Distributionally Robust Optimization using Cost-Aware Ambiguity Sets

We present a novel class of ambiguity sets for distributionally robust optimization (DRO). These ambiguity sets, called cost-aware ambiguity sets, are defined as halfspaces which depend on the cost function evaluated at an independent estimate of the optimal solution, thus excluding only those distributions that are expected to have significant impact on the obtained worst-case cost. We show that the resulting DRO method provides both a high-confidence upper bound and a consistent estimator of the out-of-sample expected cost, and demonstrate empirically that it results in less conservative solutions compared to divergence-based ambiguity sets.

Efficient semantic image segmentation with superpixel pooling

In this work, we evaluate the use of superpixel pooling layers in deep network architectures for semantic segmentation. Superpixel pooling is a flexible and efficient replacement for other pooling strategies that incorporates spatial prior information. We propose a simple and efficient GPU-implementation of the layer and explore several designs for the integration of the layer into existing network architectures. We provide experimental results on the IBSR and Cityscapes dataset, demonstrating that superpixel pooling can be leveraged to consistently increase network accuracy with minimal computational overhead. Source code is available at https://github.com/bermanmaxim/superpixPool