Italy

Stochastic block models (SBMs) are often used to find assortative community structures in networks, such that the probability of connections within communities is higher than in between communities. However, classic SBMs are not limited to assortative structures. In this study, we discuss the implications of this model-inherent indifference towards assortativity or disassortativity, and show that this characteristic can lead to undesirable outcomes for networks which are presupposedy assortative but which contain a reduced amount of information. To circumvent this issue, we introduce a constrained SBM that imposes strong assortativity constraints, along with efficient algorithmic approaches to solve it. These constraints significantly boost community recovery capabilities in regimes that are close to the information-theoretic threshold. They also permit to identify structurally-different communities in networks representing cerebral-cortex activity regions.

ICPR 2020

Assortative-Constrained Stochastic Block Models

stochastic block model

community detection

machine learning

clustering

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
AAAI is providing you with a conference planner, which you can use to help organize your itinerary of activities. This includes talks to attend in person, talks to attend remotely, breaks with colleagues and your site seeing activities. To access this conference planner, please go to [https://aaai-2023.takemobi.io](https://aaai-2023.takemobi.io).

In order to access this site, you need to register. If you haven't already, please register [here](https://aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI-23/registration/).


AAAI 2023

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines.

poster

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. 


In this paper we ask for the main factors that determine a classifier's decision making process and uncover such factors by studying latent codes produced by auto-encoding frameworks. To deliver an explanation of a classifier's behaviour, we propose a method that provides series of examples highlighting semantic differences between the classifier's decisions. These examples are generated through interpolations in latent space. We introduce and formalize the notion of a semantic stochastic path, as a suitable stochastic process defined in feature (data) space via latent code interpolations. We then introduce the concept of semantic Lagrangians as a way to incorporate the desired classifier's behaviour and find that the solution of the associated variational problem allows for highlighting differences in the classifier decision.
Very importantly, within our framework the classifier is used as a black-box, and only its evaluation is required.

Auto Encoding Explanatory Examples with Stochastic Paths


Morphological hierarchies form a popular framework aiming at emphasizing the multiscale structure of digital image by performing an unsupervised spatial partitioning of the data. These hierarchies have been recently extended to cope with image sequences, and different strategies have been proposed to allow their construction from spatio-temporal data. In this paper, we compare these hierarchical representation strategies for image sequences according to their structural properties. We introduce a projection method to make these representations comparable. Furthermore, we extend one of these recent strategies in order to obtain more efficient hierarchical representations for image sequences. Experiments were conducted on both synthetic and real datasets, the latter being made of satellite image time series. We show that building one hierarchy by using spatial and temporal information together is more efficient comparing to other existing strategies.

On Morphological Hierarchies for Image Sequences


This paper studies the problem of Person Re-Identification (ReID)
for large-scale applications. Recent research efforts have been devoted
to building complicated part models, which introduce considerably
high computational cost and memory consumption, inhibiting its practicability
in large-scale applications. This paper aims to develop a novel learning
strategy to find efficient feature embeddings while maintaining the
balance of accuracy and model complexity. More specifically, we find
by enhancing the classical triplet loss together with cross-entropy
loss, our method can explore the hard examples and build a discriminant
feature embedding yet compact enough for large-scale applications.
Our method is carried out progressively using Bayesian optimization,
and we call it the Progressive Learning Algorithm (PLA). Extensive
experiments on three large-scale datasets show that our PLA is comparable
or better than the state-of-the-arts. Especially, on the challenging
Market-1501 dataset, we achieve Rank-1=94.7%/mAP=89.4% while saving
at least 30\% parameters than strong part models.

Local Clustering with Mean Teacher for Semi-supervised learning




This paper studies the indoor localisation of WiFi devices based on a commodity chipset and standard channel sounding. First, we present a novel shallow neural network (SNN) in which features are extracted from the channel state information (CSI) corresponding to WiFi subcarriers received on different antennas and used to train the model. The single-layer architecture of this localisation neural network makes it lightweight and easy-to-deploy on devices with stringent constraints on computational resources. We further investigate for localisation the use of deep learning models and design novel architectures for convolutional neural network (CNN) and long-short term memory (LSTM). We extensively evaluate these
localisation algorithms for continuous tracking in indoor environments. Experimental results prove that even an SNN model, after a careful handcrafted feature extraction, can achieve accurate localisation. Meanwhile, using a well-organised architecture, the neural network models can be trained directly with raw data from the CSI and localisation features can be automatically extracted to achieve accurate position estimates. We also found that the performance of neural network-based methods are directly affected by the number of anchor access points (APs) regardless of their structure. With three APs, all neural network models proposed in this paper can obtain localisation accuracy of around 0.5 metres. In addition the proposed deep NN architecture reduces the data pre-processing time by 6.5 hours compared with a shallow NN using the data collected in our testbed. In the deployment phase, the inference time is also significantly reduced to 0.1 ms per sample. We also demonstrate the generalisation capability of the proposed method by evaluating models using different target movement characteristics to the ones in which they were trained.


Wireless Localisation in WiFi using Novel Deep Architectures

In class-incremental learning, a learning agent faces a stream of data with the goal of learning new classes while not forgetting previous ones. Neural networks are known to suffer under this setting, as they forget previously acquired knowledge. To address this problem, effective methods exploit past data stored in an episodic memory while expanding the final classifier nodes to accommodate the new classes.

In this work, we substitute the expanding classifier with a novel fixed classifier
in which a number of pre-allocated output nodes are subject to the classification loss right from the beginning of the learning phase. Contrarily to the standard expanding classifier, this allows: (a) the output nodes of future unseen classes to firstly see negative samples since the beginning of learning together with the positive samples that incrementally arrive; (b) to learn features that do not change their geometric configuration as novel classes are incorporated in the learning model.

Experiments with public
datasets show that the proposed approach is as effective as the expanding classifier while exhibiting novel intriguing properties of the internal feature representation that are otherwise not-existent. Our ablation study on pre-allocating a large number of classes further validates the approach.

Class-incremental Learning with Regular Polytope Networks

In this presentation, the Surface Material Dataset for Robotics Applications (SMDRA) is introduced including the necessity for this dataset and how the data was collected and verified.

Surface Material Dataset for Robotics Applications (SMDRA): A Dataset with Friction Coefficient and RGB-D for Surface Segmentation


Representational Learning in the form of high dimensional embeddings has been used for multiple pattern recognition applications. 
There has been a significant interest in building embedding based systems for learning representations in the mathematical domain. 
At the same time, retrieval of structured information such as mathematical expressions is an important need for modern IR systems.
In this work, our motivation is to introduce a robust framework for learning representations 
for similarity-based retrieval of mathematical expressions.
Given a query by example, the embedding can find the closest matching expression as a function of Euclidean distance between them. 
We leverage recent advancements in image-based and graph-based deep learning algorithms to learn our similarity embeddings. 
We do this first, by using uni-modal encoders in graph space and image space and then, by a multi-modal combination of the same. 
To overcome the lack of training data, we force the networks to learn a deep metric using triplets generated with a heuristic scoring function.
We also adopt a custom strategy for mining hard samples to train our neural networks. 
Our system produces rankings similar to those generated by the original scoring function, but using only a fraction of the time.
Our results establish the viability of using such a multi-modal embedding for this task.

Equation Attention Relationship Network (EARN) : A Geometric Deep Metric Framework for Learning Similar Math Expression Embedding

With more research published on adversarial examples, we face a growing need for strong and insightful methods for evaluating the robustness of machine learning solutions against their adversarial threats. Previous work contains problematic and overly simplified evaluation methods, where different methods for generating adversarial examples are compared, even though they produce adversarial examples of differing perturbation magnitudes. This creates a biased evaluation environment, as higher perturbations yield naturally stronger adversarial examples. We propose a novel "accuracy-perturbation curve" that visualizes a classifiers classification accuracy response to adversarial examples of different perturbations. To demonstrate the utility of the curve we perform evaluation of responses of different image classifier architectures to four popular adversarial example methods. We also show how adversarial training improves the robustness of a classifier using the "accuracy-perturbation curve".

Accuracy-Perturbation Curves for Evaluation of Adversarial Attack and Defence Methods

In this paper, we present a novel framework that uses tensor factorization to generate richer feature spaces for pixel classification in hyperspectral images. In
particular, we assess the performance of different tensor rank decomposition methods as compared to the traditional kernel-based approaches for the hyperspectral image classification problem. We propose ORION, which takes as
input a hyperspectral image tensor and a rank and outputs an enhanced feature space from the factor matrices of the decomposed tensor. Our method is a feature explosion technique that inherently maps low dimensional input space in R^K to high dimensional space in R^R, where R >> K, say in the order of 1000x, like a kernel. We show how the proposed method exploits the multi-linear structure of hyperspectral three-dimensional tensor. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with experiments on three publicly available hyperspectral datasets with labeled pixels and compare their classification performance against traditional linear and non-linear supervised learning methods such as SVM with Linear, Polynomial, RBF kernels, and the Multi-Layer Perceptron model. Finally, we explore the relationship between the rank of the tensor decomposition and the classification accuracy using several hyperspectral datasets with ground truth.

Tensorized Feature Spaces for Feature Explosion

The problem of uncovering different dynamical regimes is of pivotal importance in time series analysis. Switching dynamical systems provide a solution for modeling physical phenomena whose time series data exhibit different dynamical modes. In this work we propose a novel variational RNN model for switching dynamics allowing for both non-Markovian and non-linear dynamical behavior between and within dynamic modes. Attention mechanisms are provided to inform the switching distribution.
We evaluate our model on synthetic and empirical datasets of diverse nature and successfully uncover different dynamical regimes and predict the switching dynamics.

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Assortative-Constrained Stochastic Block Models

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Auto Encoding Explanatory Examples with Stochastic Paths

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