We prove that Strings-and-Coins -- the combinatorial two-player game generalizing the dual of Dots-and-Boxes -- is strongly PSPACE-complete on multigraphs. This result improves the best previous result, NP-hardness, argued in Winning Ways. Our result also applies to the Nimstring variant, where the winner is determined by normal play; indeed, one step in our reduction is the standard reduction (also from Winning Ways) from Nimstring to Strings-and-Coins.
Perceptual image hashing methods are often applied in various objectives, such as image retrieval, finding duplicate or near-duplicate images, and finding similar images from large-scale image content. The main challenge in image hashing techniques is robust feature extraction, which generates the same or similar hashes in images that are visually identical. In this article, we present a short review of the state-of-the-art traditional perceptual hashing and deep learning-based perceptual hashing methods, identifying the best approaches.
We give a strongly polynomial-time algorithm for integer linear programs defined by integer coefficient matrices whose subdeterminants are bounded by a constant and that contain at most two nonzero entries in each row. The core of our approach is the first polynomial-time algorithm for the weighted stable set problem on graphs that do not contain more than $k$ vertex-disjoint odd cycles, where $k$ is any constant. Previously, polynomial-time algorithms were only known for $k=0$ (bipartite graphs) and for $k=1$. We observe that integer linear programs defined by coefficient matrices with bounded subdeterminants and two nonzeros per column can be also solved in strongly polynomial-time, using a reduction to $b$-matching.
We consider the vector embedding problem. We are given a finite set of items, with the goal of assigning a representative vector to each one, possibly under some constraints (such as the collection of vectors being standardized, i.e., having zero mean and unit covariance). We are given data indicating that some pairs of items are similar, and optionally, some other pairs are dissimilar. For pairs of similar items, we want the corresponding vectors to be near each other, and for dissimilar pairs, we want the corresponding vectors to not be near each other, measured in Euclidean distance. We formalize this by introducing distortion functions, defined for some pairs of the items. Our goal is to choose an embedding that minimizes the total distortion, subject to the constraints. We call this the minimum-distortion embedding (MDE) problem. The MDE framework is simple but general. It includes a wide variety of embedding methods, such as spectral embedding, principal component analysis, multidimensional scaling, dimensionality reduction methods (like Isomap and UMAP), force-directed layout, and others. It also includes new embeddings, and provides principled ways of validating historical and new embeddings alike. We develop a projected quasi-Newton method that approximately solves MDE problems and scales to large data sets. We implement this method in PyMDE, an open-source Python package. In PyMDE, users can select from a library of distortion functions and constraints or specify custom ones, making it easy to rapidly experiment with different embeddings. Our software scales to data sets with millions of items and tens of millions of distortion functions. To demonstrate our method, we compute embeddings for several real-world data sets, including images, an academic co-author network, US county demographic data, and single-cell mRNA transcriptomes.
Pictures of everyday life are inherently multi-label in nature. Hence, multi-label classification is commonly used to analyze their content. In typical multi-label datasets, each picture contains only a few positive labels, and many negative ones. This positive-negative imbalance can result in under-emphasizing gradients from positive labels during training, leading to poor accuracy. In this paper, we introduce a novel asymmetric loss ("ASL"), that operates differently on positive and negative samples. The loss dynamically down-weights the importance of easy negative samples, causing the optimization process to focus more on the positive samples, and also enables to discard mislabeled negative samples. We demonstrate how ASL leads to a more "balanced" network, with increased average probabilities for positive samples, and show how this balanced network is translated to better mAP scores, compared to commonly used losses. Furthermore, we offer a method that can dynamically adjust the level of asymmetry throughout the training. With ASL, we reach new state-of-the-art results on three common multi-label datasets, including achieving 86.6% on MS-COCO. We also demonstrate ASL applicability for other tasks such as fine-grain single-label classification and object detection. ASL is effective, easy to implement, and does not increase the training time or complexity. Implementation is available at: //github.com/Alibaba-MIIL/ASL.
The problem of Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search is fundamental in computer science and has benefited from significant progress in the past couple of decades. However, most work has been devoted to pointsets whereas complex shapes have not been sufficiently treated. Here, we focus on distance functions between discretized curves in Euclidean space: they appear in a wide range of applications, from road segments to time-series in general dimension. For $\ell_p$-products of Euclidean metrics, for any $p$, we design simple and efficient data structures for ANN, based on randomized projections, which are of independent interest. They serve to solve proximity problems under a notion of distance between discretized curves, which generalizes both discrete Fr\'echet and Dynamic Time Warping distances. These are the most popular and practical approaches to comparing such curves. We offer the first data structures and query algorithms for ANN with arbitrarily good approximation factor, at the expense of increasing space usage and preprocessing time over existing methods. Query time complexity is comparable or significantly improved by our algorithms, our algorithm is especially efficient when the length of the curves is bounded.
The use of orthogonal projections on high-dimensional input and target data in learning frameworks is studied. First, we investigate the relations between two standard objectives in dimension reduction, maximizing variance and preservation of pairwise relative distances. The derivation of their asymptotic correlation and numerical experiments tell that a projection usually cannot satisfy both objectives. In a standard classification problem we determine projections on the input data that balance them and compare subsequent results. Next, we extend our application of orthogonal projections to deep learning frameworks. We introduce new variational loss functions that enable integration of additional information via transformations and projections of the target data. In two supervised learning problems, clinical image segmentation and music information classification, the application of the proposed loss functions increase the accuracy.
Network embedding aims to learn a latent, low-dimensional vector representations of network nodes, effective in supporting various network analytic tasks. While prior arts on network embedding focus primarily on preserving network topology structure to learn node representations, recently proposed attributed network embedding algorithms attempt to integrate rich node content information with network topological structure for enhancing the quality of network embedding. In reality, networks often have sparse content, incomplete node attributes, as well as the discrepancy between node attribute feature space and network structure space, which severely deteriorates the performance of existing methods. In this paper, we propose a unified framework for attributed network embedding-attri2vec-that learns node embeddings by discovering a latent node attribute subspace via a network structure guided transformation performed on the original attribute space. The resultant latent subspace can respect network structure in a more consistent way towards learning high-quality node representations. We formulate an optimization problem which is solved by an efficient stochastic gradient descent algorithm, with linear time complexity to the number of nodes. We investigate a series of linear and non-linear transformations performed on node attributes and empirically validate their effectiveness on various types of networks. Another advantage of attri2vec is its ability to solve out-of-sample problems, where embeddings of new coming nodes can be inferred from their node attributes through the learned mapping function. Experiments on various types of networks confirm that attri2vec is superior to state-of-the-art baselines for node classification, node clustering, as well as out-of-sample link prediction tasks. The source code of this paper is available at //github.com/daokunzhang/attri2vec.
Generative Adversarial networks (GANs) have obtained remarkable success in many unsupervised learning tasks and unarguably, clustering is an important unsupervised learning problem. While one can potentially exploit the latent-space back-projection in GANs to cluster, we demonstrate that the cluster structure is not retained in the GAN latent space. In this paper, we propose ClusterGAN as a new mechanism for clustering using GANs. By sampling latent variables from a mixture of one-hot encoded variables and continuous latent variables, coupled with an inverse network (which projects the data to the latent space) trained jointly with a clustering specific loss, we are able to achieve clustering in the latent space. Our results show a remarkable phenomenon that GANs can preserve latent space interpolation across categories, even though the discriminator is never exposed to such vectors. We compare our results with various clustering baselines and demonstrate superior performance on both synthetic and real datasets.
In this paper, we focus on triplet-based deep binary embedding networks for image retrieval task. The triplet loss has been shown to be most effective for the ranking problem. However, most of the previous works treat the triplets equally or select the hard triplets based on the loss. Such strategies do not consider the order relations, which is important for retrieval task. To this end, we propose an order-aware reweighting method to effectively train the triplet-based deep networks, which up-weights the important triplets and down-weights the uninformative triplets. First, we present the order-aware weighting factors to indicate the importance of the triplets, which depend on the rank order of binary codes. Then, we reshape the triplet loss to the squared triplet loss such that the loss function will put more weights on the important triplets. Extensive evaluations on four benchmark datasets show that the proposed method achieves significant performance compared with the state-of-the-art baselines.
We propose an Active Learning approach to image segmentation that exploits geometric priors to streamline the annotation process. We demonstrate this for both background-foreground and multi-class segmentation tasks in 2D images and 3D image volumes. Our approach combines geometric smoothness priors in the image space with more traditional uncertainty measures to estimate which pixels or voxels are most in need of annotation. For multi-class settings, we additionally introduce two novel criteria for uncertainty. In the 3D case, we use the resulting uncertainty measure to show the annotator voxels lying on the same planar patch, which makes batch annotation much easier than if they were randomly distributed in the volume. The planar patch is found using a branch-and-bound algorithm that finds a patch with the most informative instances. We evaluate our approach on Electron Microscopy and Magnetic Resonance image volumes, as well as on regular images of horses and faces. We demonstrate a substantial performance increase over state-of-the-art approaches.