Italy

In this work, we introduce a generalization methodology for the automatic selection of the activation functions inside a neural network, taking advantage of concepts defined in fractional calculus. This methodology enables the neural network to search and optimize its own activation functions during the training process, by defining the fractional order of the derivative of a given primitive activation function. This fractional order is tuned as an additional training hyper-parameter $a$ for intrafamily selection and $b$ for cross family selection. By following this approach, the neurons inside the network can adjust their activation functions, e.g. from MLP to RBF networks, to best fit the input data, and reduce the output error. The experimental results obtained show the benefits of using this technique implemented on a ResNet18 topology, by outperforming the accuracy of a ResNet100 trained with CIFAR10 and Improving 1% ImageNet reported in the literature.

ICPR 2020

Fractional Adaptation of Activation Functions In Neural Networks

adaptive activation functions

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IJCNLP-AACL 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

poster

ICPR 2020 is the premier international conference on Pattern Recognition, gathering leading researchers from around the world to present their latest achievements in Pattern Analysis and Recognition, applied Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The topic of the year is " Putting Artificial intelligence to work on Patterns". 
For the first time, ICPR has employed a two-round review process similar to journal submissions, with new papers allowed to be submitted in either the first or second round and papers submitted in the first round and not accepted allowed to be revised and re-submitted for second round review. 

In this edition of the **ICPR 2020** Conference, there are 1407 Oral/Poster presentations organized in five Tracks: 
- Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning for Pattern Analysis; 
- Biometrics, Human Analysis and Behavior Understanding; Computer Vision, Robotics and Intelligent Systems; 
- Document and Media Analysis; and 
- Image and Signal Processing. 

The **ICPR 2020** Main Conference program also includes 7 Keynotes from prominent world-renowned scientists, 8 Tutorials, 28 Demos, 8 Challenges, 2 Panels, as well as an Industry/Sponsor Exhibition. In addition, 41 Workshops on a range of important current and emerging research topics complete the ICPR 2020 program. 


Introduction about the duplex spatiotemporal filtering network with experiment statistics and visualization.

A Duplex Spatiotemporal Filtering Network for Video-based Person Re-identification

We propose a data-driven cancellable biometrics scheme, referred to as SoftmaxOut Transformation-Permutation Network (SOTPN). The SOTPN is a neural version of Random Permutation Maxout (RPM) transform, which was introduced for facial template protection. We present a specialized SoftmaxOut layer integrated with the permutable MaxOut units and the parameterized softmax function to approximate the non-differentiable permutation and the winner-takes-all operations in the RPM transform. On top of that, a novel pairwise ArcFace loss and a code balancing loss are also formulated to ensure that the SOTPN-transformed facial template is cancellable, discriminative, high entropy and free from quantization errors when coupled with the SoftmaxOut layer. The proposed SOTPN is evaluated on three face datasets, namely LFW, YouTube Face and Facescrub, and our experimental results disclosed that the SOTPN outperforms the RPM transform significantly.

SoftmaxOut Transformation-Permutation Network for Facial Template Protection

Recognizing time-varying object states in complex tasks is an important and challenging issue. In this presentation, we propose a novel model to jointly infer object fluents and complex tasks in videos. A task is a complex human activity with specific goals and a fluent is defined as a time-varying object state. A hierarchical graph represents a task as a human action stream and multiple concurrent object fluents which vary as the human performs the actions. In this process, the human actions serve as the causes of object state changes which conversely reflect the effects of human actions. For a given input video, a causal sampling search algorithm is proposed to jointly infer the task category and the states of objects in each video frame. For model learning, a structural SVM framework is adopted to jointly train the task, fluent, cause, and effect parameters. We test the proposed method on a task and fluent dataset. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Inferring Tasks and Fluents in Videos by Learning Causal Relations


This paper studies the problem of Person Re-Identification (ReID)
for large-scale applications. Recent research efforts have been devoted
to building complicated part models, which introduce considerably
high computational cost and memory consumption, inhibiting its practicability
in large-scale applications. This paper aims to develop a novel learning
strategy to find efficient feature embeddings while maintaining the
balance of accuracy and model complexity. More specifically, we find
by enhancing the classical triplet loss together with cross-entropy
loss, our method can explore the hard examples and build a discriminant
feature embedding yet compact enough for large-scale applications.
Our method is carried out progressively using Bayesian optimization,
and we call it the Progressive Learning Algorithm (PLA). Extensive
experiments on three large-scale datasets show that our PLA is comparable
or better than the state-of-the-arts. Especially, on the challenging
Market-1501 dataset, we achieve Rank-1=94.7%/mAP=89.4% while saving
at least 30\% parameters than strong part models.

Channel Planting for Deep Neural Networks Using Knowledge Distillation


The fusion of audio and visual modalities is an important stage of audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR), which is generally approached through feature fusion or decision fusion. Feature fusion can exploit the covariations between features from different modalities effectively, whereas decision fusion shows the robustness of capturing an optimal combination of multi- modality. In this work, to take full advantage of the complemen- tarity of the two fusion strategies and address the challenge of inherent ambiguity in noisy environments, we propose a novel hybrid fusion based AVSR method with residual networks and Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (BGRU), which is able to distinguish homophones in both clean and noisy conditions. Specifically, a simple yet effective audio-visual encoder is used to map audio and visual features into a shared latent space to capture more discriminative multi-modal feature and find the internal correlation between spatial-temporal information for different modalities. Furthermore, a decision fusion module is designed to get final predictions in order to robustly utilize the reliability measures of audio-visual information. Finally, we introduce a combined loss, which shows its noise-robustness in learning the joint representation across various modalities. Experimental results on the largest publicly available dataset (LRW) demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method under various noisy conditions.

Robust Audio-Visual Speech Recognition Based on Hybrid Fusion

Adversarial attacks have been a prevalent problem causing misclassification in machine learning models, with stochasticity being a promising direction towards greater robustness. However, stochastic networks frequently underperform compared to deterministic deep networks. In this work, we present a conceptually clear adaptive noise injection mechanism in combination with teacher-initialisation, which adjusts its degree of randomness dynamically through the computation of mini-batch statistics. This mechanism is embedded within a simple framework to obtain stochastic networks from existing deterministic networks. Our experiments show that our method is able to outperform prior baselines under white-box settings, exemplified through CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100. Following which, we perform in-depth analysis on varying different components of training with our approach on the effects of robustness and accuracy, through the study of the evolution of decision boundary and trend curves of clean accuracy/attack success over differing degrees of stochasticity. We also shed light on the effects of adversarial training on a pre-trained network, through the lens of decision boundaries.

Adaptive Noise Injection for Training Stochastic Student Networks from Deterministic Teachers

In this paper, we present a distinct discriminant
canonical correlation analysis network (DDCCANet) based deep
information quality representation with application to image
classification. Specifically, to explore the sufficient discriminant
information between different data sets, the within-class and
between-class correlation matrices are employed and optimized
jointly. Moreover, different from the existing canonical correlation
analysis network (CCANet) and related algorithms, an
information theoretic descriptor, information quality (IQ), is
adopted to generate the deep-level feature representation for
image classification. Benefiting from the explored discriminant
information and IQ descriptor, it is potential to gain a more
effective deep-level representation from multi-view data sets,
leading to improved performance in classification tasks. To
demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DDCCANet, we
conduct experiments on the Olivetti Research Lab (ORL) face
database, ETH80 database and CIFAR10 database. Experimental
results show the superiority of the proposed solution on image
classification.

A Distinct Discriminant Canonical Correlation Analysis Network based Deep Information Quality Representation for Image Classification


The loss function is a key component in deep learning models. A commonly used loss function for classification is the cross-entropy loss, which is a simple yet effective application of information theory for classification problems. Based on this loss, many other loss functions have been proposed, e.g., by adding intra-class and inter-class constraints to enhance the discriminative ability of the learned features. However, these loss functions fail to consider the connections between the feature distribution and the model structure. Aiming at ad- dressing this problem, we propose a channel correlation loss (CC-Loss) that is able to constrain the specific relations be-tween classes and channels as well as maintain the intra-class and the inter-class separability. CC-Loss uses a channel attention module to generate channel attention of features for each sample in the training stage. Next, a Euclidean distance matrix is calculated to make the channel attention vectors associated with the same class become identical and to increase the difference between different classes. Finally, we obtain a feature embedding with good intra-class compactness and inter-class separability. Experimental results show that two different backbone models trained with the proposed CC-Loss outperform the state-of-the-art loss functions on three image classification datasets.

CC-LOSS: Channel Correlation Loss For Image Classification

Cross-domain few-shot classification task (CD-FSC) combines few-shot classification with the requirement to generalize across domains represented by datasets. This setup faces challenges originating from the limited labeled data in each class and, additionally, from the domain shift between training and test sets. 
In this paper, we introduce a novel training approach for existing FSC models. It leverages on the explanation scores, obtained from existing explanation methods when applied to the predictions of FSC models, computed for intermediate feature maps of the models. Firstly, we tailor the layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP) method to explain the predictions of FSC models. Secondly, we develop a model-agnostic explanation-guided training strategy that dynamically finds and emphasizes the features which are important for the predictions. Our contribution does not target a novel explanation method but lies in a novel application of explanations for the training phase. We show that explanation-guided training effectively improves the model generalization. We observe improved accuracy for three different FSC models: RelationNet, cross attention network, and a graph neural network-based formulation, on five few-shot learning datasets: miniImagenet, CUB, Cars, Places, and Plantae. The source code is available at https://github.com/SunJiamei/few-shot-lrp-guided

Explanation-Guided Training for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Classification

Person re-identification aims to identify the same person from different cameras, which needs to integrate whole-body information and capture global correlation. However, convolutional neural network is able to only capture short-distance information because of the size of filters. Self-attention is introduced to capture long-distance correlation, but inner-product similarity calculation in self-attention mingles semantic response and semantic difference together. Semantic difference is more important for person re-identification, because it is robust to illumination without the effect of semantic response. However, we find the scale of norms measuring semantic response is much larger than angle measuring semantic difference by decoupling inner-product similarity into norms and angle. To balance the importance of semantic response and semantic difference in self-attention, we propose the decoupled self-attention module for person re-identification to make the most of self-attention. Extensive experiments show that the decoupled self-attention module obtains significant performance with easier convergence and stronger robustness.

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Fractional Adaptation of Activation Functions In Neural Networks

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A Duplex Spatiotemporal Filtering Network for Video-based Person Re-identification

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