Dense Learning based Semi-Supervised Object Detection

Semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) aims to facilitate the training and deployment of object detectors with the help of a large amount of unlabeled data. Though various self-training based and consistency-regularization based SSOD methods have been proposed, most of them are anchor-based detectors, ignoring the fact that in many real-world applications anchor-free detectors are more demanded. In this paper, we intend to bridge this gap and propose a DenSe Learning (DSL) based anchor-free SSOD algorithm. Specifically, we achieve this goal by introducing several novel techniques, including an Adaptive Filtering strategy for assigning multi-level and accurate dense pixel-wise pseudo-labels, an Aggregated Teacher for producing stable and precise pseudo-labels, and an uncertainty-consistency-regularization term among scales and shuffled patches for improving the generalization capability of the detector. Extensive experiments are conducted on MS-COCO and PASCAL-VOC, and the results show that our proposed DSL method records new state-of-the-art SSOD performance, surpassing existing methods by a large margin. Codes can be found at \textcolor{blue}{https://github.com/chenbinghui1/DSL}.

Guided Semi-Supervised Non-negative Matrix Factorization on Legal Documents

Classification and topic modeling are popular techniques in machine learning that extract information from large-scale datasets. By incorporating a priori information such as labels or important features, methods have been developed to perform classification and topic modeling tasks; however, most methods that can perform both do not allow for guidance of the topics or features. In this paper, we propose a method, namely Guided Semi-Supervised Non-negative Matrix Factorization (GSSNMF), that performs both classification and topic modeling by incorporating supervision from both pre-assigned document class labels and user-designed seed words. We test the performance of this method through its application to legal documents provided by the California Innocence Project, a nonprofit that works to free innocent convicted persons and reform the justice system. The results show that our proposed method improves both classification accuracy and topic coherence in comparison to past methods like Semi-Supervised Non-negative Matrix Factorization (SSNMF) and Guided Non-negative Matrix Factorization (Guided NMF).

Variational Attention: Propagating Domain-Specific Knowledge for Multi-Domain Learning in Crowd Counting

In crowd counting, due to the problem of laborious labelling, it is perceived intractability of collecting a new large-scale dataset which has plentiful images with large diversity in density, scene, etc. Thus, for learning a general model, training with data from multiple different datasets might be a remedy and be of great value. In this paper, we resort to the multi-domain joint learning and propose a simple but effective Domain-specific Knowledge Propagating Network (DKPNet)1 for unbiasedly learning the knowledge from multiple diverse data domains at the same time. It is mainly achieved by proposing the novel Variational Attention(VA) technique for explicitly modeling the attention distributions for different domains. And as an extension to VA, Intrinsic Variational Attention(InVA) is proposed to handle the problems of over-lapped domains and sub-domains. Extensive experiments have been conducted to validate the superiority of our DKPNet over several popular datasets, including ShanghaiTech A/B, UCF-QNRF and NWPU.

Analysis of Legal Documents via Non-negative Matrix Factorization Methods

The California Innocence Project (CIP), a clinical law school program aiming to free wrongfully convicted prisoners, evaluates thousands of mails containing new requests for assistance and corresponding case files. Processing and interpreting this large amount of information presents a significant challenge for CIP officials, which can be successfully aided by topic modeling techniques.In this paper, we apply Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) method and implement various offshoots of it to the important and previously unstudied data set compiled by CIP. We identify underlying topics of existing case files and classify request files by crime type and case status (decision type). The results uncover the semantic structure of current case files and can provide CIP officials with a general understanding of newly received case files before further examinations. We also provide an exposition of popular variants of NMF with their experimental results and discuss the benefits and drawbacks of each variant through the real-world application.

COVID-19 Literature Topic-Based Search via Hierarchical NMF

A dataset of COVID-19-related scientific literature is compiled, combining the articles from several online libraries and selecting those with open access and full text available. Then, hierarchical nonnegative matrix factorization is used to organize literature related to the novel coronavirus into a tree structure that allows researchers to search for relevant literature based on detected topics. We discover eight major latent topics and 52 granular subtopics in the body of literature, related to vaccines, genetic structure and modeling of the disease and patient studies, as well as related diseases and virology. In order that our tool may help current researchers, an interactive website is created that organizes available literature using this hierarchical structure.

Logical Parsing from Natural Language Based on a Neural Translation Model

Semantic parsing has emerged as a significant and powerful paradigm for natural language interface and question answering systems. Traditional methods of building a semantic parser rely on high-quality lexicons, hand-crafted grammars and linguistic features which are limited by applied domain or representation. In this paper, we propose a general approach to learn from denotations based on Seq2Seq model augmented with attention mechanism. We encode input sequence into vectors and use dynamic programming to infer candidate logical forms. We utilize the fact that similar utterances should have similar logical forms to help reduce the searching space. Under our learning policy, the Seq2Seq model can learn mappings gradually with noises. Curriculum learning is adopted to make the learning smoother. We test our method on the arithmetic domain which shows our model can successfully infer the correct logical forms and learn the word meanings, compositionality and operation orders simultaneously.