No Arabic abstract
We find that the way we choose to represent data labels can have a profound effect on the quality of trained models. For example, training an image classifier to regress audio labels rather than traditional categorical probabilities produces a more reliable classification. This result is surprising, considering that audio labels are more complex than simpler numerical probabilities or text. We hypothesize that high dimensional, high entropy label representations are generally more useful because they provide a stronger error signal. We support this hypothesis with evidence from various label representations including constant matrices, spectrograms, shuffled spectrograms, Gaussian mixtures, and uniform random matrices of various dimensionalities. Our experiments reveal that high dimensional, high entropy labels achieve comparable accuracy to text (categorical) labels on the standard image classification task, but features learned through our label representations exhibit more robustness under various adversarial attacks and better effectiveness with a limited amount of training data. These results suggest that label representation may play a more important role than previously thought. The project website is at url{https://www.creativemachineslab.com/label-representation.html}.
We study the problem of defending deep neural network approaches for image classification from physically realizable attacks. First, we demonstrate that the two most scalable and effective methods for learning robust models, adversarial training with PGD attacks and randomized smoothing, exhibit very limited effectiveness against three of the highest profile physical attacks. Next, we propose a new abstract adversarial model, rectangular occlusion attacks, in which an adversary places a small adversarially crafted rectangle in an image, and develop two approaches for efficiently computing the resulting adversarial examples. Finally, we demonstrate that adversarial training using our new attack yields image classification models that exhibit high robustness against the physically realizable attacks we study, offering the first effective generic defense against such attacks.
Attributes act as intermediate representations that enable parameter sharing between classes, a must when training data is scarce. We propose to view attribute-based image classification as a label-embedding problem: each class is embedded in the space of attribute vectors. We introduce a function that measures the compatibility between an image and a label embedding. The parameters of this function are learned on a training set of labeled samples to ensure that, given an image, the correct classes rank higher than the incorrect ones. Results on the Animals With Attributes and Caltech-UCSD-Birds datasets show that the proposed framework outperforms the standard Direct Attribute Prediction baseline in a zero-shot learning scenario. Label embedding enjoys a built-in ability to leverage alternative sources of information instead of or in addition to attributes, such as e.g. class hierarchies or textual descriptions. Moreover, label embedding encompasses the whole range of learning settings from zero-shot learning to regular learning with a large number of labeled examples.
Multi-label image classification is the task of predicting a set of labels corresponding to objects, attributes or other entities present in an image. In this work we propose the Classification Transformer (C-Tran), a general framework for multi-label image classification that leverages Transformers to exploit the complex dependencies among visual features and labels. Our approach consists of a Transformer encoder trained to predict a set of target labels given an input set of masked labels, and visual features from a convolutional neural network. A key ingredient of our method is a label mask training objective that uses a ternary encoding scheme to represent the state of the labels as positive, negative, or unknown during training. Our model shows state-of-the-art performance on challenging datasets such as COCO and Visual Genome. Moreover, because our model explicitly represents the uncertainty of labels during training, it is more general by allowing us to produce improved results for images with partial or extra label annotations during inference. We demonstrate this additional capability in the COCO, Visual Genome, News500, and CUB image datasets.
In this project we analysed how much semantic information images carry, and how much value image data can add to sentiment analysis of the text associated with the images. To better understand the contribution from images, we compared models which only made use of image data, models which only made use of text data, and models which combined both data types. We also analysed if this approach could help sentiment classifiers generalize to unknown sentiments.
Multi-label image classification (MLIC) is a fundamental and practical task, which aims to assign multiple possible labels to an image. In recent years, many deep convolutional neural network (CNN) based approaches have been proposed which model label correlations to discover semantics of labels and learn semantic representations of images. This paper advances this research direction by improving both the modeling of label correlations and the learning of semantic representations. On the one hand, besides the local semantics of each label, we propose to further explore global semantics shared by multiple labels. On the other hand, existing approaches mainly learn the semantic representations at the last convolutional layer of a CNN. But it has been noted that the image representations of different layers of CNN capture different levels or scales of features and have different discriminative abilities. We thus propose to learn semantic representations at multiple convolutional layers. To this end, this paper designs a Multi-layered Semantic Representation Network (MSRN) which discovers both local and global semantics of labels through modeling label correlations and utilizes the label semantics to guide the semantic representations learning at multiple layers through an attention mechanism. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets including VOC 2007, COCO, NUS-WIDE, and Apparel show a competitive performance of the proposed MSRN against state-of-the-art models.