Poisoning Attack against Estimating from Pairwise Comparisons

As pairwise ranking becomes broadly employed for elections, sports competitions, recommendations, and so on, attackers have strong motivation and incentives to manipulate the ranking list. They could inject malicious comparisons into the training data to fool the victim. Such a technique is called poisoning attack in regression and classification tasks. In this paper, to the best of our knowledge, we initiate the first systematic investigation of data poisoning attacks on pairwise ranking algorithms, which can be formalized as the dynamic and static games between the ranker and the attacker and can be modeled as certain kinds of integer programming problems. To break the computational hurdle of the underlying integer programming problems, we reformulate them into the distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problems, which are computationally tractable. Based on such DRO formulations, we propose two efficient poisoning attack algorithms and establish the associated theoretical guarantees. The effectiveness of the suggested poisoning attack strategies is demonstrated by a series of toy simulations and several real data experiments. These experimental results show that the proposed methods can significantly reduce the performance of the ranker in the sense that the correlation between the true ranking list and the aggregated results can be decreased dramatically.

Seeking the Shape of Sound: An Adaptive Framework for Learning Voice-Face Association

Nowadays, we have witnessed the early progress on learning the association between voice and face automatically, which brings a new wave of studies to the computer vision community. However, most of the prior arts along this line (a) merely adopt local information to perform modality alignment and (b) ignore the diversity of learning difficulty across different subjects. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to jointly address the above-mentioned issues. Targeting at (a), we propose a two-level modality alignment loss where both global and local information are considered. Compared with the existing methods, we introduce a global loss into the modality alignment process. The global component of the loss is driven by the identity classification. Theoretically, we show that minimizing the loss could maximize the distance between embeddings across different identities while minimizing the distance between embeddings belonging to the same identity, in a global sense (instead of a mini-batch). Targeting at (b), we propose a dynamic reweighting scheme to better explore the hard but valuable identities while filtering out the unlearnable identities. Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms the previous methods in multiple settings, including voice-face matching, verification and retrieval.

NuI-Go: Recursive Non-Local Encoder-Decoder Network for Retinal Image Non-Uniform Illumination Removal

Retinal images have been widely used by clinicians for early diagnosis of ocular diseases. However, the quality of retinal images is often clinically unsatisfactory due to eye lesions and imperfect imaging process. One of the most challenging quality degradation issues in retinal images is non-uniform which hinders the pathological information and further impairs the diagnosis of ophthalmologists and computer-aided analysis.To address this issue, we propose a non-uniform illumination removal network for retinal image, called NuI-Go, which consists of three Recursive Non-local Encoder-Decoder Residual Blocks (NEDRBs) for enhancing the degraded retinal images in a progressive manner. Each NEDRB contains a feature encoder module that captures the hierarchical feature representations, a non-local context module that models the context information, and a feature decoder module that recovers the details and spatial dimension. Additionally, the symmetric skip-connections between the encoder module and the decoder module provide long-range information compensation and reuse. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively remove the non-uniform illumination on retinal images while well preserving the image details and color. We further demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method for improving the accuracy of retinal vessel segmentation.

RGB-D Salient Object Detection with Cross-Modality Modulation and Selection

We present an effective method to progressively integrate and refine the cross-modality complementarities for RGB-D salient object detection (SOD). The proposed network mainly solves two challenging issues: 1) how to effectively integrate the complementary information from RGB image and its corresponding depth map, and 2) how to adaptively select more saliency-related features. First, we propose a cross-modality feature modulation (cmFM) module to enhance feature representations by taking the depth features as prior, which models the complementary relations of RGB-D data. Second, we propose an adaptive feature selection (AFS) module to select saliency-related features and suppress the inferior ones. The AFS module exploits multi-modality spatial feature fusion with the self-modality and cross-modality interdependencies of channel features are considered. Third, we employ a saliency-guided position-edge attention (sg-PEA) module to encourage our network to focus more on saliency-related regions. The above modules as a whole, called cmMS block, facilitates the refinement of saliency features in a coarse-to-fine fashion. Coupled with a bottom-up inference, the refined saliency features enable accurate and edge-preserving SOD. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our network outperforms state-of-the-art saliency detectors on six popular RGB-D SOD benchmarks.

Task-Feature Collaborative Learning with Application to Personalized Attribute Prediction

As an effective learning paradigm against insufficient training samples, Multi-Task Learning (MTL) encourages knowledge sharing across multiple related tasks so as to improve the overall performance. In MTL, a major challenge springs from the phenomenon that sharing the knowledge with dissimilar and hard tasks, known as negative transfer, often results in a worsened performance. Though a substantial amount of studies have been carried out against the negative transfer, most of the existing methods only model the transfer relationship as task correlations, with the transfer across features and tasks left unconsidered. Different from the existing methods, our goal is to alleviate negative transfer collaboratively across features and tasks. To this end, we propose a novel multi-task learning method called Task-Feature Collaborative Learning (TFCL). Specifically, we first propose a base model with a heterogeneous block-diagonal structure regularizer to leverage the collaborative grouping of features and tasks and suppressing inter-group knowledge sharing. We then propose an optimization method for the model. Extensive theoretical analysis shows that our proposed method has the following benefits: (a) it enjoys the global convergence property and (b) it provides a block-diagonal structure recovery guarantee. As a practical extension, we extend the base model by allowing overlapping features and differentiating the hard tasks. We further apply it to the personalized attribute prediction problem with fine-grained modeling of user behaviors. Finally, experimental results on both simulated dataset and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method

DPANet: Depth Potentiality-Aware Gated Attention Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection

There are two main issues in RGB-D salient object detection: (1) how to effectively integrate the complementarity from the cross-modal RGB-D data; (2) how to prevent the contamination effect from the unreliable depth map. In fact, these two problems are linked and intertwined, but the previous methods tend to focus only on the first problem and ignore the consideration of depth map quality, which may yield the model fall into the sub-optimal state. In this paper, we address these two issues in a holistic model synergistically, and propose a novel network named DPANet to explicitly model the potentiality of the depth map and effectively integrate the cross-modal complementarity. By introducing the depth potentiality perception, the network can perceive the potentiality of depth information in a learning-based manner, and guide the fusion process of two modal data to prevent the contamination occurred. The gated multi-modality attention module in the fusion process exploits the attention mechanism with a gate controller to capture long-range dependencies from a cross-modal perspective. Experimental results compared with 15 state-of-the-art methods on 8 datasets demonstrate the validity of the proposed approach both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Global Context-Aware Progressive Aggregation Network for Salient Object Detection

Deep convolutional neural networks have achieved competitive performance in salient object detection, in which how to learn effective and comprehensive features plays a critical role. Most of the previous works mainly adopted multiple level feature integration yet ignored the gap between different features. Besides, there also exists a dilution process of high-level features as they passed on the top-down pathway. To remedy these issues, we propose a novel network named GCPANet to effectively integrate low-level appearance features, high-level semantic features, and global context features through some progressive context-aware Feature Interweaved Aggregation (FIA) modules and generate the saliency map in a supervised way. Moreover, a Head Attention (HA) module is used to reduce information redundancy and enhance the top layers features by leveraging the spatial and channel-wise attention, and the Self Refinement (SR) module is utilized to further refine and heighten the input features. Furthermore, we design the Global Context Flow (GCF) module to generate the global context information at different stages, which aims to learn the relationship among different salient regions and alleviate the dilution effect of high-level features. Experimental results on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Fast Stochastic Ordinal Embedding with Variance Reduction and Adaptive Step Size

Learning representation from relative similarity comparisons, often called ordinal embedding, gains rising attention in recent years. Most of the existing methods are based on semi-definite programming (\textit{SDP}), which is generally time-consuming and degrades the scalability, especially confronting large-scale data. To overcome this challenge, we propose a stochastic algorithm called \textit{SVRG-SBB}, which has the following features: i) achieving good scalability via dropping positive semi-definite (\textit{PSD}) constraints as serving a fast algorithm, i.e., stochastic variance reduced gradient (\textit{SVRG}) method, and ii) adaptive learning via introducing a new, adaptive step size called the stabilized Barzilai-Borwein (\textit{SBB}) step size. Theoretically, under some natural assumptions, we show the $\boldsymbol{O}(\frac{1}{T})$ rate of convergence to a stationary point of the proposed algorithm, where $T$ is the number of total iterations. Under the further Polyak-\L{}ojasiewicz assumption, we can show the global linear convergence (i.e., exponentially fast converging to a global optimum) of the proposed algorithm. Numerous simulations and real-world data experiments are conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm by comparing with the state-of-the-art methods, notably, much lower computational cost with good prediction performance.

iSplit LBI: Individualized Partial Ranking with Ties via Split LBI

Due to the inherent uncertainty of data, the problem of predicting partial ranking from pairwise comparison data with ties has attracted increasing interest in recent years. However, in real-world scenarios, different individuals often hold distinct preferences. It might be misleading to merely look at a global partial ranking while ignoring personal diversity. In this paper, instead of learning a global ranking which is agreed with the consensus, we pursue the tie-aware partial ranking from an individualized perspective. Particularly, we formulate a unified framework which not only can be used for individualized partial ranking prediction, but also be helpful for abnormal user selection. This is realized by a variable splitting-based algorithm called \ilbi. Specifically, our algorithm generates a sequence of estimations with a regularization path, where both the hyperparameters and model parameters are updated. At each step of the path, the parameters can be decomposed into three orthogonal parts, namely, abnormal signals, personalized signals and random noise. The abnormal signals can serve the purpose of abnormal user selection, while the abnormal signals and personalized signals together are mainly responsible for individual partial ranking prediction. Extensive experiments on simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate that our new approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art alternatives. The code is now availiable at https://github.com/qianqianxu010/NeurIPS2019-iSplitLBI.

Learning Personalized Attribute Preference via Multi-task AUC Optimization

Traditionally, most of the existing attribute learning methods are trained based on the consensus of annotations aggregated from a limited number of annotators. However, the consensus might fail in settings, especially when a wide spectrum of annotators with different interests and comprehension about the attribute words are involved. In this paper, we develop a novel multi-task method to understand and predict personalized attribute annotations. Regarding the attribute preference learning for each annotator as a specific task, we first propose a multi-level task parameter decomposition to capture the evolution from a highly popular opinion of the mass to highly personalized choices that are special for each person. Meanwhile, for personalized learning methods, ranking prediction is much more important than accurate classification. This motivates us to employ an Area Under ROC Curve (AUC) based loss function to improve our model. On top of the AUC-based loss, we propose an efficient method to evaluate the loss and gradients. Theoretically, we propose a novel closed-form solution for one of our non-convex subproblem, which leads to provable convergence behaviors. Furthermore, we also provide a generalization bound to guarantee a reasonable performance. Finally, empirical analysis consistently speaks to the efficacy of our proposed method.