Abstract: Deep neural networks represent a compelling technique to tackle complex real-world problems, but are over-parameterized and often suffer from over- or under-confident estimates. Deep ensembles have shown better parameter estimations and often provide reliable uncertainty estimates that contribute to the robustness of the results. In this work, we propose a new metric to identify samples that are hard to classify. Our metric is defined as coincidence score for deep ensembles which measures the agreement of its individual models. The main hypothesis we rely on is that deep learning algorithms learn the low-loss samples better compared to large-loss samples. In order to compensate for this, we use controlled over-sampling on the identified ”hard” samples using proper data augmentation schemes to enable the models to learn those samples better. We validate the proposed metric using two public food datasets on different backbone architectures and show the improvements compared to the conventional deep neural network training using different performance metrics.

Abstract: This paper describes an affect-responsive interactive photo-frame application that offers its user a different experience with every use. It relies on visual analysis of activity levels and facial expressions of its users to select responses from a database of short video segments. This ever-growing database is automatically prepared by an offline analysis of user-uploaded videos. The resulting system matches its user’s affect along dimensions of valence and arousal, and gradually adapts its response to each specific user. In an extended mode, two such systems are coupled and feed each other with visual content. The strengths and weaknesses of the system are assessed through a usability study, where a Wizard-of-Oz response logic is contrasted with the fully automatic system that uses affective and activity-based features, either alone, or in tandem.

Abstract: While the objective of the standard supervised learning problem is to classify feature vectors, in the multiple instance learning problem, the objective is to classify bags, where each bag contains multiple feature vectors. This represents a generalization of the standard problem, and this generalization becomes necessary in many real applications such as drug activity prediction, content-based image retrieval, and others. While the existing paradigms are based on learning the discriminant information either at the instance level or at the bag level, we propose to incorporate both levels of information. This is done by defining a discriminative embedding of the original space based on the responses of cluster-adapted instance classifiers. Results clearly show the advantage of the proposed method over the state of the art, where we tested the performance through a variety of well-known databases that come from real problems, and we also included an analysis of the performance using synthetically generated data.

Abstract: With the massive explosion of machine learning in our day-to-day life, incremental and adaptive learning has become a major topic, crucial to keep up-to-date and improve classification models and their corresponding feature extraction processes. This paper presents a categorized overview of incremental feature extraction based on linear subspace methods which aim at incorporating new information to the already acquired knowledge without accessing previous data. Specifically, this paper focuses on those linear dimensionality reduction methods with orthogonal matrix constraints based on global loss function, due to the extensive use of their batch approaches versus other linear alternatives. Thus, we cover the approaches derived from Principal Components Analysis, Linear Discriminative Analysis and Discriminative Common Vector methods. For each basic method, its incremental approaches are differentiated according to the subspace model and matrix decomposition involved in the updating process. Besides this categorization, several updating strategies are distinguished according to the amount of data used to update and to the fact of considering a static or dynamic number of classes. Moreover, the specific role of the size/dimension ratio in each method is considered. Finally, computational complexity, experimental setup and the accuracy rates according to published results are compiled and analyzed, and an empirical evaluation is done to compare the best approach of each kind.

Abstract: Landmark detection is a fundamental task aiming at identifying specific landmarks that serve as representations of distinct object features within an image. However, the present landmark detection algorithms often adopt complex architectures and are trained in a supervised manner using large datasets to achieve satisfactory performance. When faced with limited data, these algorithms tend to experience a notable decline in accuracy. To address these drawbacks, we propose a novel diffusion-based network (DBN) for unsupervised landmark detection, which leverages the generation ability of the diffusion models to detect the landmark locations. In particular, we introduce a dual-branch encoder (DualE) for extracting visual features and predicting landmarks. Additionally, we lighten the decoder structure for faster inference, referred to as LightD. By this means, we avoid relying on extensive data comparison and the necessity of designing complex architectures as in previous methods. Experiments on CelebA, AFLW, 300W and Deepfashion benchmarks have shown that DBN performs state-of-the-art compared to the existing methods. Furthermore, DBN shows robustness even when faced with limited data cases.