categorize them as data-augmentation, embedding, optimization and semantics based learning for few-shot, one-shot and zero-shot settings. We then describe the seminal work done in each category and discuss their approach towards solving the predicament of learning from few samples. Lastly we provide a comparison of these techniques on the commonly used benchmark datasets: Omniglot, and MiniImagenet, along with a discussion towards the future direction of improving the performance of these techniques towards the final goal of outperforming humans.
Many tasks in natural language processing can be viewed as multi-label classification problems. However, most of the existing models are trained with the standard cross-entropy loss function and use a fixed prediction policy (e.g., a threshold of 0.5) for all the labels, which completely ignores the complexity and dependencies among different labels. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning method to capture these complex label dependencies. More specifically, our method utilizes a meta-learner to jointly learn the training policies and prediction policies for different labels. The training policies are then used to train the classifier with the cross-entropy loss function, and the prediction policies are further implemented for prediction. Experimental results on fine-grained entity typing and text classification demonstrate that our proposed method can obtain more accurate multi-label classification results.
Humans and animals have the ability to continually acquire, fine-tune, and transfer knowledge and skills throughout their lifespan. This ability, referred to as lifelong learning, is mediated by a rich set of neurocognitive mechanisms that together contribute to the development and specialization of our sensorimotor skills as well as to long-term memory consolidation and retrieval. Consequently, lifelong learning capabilities are crucial for autonomous agents interacting in the real world and processing continuous streams of information. However, lifelong learning remains a long-standing challenge for machine learning and neural network models since the continual acquisition of incrementally available information from non-stationary data distributions generally leads to catastrophic forgetting or interference. This limitation represents a major drawback for state-of-the-art deep neural network models that typically learn representations from stationary batches of training data, thus without accounting for situations in which information becomes incrementally available over time. In this review, we critically summarize the main challenges linked to lifelong learning for artificial learning systems and compare existing neural network approaches that alleviate, to different extents, catastrophic forgetting. We discuss well-established and emerging research motivated by lifelong learning factors in biological systems such as structural plasticity, memory replay, curriculum and transfer learning, intrinsic motivation, and multisensory integration.
Many natural language processing tasks solely rely on sparse dependencies between a few tokens in a sentence. Soft attention mechanisms show promising performance in modeling local/global dependencies by soft probabilities between every two tokens, but they are not effective and efficient when applied to long sentences. By contrast, hard attention mechanisms directly select a subset of tokens but are difficult and inefficient to train due to their combinatorial nature. In this paper, we integrate both soft and hard attention into one context fusion model, "reinforced self-attention (ReSA)", for the mutual benefit of each other. In ReSA, a hard attention trims a sequence for a soft self-attention to process, while the soft attention feeds reward signals back to facilitate the training of the hard one. For this purpose, we develop a novel hard attention called "reinforced sequence sampling (RSS)", selecting tokens in parallel and trained via policy gradient. Using two RSS modules, ReSA efficiently extracts the sparse dependencies between each pair of selected tokens. We finally propose an RNN/CNN-free sentence-encoding model, "reinforced self-attention network (ReSAN)", solely based on ReSA. It achieves state-of-the-art performance on both Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI) and Sentences Involving Compositional Knowledge (SICK) datasets.
In order to answer natural language questions over knowledge graphs, most processing pipelines involve entity and relation linking. Traditionally, entity linking and relation linking has been performed either as dependent sequential tasks or independent parallel tasks. In this paper, we propose a framework called "EARL", which performs entity linking and relation linking as a joint single task. EARL uses a graph connection based solution to the problem. We model the linking task as an instance of the Generalised Travelling Salesman Problem (GTSP) and use GTSP approximate algorithm solutions. We later develop EARL which uses a pair-wise graph-distance based solution to the problem.The system determines the best semantic connection between all keywords of the question by referring to a knowledge graph. This is achieved by exploiting the "connection density" between entity candidates and relation candidates. The "connection density" based solution performs at par with the approximate GTSP solution.We have empirically evaluated the framework on a dataset with 5000 questions. Our system surpasses state-of-the-art scores for entity linking task by reporting an accuracy of 0.65 to 0.40 from the next best entity linker.