scholarly journals Quadruply Stochastic Gradient Method for Large Scale Nonlinear Semi-Supervised Ordinal Regression AUC Optimization

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (04) ◽  
pp. 5734-5741
Author(s):  
Wanli Shi ◽  
Bin Gu ◽  
Xiang Li ◽  
Heng Huang

Semi-supervised ordinal regression (S2OR) problems are ubiquitous in real-world applications, where only a few ordered instances are labeled and massive instances remain unlabeled. Recent researches have shown that directly optimizing concordance index or AUC can impose a better ranking on the data than optimizing the traditional error rate in ordinal regression (OR) problems. In this paper, we propose an unbiased objective function for S2OR AUC optimization based on ordinal binary decomposition approach. Besides, to handle the large-scale kernelized learning problems, we propose a scalable algorithm called QS3ORAO using the doubly stochastic gradients (DSG) framework for functional optimization. Theoretically, we prove that our method can converge to the optimal solution at the rate of O(1/t), where t is the number of iterations for stochastic data sampling. Extensive experimental results on various benchmark and real-world datasets also demonstrate that our method is efficient and effective while retaining similar generalization performance.

Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (22) ◽  
pp. 2868
Author(s):  
Wenxuan Zhao ◽  
Yaqin Zhao ◽  
Liqi Feng ◽  
Jiaxi Tang

The purpose of image dehazing is the reduction of the image degradation caused by suspended particles for supporting high-level visual tasks. Besides the atmospheric scattering model, convolutional neural network (CNN) has been used for image dehazing. However, the existing image dehazing algorithms are limited in face of unevenly distributed haze and dense haze in real-world scenes. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end convolutional neural network called attention enhanced serial Unet++ dehazing network (AESUnet) for single image dehazing. We attempt to build a serial Unet++ structure that adopts a serial strategy of two pruned Unet++ blocks based on residual connection. Compared with the simple Encoder–Decoder structure, the serial Unet++ module can better use the features extracted by encoders and promote contextual information fusion in different resolutions. In addition, we take some improvement measures to the Unet++ module, such as pruning, introducing the convolutional module with ResNet structure, and a residual learning strategy. Thus, the serial Unet++ module can generate more realistic images with less color distortion. Furthermore, following the serial Unet++ blocks, an attention mechanism is introduced to pay different attention to haze regions with different concentrations by learning weights in the spatial domain and channel domain. Experiments are conducted on two representative datasets: the large-scale synthetic dataset RESIDE and the small-scale real-world datasets I-HAZY and O-HAZY. The experimental results show that the proposed dehazing network is not only comparable to state-of-the-art methods for the RESIDE synthetic datasets, but also surpasses them by a very large margin for the I-HAZY and O-HAZY real-world dataset.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (04) ◽  
pp. 6853-6860
Author(s):  
Xuchao Zhang ◽  
Xian Wu ◽  
Fanglan Chen ◽  
Liang Zhao ◽  
Chang-Tien Lu

The success of training accurate models strongly depends on the availability of a sufficient collection of precisely labeled data. However, real-world datasets contain erroneously labeled data samples that substantially hinder the performance of machine learning models. Meanwhile, well-labeled data is usually expensive to obtain and only a limited amount is available for training. In this paper, we consider the problem of training a robust model by using large-scale noisy data in conjunction with a small set of clean data. To leverage the information contained via the clean labels, we propose a novel self-paced robust learning algorithm (SPRL) that trains the model in a process from more reliable (clean) data instances to less reliable (noisy) ones under the supervision of well-labeled data. The self-paced learning process hedges the risk of selecting corrupted data into the training set. Moreover, theoretical analyses on the convergence of the proposed algorithm are provided under mild assumptions. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach can achieve a considerable improvement in effectiveness and robustness to existing methods.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (01) ◽  
pp. 19-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chong Chen ◽  
Min Zhang ◽  
Yongfeng Zhang ◽  
Weizhi Ma ◽  
Yiqun Liu ◽  
...  

Recent studies on recommendation have largely focused on exploring state-of-the-art neural networks to improve the expressiveness of models, while typically apply the Negative Sampling (NS) strategy for efficient learning. Despite effectiveness, two important issues have not been well-considered in existing methods: 1) NS suffers from dramatic fluctuation, making sampling-based methods difficult to achieve the optimal ranking performance in practical applications; 2) although heterogeneous feedback (e.g., view, click, and purchase) is widespread in many online systems, most existing methods leverage only one primary type of user feedback such as purchase. In this work, we propose a novel non-sampling transfer learning solution, named Efficient Heterogeneous Collaborative Filtering (EHCF) for Top-N recommendation. It can not only model fine-grained user-item relations, but also efficiently learn model parameters from the whole heterogeneous data (including all unlabeled data) with a rather low time complexity. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets show that EHCF significantly outperforms state-of-the-art recommendation methods in both traditional (single-behavior) and heterogeneous scenarios. Moreover, EHCF shows significant improvements in training efficiency, making it more applicable to real-world large-scale systems. Our implementation has been released 1 to facilitate further developments on efficient whole-data based neural methods.


Author(s):  
Xiao Huang ◽  
Qingquan Song ◽  
Fan Yang ◽  
Xia Hu

Feature embedding aims to learn a low-dimensional vector representation for each instance to preserve the information in its features. These representations can benefit various offthe-shelf learning algorithms. While embedding models for a single type of features have been well-studied, real-world instances often contain multiple types of correlated features or even information within a different modality such as networks. Existing studies such as multiview learning show that it is promising to learn unified vector representations from all sources. However, high computational costs of incorporating heterogeneous information limit the applications of existing algorithms. The number of instances and dimensions of features in practice are often large. To bridge the gap, we propose a scalable framework FeatWalk, which can model and incorporate instance similarities in terms of different types of features into a unified embedding representation. To enable the scalability, FeatWalk does not directly calculate any similarity measure, but provides an alternative way to simulate the similarity-based random walks among instances to extract the local instance proximity and preserve it in a set of instance index sequences. These sequences are homogeneous with each other. A scalable word embedding algorithm is applied to them to learn a joint embedding representation of instances. Experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of FeatWalk.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tarun Kumer Biswas

The Influence Maximization (IM) problem aims at maximizing the diffusion of information or adoption of products among users in a social network by identifying and activating a set of initial users. In real-life applications, it is not unrealistic to have a higher activation cost for a user with higher influence. However, the existing works on IM consider finding the most influential users as the seed set, ignoring either the activation costs of such individual nodes and the total budget or the size of the seed set, which may not be always an optimal solution, particularly from the financial and managerial perspectives, respectively. To address these issues, we propose a more realistic and generalized formulation termed as multi-constraint influence maximization (MCIM) aiming to achieve a cost-effective solution under both budgetary and cardinality constraints. Unlike the existing IM formulations, the proposed MCIM is no longer a monotone but a submodular function. As it is also proved to be an NP-hard problem, we propose a simple additive weighting (SAW) assisted differential evolution (DE) algorithm for solving the large-size real-world problems. Experimental results on four real-world datasets show that the proposed formulation and algorithm are effective in finding a cost-effective seed set.


Entropy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (5) ◽  
pp. 602
Author(s):  
Hongming Zhu ◽  
Xiaowen Wang ◽  
Yizhi Jiang ◽  
Hongfei Fan ◽  
Bowen Du ◽  
...  

Instance matching is a key task in knowledge graph fusion, and it is critical to improving the efficiency of instance matching, given the increasing scale of knowledge graphs. Blocking algorithms selecting candidate instance pairs for comparison is one of the effective methods to achieve the goal. In this paper, we propose a novel blocking algorithm named MultiObJ, which constructs indexes for instances based on the Ordered Joint of Multiple Objects’ features to limit the number of candidate instance pairs. Based on MultiObJ, we further propose a distributed framework named Follow-the-Regular-Leader Instance Matching (FTRLIM), which matches instances between large-scale knowledge graphs with approximately linear time complexity. FTRLIM has participated in OAEI 2019 and achieved the best matching quality with significantly efficiency. In this research, we construct three data collections based on a real-world large-scale knowledge graph. Experiment results on the constructed data collections and two real-world datasets indicate that MultiObJ and FTRLIM outperform other state-of-the-art methods.


Sensors ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 532
Author(s):  
Vedhus Hoskere ◽  
Yasutaka Narazaki ◽  
Billie F. Spencer

Manual visual inspection of civil infrastructure is high-risk, subjective, and time-consuming. The success of deep learning and the proliferation of low-cost consumer robots has spurred rapid growth in research and application of autonomous inspections. The major components of autonomous inspection include data acquisition, data processing, and decision making, which are usually studied independently. However, for robust real-world applicability, these three aspects of the overall process need to be addressed concurrently with end-to-end testing, incorporating scenarios such as variations in structure type, color, damage level, camera distance, view angle, lighting, etc. Developing real-world datasets that span all these scenarios is nearly impossible. In this paper, we propose a framework to create a virtual visual inspection testbed using 3D synthetic environments that can enable end-to-end testing of autonomous inspection strategies. To populate the 3D synthetic environment with virtual damaged buildings, we propose the use of a non-linear finite element model to inform the realistic and automated visual rendering of different damage types, the damage state, and the material textures of what are termed herein physics-based graphics models (PBGMs). To demonstrate the benefits of the autonomous inspection testbed, three experiments are conducted with models of earthquake damaged reinforced concrete buildings. First, we implement the proposed framework to generate a new large-scale annotated benchmark dataset for post-earthquake inspections of buildings termed QuakeCity. Second, we demonstrate the improved performance of deep learning models trained using the QuakeCity dataset for inference on real data. Finally, a comparison of deep learning-based damage state estimation for different data acquisition strategies is carried out. The results demonstrate the use of PBGMs as an effective testbed for the development and validation of strategies for autonomous vision-based inspections of civil infrastructure.


Author(s):  
Wanli Shi ◽  
Bin Gu ◽  
Xiang Li ◽  
Xiang Geng ◽  
Heng Huang

Semi-supervised learning is pervasive in real-world applications, where only a few labeled data are available and large amounts of instances remain unlabeled. Since AUC is an important model evaluation metric in classification, directly optimizing AUC in semi-supervised learning scenario has drawn much attention in the machine learning community. Recently, it has been shown that one could find an unbiased solution for the semi-supervised AUC maximization problem without knowing the class prior distribution. However, this method is hardly scalable for nonlinear classification problems with kernels. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel scalable quadruply stochastic gradient algorithm (QSG-S2AUC) for nonlinear semi-supervised AUC optimization. In each iteration of the stochastic optimization process, our method randomly samples a positive instance, a negative instance, an unlabeled instance and their random features to compute the gradient and then update the model by using this quadruply stochastic gradient to approach the optimal solution. More importantly, we prove that QSG-S2AUC can converge to the optimal solution in O(1/t), where t is the iteration number. Extensive experimental results on  a variety of benchmark datasets show that QSG-S2AUC is far more efficient than the existing state-of-the-art algorithms for semi-supervised AUC maximization, while retaining the similar generalization performance.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (17) ◽  
pp. 4902
Author(s):  
Fanhua Shang ◽  
Bingkun Wei ◽  
Yuanyuan Liu ◽  
Hongying Liu ◽  
Shuang Wang ◽  
...  

In recent years, a series of matching pursuit and hard thresholding algorithms have been proposed to solve the sparse representation problem with ℓ0-norm constraint. In addition, some stochastic hard thresholding methods were also proposed, such as stochastic gradient hard thresholding (SG-HT) and stochastic variance reduced gradient hard thresholding (SVRGHT). However, each iteration of all the algorithms requires one hard thresholding operation, which leads to a high per-iteration complexity and slow convergence, especially for high-dimensional problems. To address this issue, we propose a new stochastic recursive gradient support pursuit (SRGSP) algorithm, in which only one hard thresholding operation is required in each outer-iteration. Thus, SRGSP has a significantly lower computational complexity than existing methods such as SG-HT and SVRGHT. Moreover, we also provide the convergence analysis of SRGSP, which shows that SRGSP attains a linear convergence rate. Our experimental results on large-scale synthetic and real-world datasets verify that SRGSP outperforms state-of-the-art related methods for tackling various sparse representation problems. Moreover, we conduct many experiments on two real-world sparse representation applications such as image denoising and face recognition, and all the results also validate that our SRGSP algorithm obtains much better performance than other sparse representation learning optimization methods in terms of PSNR and recognition rates.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (23) ◽  
pp. 6733
Author(s):  
Hao Luo ◽  
Qingbo Wu ◽  
King Ngi Ngan ◽  
Hanxiao Luo ◽  
Haoran Wei ◽  
...  

Removing raindrops from a single image is a challenging problem due to the complex changes in shape, scale, and transparency among raindrops. Previous explorations have mainly been limited in two ways. First, publicly available raindrop image datasets have limited capacity in terms of modeling raindrop characteristics (e.g., raindrop collision and fusion) in real-world scenes. Second, recent deraining methods tend to apply shape-invariant filters to cope with diverse rainy images and fail to remove raindrops that are especially varied in shape and scale. In this paper, we address these raindrop removal problems from two perspectives. First, we establish a large-scale dataset named RaindropCityscapes, which includes 11,583 pairs of raindrop and raindrop-free images, covering a wide variety of raindrops and background scenarios. Second, a two-branch Multi-scale Shape Adaptive Network (MSANet) is proposed to detect and remove diverse raindrops, effectively filtering the occluded raindrop regions and keeping the clean background well-preserved. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significant improvements over the recent state-of-the-art raindrop removal methods. Moreover, the extension of our method towards the rainy image segmentation and detection tasks validates the practicality of the proposed method in outdoor applications.


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