Italy

We propose a novel supervised machine learning strategy, inspired by human learning, that enables an Agent to learn continually over its lifetime. A natural consequence is that the Agent must be able to handle an input whose label is delayed until a later time, or may not arrive at all. Our Agent learns in two steps: a short Seeding phase, in which the Agent’s model is initialized with labelled inputs, and an indefinitely long Growing phase, in which the Agent refines and assesses its model if the label is given for an input, but stores the input in a finite- length queue if the label is missing. Queued items are matched against future input-label pairs that arrive, and the model is then updated. Our strategy also allows for the delayed feedback to take a different form. For example, in an image captioning task, the feedback could be a semantic segmentation rather than a textual caption. We show with many experiments that our strategy enables an Agent to learn flexibly and efficiently.

ICPR 2020

Learning with Delayed Feedback

delayed feedback

image classification

image captioning

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. 


poster

We present an approach to detecting small cell populations in flow cytometry (FCM) samples based on the combination of unsupervised manifold embedding and supervised random forest classification. Each sample consists of hundred thousands to a million cells where each cell typically corresponds to a measurement vector with 10 to 50 dimensions. The difficulty of the task is that clusters of measurement vectors formed in the data space according to standard clustering criteria often do not correspond to biologically meaningful sub-populations of cells, due to strong variations in shape and size of their distributions. In many cases the relevant population consists of less than 100 scattered events out of millions of events, where supervised approaches perform better than unsupervised clustering. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the performance of the standard supervised classifier can be improved significantly by combining it with a preceding unsupervised learning step involving the Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP). We present an experimental evaluation on FCM data from children suffering from Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) showing that the positive effect of the UMAP becomes more noticeable for smaller training sets. Further, the experiments indicate that in this situation the algorithm also outperforms other baseline methods based on Gaussian Mixture Models.

Detecting rare cell populations in flow cytometry data using UMAP


Medical image computing has advanced rapidly with the advent of deep learning techniques. Deep convolutional neural networks can perform well given full supervision. However, the success of such fully-supervised models in various image analysis tasks (e.g., anatomy or lesion segmentation from medical images) depends on the availability of massive quantities of labeled data. Given small sample sizes, such models are prohibitively data biased with large domain shifts. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel end-to-end medical image segmentation model, namely Progressive Adversarial Semantic Segmentation (PASS), which can make improved and consistent pixel-wise segmentation predictions without requiring any domain-specific data during training. Our extensive experimentation with 8 public diabetic retinopathy and chest X-ray datasets confirms the effectiveness of PASS in accurate vascular and pulmonary segmentation, both for in-domain and cross-domain evaluations.

Progressive Adversarial Semantic Segmentation

We deal with the problem of generating textual captions from optical remote sensing (RS) images using the notion of deep reinforcement learning. Due to the high inter-class similarity in reference sentences describing remote sensing data, jointly encoding the sentences and images encourages prediction of captions that are semantically more precise than the ground truth in many cases. To this end, we introduce an Actor Dual-Critic training strategy where a second critic model is deployed in the form of an encoder-decoder RNN to encode the latent information corresponding to the original and generated captions. While all actor-critic methods use an actor to predict sentences for an image and a critic to provide rewards, our proposed encoder-decoder RNN guarantees high-level comprehension of images by sentence-to-image translation. We observe that the proposed model generates sentences on the test data highly similar to the ground truth and is successful in generating even better captions in many critical cases. Extensive experiments on the benchmark Remote Sensing Image Captioning Dataset (RSICD) and the UCM-captions dataset confirm the superiority of the proposed approach in comparison to the previous state-of-the-art where we obtain a gain of sharp increments in both the ROUGE-L and CIDEr measures.

A Novel Actor Dual-Critic Model for Remote Sensing Image Captioning


The cost-effective visual representation and fast query-by-example search are two challenging goals that should be maintained for web-scale visual retrieval tasks on moderate hardware. This paper introduces a fast and robust method that ensures both of these goals by obtaining state-of-the art performance for an image-to-video search scenario. Hence, we present critical enhancements to well-known indexing and visual representation techniques by promoting faster, better and moderate retrieval performance. We also boost the superiority of our method for some visual challenges by exploiting individual decisions of local and global descriptors at query time. For instance, local content descriptors represent copied/duplicated scenes with large geometric deformations such as scale, orientation and affine transformation. In contrast, the use of global content descriptors is more practical for near-duplicate and semantic searches. Experiments are conducted on a large-scale Stanford I2V dataset. The experimental results show that our method is useful in terms of complexity and query processing time for large-scale visual retrieval scenarios, even if local and global representations are used together. The proposed method is superior and achieves state-of-the-art performance based on the mean average precision (MAP) score of this dataset. Lastly, we report additional MAP scores after updating the ground annotations unveiled by retrieval results of the proposed method, and it shows that the actual performance.

Exploiting Local Indexing and Deep Feature Confidence Scores 
for Fast Image-to-Video Search


Environmental Sound Classification (ESC) is an active research area in the audio domain and has seen a lot of progress in the past years. However, many of the existing approaches achieve high accuracy by relying on domain-specific features and architectures, making it harder to benefit from advances in other fields (e.g., the image domain). Additionally, some of the past successes have been attributed to a discrepancy of how results are evaluated (i.e., on unofficial splits of the UrbanSound8K (US8K) dataset), distorting the overall progression of the field.
The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we present a model that is inherently compatible with mono and stereo sound inputs. Our model is based on simple log-power Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) spectrograms and combines them with several well-known approaches from the image domain (i.e., ResNet, Siamese-like networks and attention). We investigate the influence of cross-domain pre-training, architectural changes, and evaluate our model on standard datasets. We find that our model out-performs all previously known approaches in a fair comparison by achieving accuracies of 97.0 % (ESC-10), 91.5 % (ESC-50) and 84.2 % / 85.4 % (US8K mono / stereo).
Second, we provide a comprehensive overview of the actual state of the field, by differentiating several previously reported results on the US8K dataset between official or unofficial splits.

ESResNet: Environmental Sound Classification Based on Visual Domain Models




While deep learning approaches have shown remarkable performance in many imaging tasks, most of these methods rely on the availability of large quantities of data. Medical imaging data, however, are scarce and fragmented. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have recently been very effective in handling such datasets by generating more data. If the datasets are very small, however, GANs cannot learn the data distribution properly, resulting in less diverse or low-quality results. One such limited dataset is that for the concurrent gain of 19/20 chromosomes (19/20 co-gain), a mutation with positive prognostic value in Glioblastomas (GBM). In this paper, imaging biomarkers are detected for the mutation to streamline the extensive and invasive prognosis pipeline. Since this mutation is relatively rare, i.e. small dataset, a novel generative framework – the Sequential Attribute GEnerator (SAGE), is proposed, that generates detailed tumor imaging features while learning from a limited dataset. Experiments show that not only does SAGE generate high quality tumors when compared to Progressively Growing GAN (PGGAN), Wasserstein GAN with Gradient Penalty (WGAN-GP) and Deep Convolutional-GAN (DC-GAN), but also captures the imaging biomarkers accurately.

SAGE: Sequential Attribute Generator for Analyzing Glioblastomas Using Limited Dataset

Person Re-Identification (re-ID) aims at retrieving images of the same person taken by different cameras. A challenge for re-ID is the performance preservation when a model is used on data of interest (target data) which belong to a different domain from the training data domain (source data). Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) is an interesting research direction for this challenge as it avoids a costly annotation of the target data. Pseudo-labeling methods achieve the best results in UDA-based re-ID. They incrementally learn with identity pseudo-labels which are initialized by clustering features in the source re-ID encoder space. Surprisingly, labeled source data are discarded after this initialization step. However, we believe that pseudo-labeling could further leverage the labeled source data in order to improve the post-initialization training steps.
In order to improve robustness against erroneous pseudo-labels, we advocate the exploitation of both labeled source data and pseudo-labeled target data during all training iterations. To support our guideline, we introduce a framework which relies on a two-branch architecture optimizing classification and triplet loss based metric learning in source and target domains, respectively, in order to allow adaptability to the target domain while ensuring robustness to noisy pseudo-labels. Indeed, shared low and mid-level parameters benefit from the source classification and triplet loss signal while high-level parameters of the target branch learn domain-specific features.
Our method is simple enough to be easily combined with existing pseudo-labeling UDA approaches. We show experimentally that it is efficient and improves performance when the base method has no mechanism to deal with pseudo-label noise.
Our approach reaches state-of-the-art performance when evaluated on commonly used datasets, Market-1501 and DukeMTMC-reID, and outperforms the state of the art when targeting the bigger and more challenging dataset MSMT.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Person Re-Identification through Source-Guided Pseudo-Labeling


Precise segmentation of objects is an important problem in tasks like class-agnostic object proposal generation or instance segmentation. Deep learning-based systems usually generate segmentations of objects based on coarse feature maps, due to the inherent downsampling in CNNs. This leads to segmentation boundaries not adhering well to the object boundaries in the image. To tackle this problem, we introduce a new superpixel-based refinement approach on top of the state-of-the-art object proposal system AttentionMask. The refinement utilizes superpixel pooling for feature extraction and a novel superpixel classifier to determine if a high precision superpixel belongs to an object or not. Our experiments show an improvement of up to 26.0% in terms of average recall compared to original ttentionMask. Furthermore, qualitative and quantitative analyses of the segmentations reveal significant improvements in terms of boundary adherence for the proposed refinement compared to various deep learning-based state-of-the-art object proposal generation systems.

Superpixel-based Refinement for Object Proposal Generation

Despite great progress, previous stereo matching algorithms still lack the ability to match textureless regions and slender structure areas. To tackle this problem, we propose ASMNet, an attention stereo matching network. Attention module and disparity refinement module are constructed in the ASMNet. The attention module can improve correlation information between two images by channels and spatial attention.The feature-guided disparity refinement module learns more geometry information in different feature levels to refine the coarse prediction resolution constantly. The proposed approach was evaluated on several benchmark datasets. Experiments show that the proposed method achieves competitive results on KITTI and Scene-Flow datasets while running in real-time at 14ms.

Attention Stereo Matching Network

The notion of anchor plays a major role in modern detection algorithms such as the Faster-RCNN or the SSD detector. Anchors relate the features of the last layers of the detector with bounding boxes containing objects in images. Despite their importance, the literature on object detection has not paid real attention to them. The motivation of this paper comes from the observations that (i) each anchor learns to classify and regress candidate objects independently (ii) insufficient examples are available for each anchor in case of small-scale datasets. This paper addresses these questions by proposing a novel hierarchical head for the SSD detector. The new design has the added advantage of no extra weights, as compared to the original design at inference time, while improving detectors performance for small size training sets. Improved performance on PASCAL-VOC and state-of-the-art performance on FlickrLogos-47 validate the method. We also show when the proposed design does not give additional performance gain over the original design.

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Learning with Delayed Feedback

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Detecting rare cell populations in flow cytometry data using UMAP

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