No Arabic abstract
We propose a method to estimate the uncertainty of the outcome of an image classifier on a given input datum. Deep neural networks commonly used for image classification are deterministic maps from an input image to an output class. As such, their outcome on a given datum involves no uncertainty, so we must specify what variability we are referring to when defining, measuring and interpreting confidence. To this end, we introduce the Wellington Posterior, which is the distribution of outcomes that would have been obtained in response to data that could have been generated by the same scene that produced the given image. Since there are infinitely many scenes that could have generated the given image, the Wellington Posterior requires induction from scenes other than the one portrayed. We explore alternate methods using data augmentation, ensembling, and model linearization. Additional alternatives include generative adversarial networks, conditional prior networks, and supervised single-view reconstruction. We test these alternatives against the empirical posterior obtained by inferring the class of temporally adjacent frames in a video. These developments are only a small step towards assessing the reliability of deep network classifiers in a manner that is compatible with safety-critical applications.
This paper summarizes our endeavors in the past few years in terms of explaining image classifiers, with the aim of including negative results and insights we have gained. The paper starts with describing the explainable neural network (XNN), which attempts to extract and visualize several high-level concepts purely from the deep network, without relying on human linguistic concepts. This helps users understand network classifications that are less intuitive and substantially improves user performance on a difficult fine-grained classification task of discriminating among different species of seagulls. Realizing that an important missing piece is a reliable heatmap visualization tool, we have developed I-GOS and iGOS++ utilizing integrated gradients to avoid local optima in heatmap generation, which improved the performance across all resolutions. During the development of those visualizations, we realized that for a significant number of images, the classifier has multiple different paths to reach a confident prediction. This has lead to our recent development of structured attention graphs (SAGs), an approach that utilizes beam search to locate multiple coarse heatmaps for a single image, and compactly visualizes a set of heatmaps by capturing how different combinations of image regions impact the confidence of a classifier. Through the research process, we have learned much about insights in building deep network explanations, the existence and frequency of multiple explanations, and various tricks of the trade that make explanations work. In this paper, we attempt to share those insights and opinions with the readers with the hope that some of them will be informative for future researchers on explainable deep learning.
Existing research in scene image classification has focused on either content features (e.g., visual information) or context features (e.g., annotations). As they capture different information about images which can be complementary and useful to discriminate images of different classes, we suppose the fusion of them will improve classification results. In this paper, we propose new techniques to compute content features and context features, and then fuse them together. For content features, we design multi-scale deep features based on background and foreground information in images. For context features, we use annotations of similar images available in the web to design a filter words (codebook). Our experiments in three widely used benchmark scene datasets using support vector machine classifier reveal that our proposed context and content features produce better results than existing context and content features, respectively. The fusion of the proposed two types of features significantly outperform numerous state-of-the-art features.
Previous methods for representing scene images based on deep learning primarily consider either the foreground or background information as the discriminating clues for the classification task. However, scene images also require additional information (hybrid) to cope with the inter-class similarity and intra-class variation problems. In this paper, we propose to use hybrid features in addition to foreground and background features to represent scene images. We suppose that these three types of information could jointly help to represent scene image more accurately. To this end, we adopt three VGG-16 architectures pre-trained on ImageNet, Places, and Hybrid (both ImageNet and Places) datasets for the corresponding extraction of foreground, background and hybrid information. All these three types of deep features are further aggregated to achieve our final features for the representation of scene images. Extensive experiments on two large benchmark scene datasets (MIT-67 and SUN-397) show that our method produces the state-of-the-art classification performance.
A set of novel approaches for estimating epistemic uncertainty in deep neural networks with a single forward pass has recently emerged as a valid alternative to Bayesian Neural Networks. On the premise of informative representations, these deterministic uncertainty methods (DUMs) achieve strong performance on detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) data while adding negligible computational costs at inference time. However, it remains unclear whether DUMs are well calibrated and can seamlessly scale to real-world applications - both prerequisites for their practical deployment. To this end, we first provide a taxonomy of DUMs, evaluate their calibration under continuous distributional shifts and their performance on OOD detection for image classification tasks. Then, we extend the most promising approaches to semantic segmentation. We find that, while DUMs scale to realistic vision tasks and perform well on OOD detection, the practicality of current methods is undermined by poor calibration under realistic distributional shifts.
The vast work in Deep Learning (DL) has led to a leap in image denoising research. Most DL solutions for this task have chosen to put their efforts on the denoisers architecture while maximizing distortion performance. However, distortion driven solutions lead to blurry results with sub-optimal perceptual quality, especially in immoderate noise levels. In this paper we propose a different perspective, aiming to produce sharp and visually pleasing denoised images that are still faithful to their clean sources. Formally, our goal is to achieve high perceptual quality with acceptable distortion. This is attained by a stochastic denoiser that samples from the posterior distribution, trained as a generator in the framework of conditional generative adversarial networks (CGAN). Contrary to distortion-based regularization terms that conflict with perceptual quality, we introduce to the CGAN objective a theoretically founded penalty term that does not force a distortion requirement on individual samples, but rather on their mean. We showcase our proposed method with a novel denoiser architecture that achieves the reformed denoising goal and produces vivid and diverse outcomes in immoderate noise levels.