In the quest for unveiling novel categories at test time, we confront the inherent limitations of traditional supervised recognition models that are restricted by a predefined category set. While strides have been made in the realms of self-supervised and open-world learning towards test-time category discovery, a crucial yet often overlooked question persists: what exactly delineates a category? In this paper, we conceptualize a category through the lens of optimization, viewing it as an optimal solution to a well-defined problem. Harnessing this unique conceptualization, we propose a novel, efficient and self-supervised method capable of discovering previously unknown categories at test time. A salient feature of our approach is the assignment of minimum length category codes to individual data instances, which encapsulates the implicit category hierarchy prevalent in real-world datasets. This mechanism affords us enhanced control over category granularity, thereby equipping our model to handle fine-grained categories adeptly. Experimental evaluations, bolstered by state-of-the-art benchmark comparisons, testify to the efficacy of our solution in managing unknown categories at test time. Furthermore, we fortify our proposition with a theoretical foundation, providing proof of its optimality. Our code is available at //github.com/SarahRastegar/InfoSieve.
In this paper we revisit the classical method of partitioning classification and study its convergence rate under relaxed conditions, both for observable (non-privatised) and for privatised data. Let the feature vector $X$ take values in $\mathbb{R}^d$ and denote its label by $Y$. Previous results on the partitioning classifier worked with the strong density assumption, which is restrictive, as we demonstrate through simple examples. We assume that the distribution of $X$ is a mixture of an absolutely continuous and a discrete distribution, such that the absolutely continuous component is concentrated to a $d_a$ dimensional subspace. Here, we study the problem under much milder assumptions: in addition to the standard Lipschitz and margin conditions, a novel characteristic of the absolutely continuous component is introduced, by which the exact convergence rate of the classification error probability is calculated, both for the binary and for the multi-label cases. Interestingly, this rate of convergence depends only on the intrinsic dimension $d_a$. The privacy constraints mean that the data $(X_1,Y_1), \dots ,(X_n,Y_n)$ cannot be directly observed, and the classifiers are functions of the randomised outcome of a suitable local differential privacy mechanism. The statistician is free to choose the form of this privacy mechanism, and here we add Laplace distributed noises to the discontinuations of all possible locations of the feature vector $X_i$ and to its label $Y_i$. Again, tight upper bounds on the rate of convergence of the classification error probability are derived, without the strong density assumption, such that this rate depends on $2\,d_a$.
In this paper, we consider the generation and utilization of helper data for physical unclonable functions (PUFs) that provide real-valued readout symbols. Compared to classical binary PUFs, more entropy can be extracted from each basic building block (PUF node), resulting in longer keys/fingerprints and/or a higher reliability. To this end, a coded modulation and signal shaping scheme that matches the (approximately) Gaussian distribution of the readout has to be employed. A new helper data scheme is proposed that works with any type of coded modulation/shaping scheme. Compared to the permutation scheme from the literature, less amount of helper data has to be generated and a higher reliability is achieved. Moreover, the recently proposed idea of a two-metric helper data scheme is generalized to coded modulation and a general S-metric scheme. It is shown how extra helper data can be generated to improve decodability. The proposed schemes are assessed by numerical simulations and by evaluation of measurement data. We compare multi-level codes using a new rate design strategy with bit-interleaved coded modulation and trellis shaping with a distribution matcher. By selecting a suitable design, the rate per PUF node that can be reliably extracted can be as high as 2~bit/node.
We present a generalized distance metric that can be used to implement routing strategies and identify routing table entries to reach the root node for a given key, in a DHT (Distributed Hash Table) network based on either Chord, Kademlia, Tapestry, or Pastry. The generalization shows that all the above four DHT algorithms are in fact, the same algorithm but with different parameters in distance representation. We also proposes that nodes can have routing tables of varying sizes based on their memory capabilities but with the fact that each node must have at least two entries, one for the node closest from it, and the other for the node from whom it is closest in each ring components for all the algorithms. Messages will always reach the correct root nodes by following the above rule. We also further observe that in any network, if the distance metric to define the root node in the DHT is same at all the nodes, then the root node for a key will also be the same, irrespective of the size of the routing table at different nodes.
In this paper, we address the task of aberration-aware depth-from-defocus (DfD), which takes account of spatially variant point spread functions (PSFs) of a real camera. To effectively obtain the spatially variant PSFs of a real camera without requiring any ground-truth PSFs, we propose a novel self-supervised learning method that leverages the pair of real sharp and blurred images, which can be easily captured by changing the aperture setting of the camera. In our PSF estimation, we assume rotationally symmetric PSFs and introduce the polar coordinate system to more accurately learn the PSF estimation network. We also handle the focus breathing phenomenon that occurs in real DfD situations. Experimental results on synthetic and real data demonstrate the effectiveness of our method regarding both the PSF estimation and the depth estimation.
This article presents the affordances that Generative Artificial Intelligence can have in disinformation context, one of the major threats to our digitalized society. We present a research framework to generate customized agent-based social networks for disinformation simulations that would enable understanding and evaluation of the phenomena whilst discussing open challenges.
Face recognition technology has advanced significantly in recent years due largely to the availability of large and increasingly complex training datasets for use in deep learning models. These datasets, however, typically comprise images scraped from news sites or social media platforms and, therefore, have limited utility in more advanced security, forensics, and military applications. These applications require lower resolution, longer ranges, and elevated viewpoints. To meet these critical needs, we collected and curated the first and second subsets of a large multi-modal biometric dataset designed for use in the research and development (R&D) of biometric recognition technologies under extremely challenging conditions. Thus far, the dataset includes more than 350,000 still images and over 1,300 hours of video footage of approximately 1,000 subjects. To collect this data, we used Nikon DSLR cameras, a variety of commercial surveillance cameras, specialized long-rage R&D cameras, and Group 1 and Group 2 UAV platforms. The goal is to support the development of algorithms capable of accurately recognizing people at ranges up to 1,000 m and from high angles of elevation. These advances will include improvements to the state of the art in face recognition and will support new research in the area of whole-body recognition using methods based on gait and anthropometry. This paper describes methods used to collect and curate the dataset, and the dataset's characteristics at the current stage.
Aiming at expanding few-shot relations' coverage in knowledge graphs (KGs), few-shot knowledge graph completion (FKGC) has recently gained more research interests. Some existing models employ a few-shot relation's multi-hop neighbor information to enhance its semantic representation. However, noise neighbor information might be amplified when the neighborhood is excessively sparse and no neighbor is available to represent the few-shot relation. Moreover, modeling and inferring complex relations of one-to-many (1-N), many-to-one (N-1), and many-to-many (N-N) by previous knowledge graph completion approaches requires high model complexity and a large amount of training instances. Thus, inferring complex relations in the few-shot scenario is difficult for FKGC models due to limited training instances. In this paper, we propose a few-shot relational learning with global-local framework to address the above issues. At the global stage, a novel gated and attentive neighbor aggregator is built for accurately integrating the semantics of a few-shot relation's neighborhood, which helps filtering the noise neighbors even if a KG contains extremely sparse neighborhoods. For the local stage, a meta-learning based TransH (MTransH) method is designed to model complex relations and train our model in a few-shot learning fashion. Extensive experiments show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art FKGC approaches on the frequently-used benchmark datasets NELL-One and Wiki-One. Compared with the strong baseline model MetaR, our model achieves 5-shot FKGC performance improvements of 8.0% on NELL-One and 2.8% on Wiki-One by the metric Hits@10.
In this paper, we propose a novel Feature Decomposition and Reconstruction Learning (FDRL) method for effective facial expression recognition. We view the expression information as the combination of the shared information (expression similarities) across different expressions and the unique information (expression-specific variations) for each expression. More specifically, FDRL mainly consists of two crucial networks: a Feature Decomposition Network (FDN) and a Feature Reconstruction Network (FRN). In particular, FDN first decomposes the basic features extracted from a backbone network into a set of facial action-aware latent features to model expression similarities. Then, FRN captures the intra-feature and inter-feature relationships for latent features to characterize expression-specific variations, and reconstructs the expression feature. To this end, two modules including an intra-feature relation modeling module and an inter-feature relation modeling module are developed in FRN. Experimental results on both the in-the-lab databases (including CK+, MMI, and Oulu-CASIA) and the in-the-wild databases (including RAF-DB and SFEW) show that the proposed FDRL method consistently achieves higher recognition accuracy than several state-of-the-art methods. This clearly highlights the benefit of feature decomposition and reconstruction for classifying expressions.
This work considers the question of how convenient access to copious data impacts our ability to learn causal effects and relations. In what ways is learning causality in the era of big data different from -- or the same as -- the traditional one? To answer this question, this survey provides a comprehensive and structured review of both traditional and frontier methods in learning causality and relations along with the connections between causality and machine learning. This work points out on a case-by-case basis how big data facilitates, complicates, or motivates each approach.
In this paper, we propose the joint learning attention and recurrent neural network (RNN) models for multi-label classification. While approaches based on the use of either model exist (e.g., for the task of image captioning), training such existing network architectures typically require pre-defined label sequences. For multi-label classification, it would be desirable to have a robust inference process, so that the prediction error would not propagate and thus affect the performance. Our proposed model uniquely integrates attention and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) models, which not only addresses the above problem but also allows one to identify visual objects of interests with varying sizes without the prior knowledge of particular label ordering. More importantly, label co-occurrence information can be jointly exploited by our LSTM model. Finally, by advancing the technique of beam search, prediction of multiple labels can be efficiently achieved by our proposed network model.