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Amongst a variety of approaches aimed at making the learning procedure of neural networks more effective, the scientific community developed strategies to order the examples according to their estimated complexity, to distil knowledge from larger networks, or to exploit the principles behind adversarial machine learning.
 
A different idea has been recently proposed, named Friendly Training, which consists in altering the input data by adding an automatically estimated perturbation, with the goal of facilitating the learning process of a neural classifier. The transformation progressively fades-out as long as training proceeds, until it completely vanishes. In this work we revisit and extend this idea, introducing a radically different and novel approach inspired by the effectiveness of neural generators in the context of Adversarial Machine Learning. We propose an auxiliary multi-layer network that is responsible of altering the input data to make them easier to be handled by the classifier at the current stage of the training procedure. 
The auxiliary network is trained jointly with the neural classifier, thus intrinsically increasing the &#39;depth&#39; of the classifier, and it is expected to spot general regularities in the data alteration process. The effect of the auxiliary network is progressively reduced up to the end of training, when it is fully dropped and the classifier is deployed for applications. We refer to this approach as Neural Friendly Training.
 
An extended experimental procedure involving several datasets and different neural architectures shows that Neural Friendly Training overcomes the originally proposed Friendly Training technique, improving the generalization of the classifier, especially in the case of noisy data.

AAAI 2022

Being Friends Instead of Adversaries: Deep Networks Learn from Data Simplified by Other Networks

Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific is partnering with AFCEA San Diego chapter to host the workshop.

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* To spread awareness of current machine learning research relevant to Naval applications

* To connect machine learning researchers with experts in military requirements

* To build and strengthen collaborations within the defense research community

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NAML 2021

The annual workshop on Naval Applications of Machine Learning is an opportunity for researchers from Navy research and development centers and our partner organizations to exchange technical ideas and to come together as a team. The goals of NAML are to spread awareness of current machine learning research relevant to Naval applications, to connect machine learning researchers with experts in military requirements and to build and strengthen collaborations within the defense research community.


Amongst a variety of approaches aimed at making the learning procedure of neural networks more effective, the scientific community developed strategies to order the examples according to their estimated complexity, to distil knowledge from larger networks, or to exploit the principles behind adversarial machine learning.
 
A different idea has been recently proposed, named Friendly Training, which consists in altering the input data by adding an automatically estimated perturbation, with the goal of facilitating the learning process of a neural classifier. The transformation progressively fades-out as long as training proceeds, until it completely vanishes. In this work we revisit and extend this idea, introducing a radically different and novel approach inspired by the effectiveness of neural generators in the context of Adversarial Machine Learning. We propose an auxiliary multi-layer network that is responsible of altering the input data to make them easier to be handled by the classifier at the current stage of the training procedure. 
The auxiliary network is trained jointly with the neural classifier, thus intrinsically increasing the 'depth' of the classifier, and it is expected to spot general regularities in the data alteration process. The effect of the auxiliary network is progressively reduced up to the end of training, when it is fully dropped and the classifier is deployed for applications. We refer to this approach as Neural Friendly Training.
 
An extended experimental procedure involving several datasets and different neural architectures shows that Neural Friendly Training overcomes the originally proposed Friendly Training technique, improving the generalization of the classifier, especially in the case of noisy data.

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

While self-training achieves state-of-the-art results in semi-supervised object detection (SSOD), it severely suffers from foreground-background and foreground-foreground imbalances in SSOD. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Class-Rebalancing Self-Training (ACRST) with a novel memory module called CropBank to alleviate these imbalances and generate unbiased pseudo-labels. Besides, we observe that both self-training and data-rebalancing procedures suffer from noisy pseudo-labels in SSOD. Therefore, we contribute a simple yet effective two-stage pseudo-label filtering scheme to obtain accurate supervision. Our method achieves competitive performance on MS-COCO and VOC benchmarks. When using only 1% labeled data of MS-COCO, our method achieves 17.02 mAP improvement over the supervised method and 5.32 mAP gains compared with state-of-the-arts.

Semi-Supervised Object Detection with Adaptive Class-Rebalancing Self-Training

Producing densely annotated data is a difficult and tedious task for medical imaging applications. 
To address this problem, we propose a novel approach to generate supervision for semi-supervised semantic segmentation. 
We argue that visually similar regions between labeled and unlabeled images likely contain the same semantics and therefore should share their label.
Following this thought, we use a small number of labeled images as reference material and match pixels in an unlabeled image to the semantic of the best fitting pixel in a reference set.
This way, we avoid pitfalls such as confirmation bias, common in purely prediction-based pseudo-labeling.
Since our method does not require any architectural changes or accompanying networks, one can easily insert it into existing frameworks.
We achieve the same performance as a standard fully supervised model on X-ray anatomy segmentation, albeit using 95% fewer labeled images.
Aside from an in-depth analysis of different aspects of our proposed method, we further demonstrate the effectiveness of our reference-guided learning paradigm by comparing our approach against existing methods for retinal fluid segmentation with competitive performance as we improve upon recent work by up to 15% mean IoU.

Reference-Guided Pseudo-Label Generation for Medical Semantic Segmentation

As one of the fundamental components of object detection, intersection-over-union (IoU) calculations between two bounding boxes play an important role in samples selection, NMS operation and evaluation of object detection algorithms. This procedure is well-defined and solved for planar images, while it is challenging for spherical ones. Some existing methods utilize planar bounding boxes to represent spherical objects. However, they are biased due to the distortions of spherical objects. Others use spherical rectangles as unbiased representations, but they adopt excessive approximate algorithms when computing the IoU. In this paper, we propose an unbiased IoU as a novel evaluation criterion for spherical image object detection, which is based on the unbiased representations and utilize unbiased analytical method for IoU calculation. This is the first time that the absolutely accurate IoU calculation is applied to the evaluation criterion, thus object detection algorithms can be correctly evaluated for spherical images. With the unbiased representation and calculation, we also present Spherical CenterNet, an anchor free object detection algorithm for spherical images. The experiments show that our unbiased IoU gives accurate results and the proposed Spherical CenterNet achieves better performance on one real-world and two synthetic spherical object detection datasets than existing methods.

Unbiased IoU for Spherical Image Object Detection

Heads-up no-limit Texas hold'em (HUNL) is the quintessential game with imperfect information. Representative priorworks like DeepStack and Libratus heavily rely on counter-factual regret minimization (CFR) and its variants to tackleHUNL. However, the prohibitive computation cost of CFRiteration makes it difficult for subsequent researchers to learnthe CFR model in HUNL and apply it in other practical applications. In this work, we present AlphaHoldem, a high-performance and lightweight HUNL AI obtained with an end-to-end self-play reinforcement learning framework. The proposed framework adopts a pseudo-siamese architecture to directly learn from the input state information to the output actions by competing the learned model with its different historical versions. The main technical contributions include anovel state representation of card and betting information, amultitask self-play training loss function, and a new modelevaluation and selection metric to generate the final model.In a study involving 100,000 hands of poker, AlphaHoldemdefeats Slumbot and DeepStack using only one PC with threedays training. At the same time, AlphaHoldem only takes 2.9milliseconds for each decision-making using only a singleGPU, more than 1,000 times faster than DeepStack. We release the history data among among AlphaHoldem, Slumbot,and top human professionals in the author's GitHub repository to facilitate further studies in this direction.

AlphaHoldem: High-Performance Artificial Intelligence for Heads-Up No-Limit Poker via End-to-End Reinforcement Learning

Multi-modal person Re-ID introduces more complementary information to assist the traditional Re-ID task. Existing multi-modal methods ignore the importance of modality-specific information in the feature fusion stage. To this end, we propose a novel method to boost modality-specific representations for multi-modal person Re-ID: Interact, Embed, and EnlargE (IEEE). First, we propose a cross-modal interacting module to exchange useful information between different modalities in the feature extraction phase. Second, we propose a relation-based embedding module to enhance the richness of feature descriptors by embedding the global feature into the fine-grained local information. Finally, we propose multi-modal margin loss to force the network to learn modality-specific information for each modality by enlarging the intra-class discrepancy. Superior performance on multi-modal Re-ID dataset RGBNT201 and three constructed Re-ID datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method compared with the state-of-the-art approaches.

Interact, Embed, and EnlargE: Boosting Modality-Specific Representations for Multi-Modal Person Re-Identification

This paper proposes a novel active boundary loss for semantic segmentation. It can progressively encourage the alignment between predicted boundaries and ground-truth boundaries during end-to-end training, which is not explicitly enforced in commonly used cross-entropy loss. Based on the predicted boundaries detected from the segmentation results using current network parameters, we formulate the boundary alignment problem as a differentiable direction vector prediction problem to guide the movement of predicted boundaries in each iteration. Our loss is model-agnostic and can be plugged in to the training of segmentation networks to improve the boundary details. Experimental results show that training with the active boundary loss can effectively improve the boundary F-score and mean Intersection-over-Union on challenging image and video object segmentation datasets.

Active Boundary Loss for Semantic Segmentation

Knowledge distillation (KD) has recently emerged as a powerful strategy to transfer knowledge from a pre-trained teacher model to a lightweight student, and has demonstrated its unprecedented success over a wide spectrum of applications. 
 In spite of the encouraging results, the KD process \emph{per se} poses a potential threat to network ownership protection, since the knowledge contained in network can be effortlessly distilled and hence exposed to a malicious user.
 In this paper, we propose a novel framework, termed as Safe Distillation Box~(SDB), that allows us to wrap a pre-trained model in a virtual box for intellectual property protection. Specifically, SDB preserves the inference capability of the wrapped model to all users, but precludes KD from unauthorized users. For authorized users, on the other hand, SDB carries out a knowledge augmentation scheme to strengthen the KD performances and the results of the student model. In other words, all users may employ a model in SDB for inference, but only authorized users get access to KD from the model. The proposed SDB imposes no constraints over the model architecture, and may readily serve as a plug-and-play solution to protect the ownership of a pre-trained network. Experiments across various datasets and architectures demonstrate that, with SDB, the performance of an unauthorized KD drops significantly while that of an authorized gets enhanced, demonstrating the effectiveness of SDB.

Safe Distillation Box

Though deep learning-based object detection methods have achieved promising results on the conventional datasets, it is still challenging to locate objects from the low-quality images captured in adverse weather conditions. The existing methods either have difficulties in balancing the tasks of image enhancement and object detection, or often ignore the latent information beneficial for detection. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel Image-Adaptive YOLO (IA-YOLO) framework, where each image can be adaptively enhanced for better detection performance. Specifically, a differentiable image processing (DIP) module is presented to take into account the adverse weather conditions for YOLO detector, whose parameters are predicted by a small convolutional neural network (CNN-PP). We learn CNN-PP and YOLOv3 jointly in an end-to-end fashion, which ensures that CNN-PP can learn an appropriate DIP to enhance the image for detection in a weakly supervised manner. Our proposed IA-YOLO approach can adaptively process images in both normal and adverse weather conditions. The experimental results are very encouraging, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed IA-YOLO method in both foggy and low-light scenarios. The source code can be found at https://github.com/wenyyu/Image-Adaptive-YOLO.

Image-Adaptive YOLO for Object Detection in Adverse Weather Conditions

We propose a novel way to incorporate expert knowledge into the training of deep neural networks. Many approaches encode domain constraints directly into the network architecture, requiring non-trivial or domain-specific engineering. In contrast, our approach, called MultiplexNet, represents domain knowledge as a quantifier-free logical formula in disjunctive normal form (DNF) which is easy to encode and to elicit from human experts. It introduces a latent Categorical variable that learns to choose which constraint term optimizes the error function of the network and it compiles the constraints directly into the output of existing learning algorithms. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach empirically on several classical deep learning tasks, such as density estimation and classification in both supervised and unsupervised settings where prior knowledge about the domains was expressed as logical constraints. Our results show that the MultiplexNet approach learned to approximate unknown distributions well, often requiring fewer data samples than the alternative approaches. In some cases, MultiplexNet finds better solutions than the baselines; or solutions that could not be achieved with the alternative approaches. Our contribution is in encoding domain knowledge in a way that facilitates inference. We specifically focus on quantifier-free logical formulae that are specified over the output domain of a network. We show that this approach is both efficient and general; and critically, our approach guarantees 100% constraint satisfaction in a network's output.

MultiplexNet: Towards Fully Satisfied Logical Constraints in Neural Networks

Temporal action proposal generation (TAPG) is a challenging task that aims to locate action instances in untrimmed videos with temporal boundaries.
 To evaluate the confidence of proposals, the existing works typically predict action score of proposals that are supervised by the temporal Intersection-over-Union (tIoU) between proposal and the ground-truth.
 In this paper, we innovatively propose a general auxiliary Background Constraint idea to further suppress low-quality proposals, by utilizing the background prediction score to restrict the confidence of proposals. In this way, the Background Constraint concept can be easily plug-and-played into existing TAPG methods (BMN, GTAD). 
 From this perspective, we propose the Background Constraint Network (BCNet) to further take advantage of the rich information of action and background. Specifically, we introduce an Action-Background Interaction module for reliable confidence evaluation, which models the inconsistency between action and background by attention mechanisms at the frame and clip levels.
 Extensive experiments are conducted on two popular benchmarks, ActivityNet-1.3 and THUMOS14. The results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Equipped with the existing action classifier, our method also achieves remarkable performance on the temporal action localization task.

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