Joint Active Learning with Feature Selection via CUR Matrix Decomposition

This paper presents an unsupervised learning approach for simultaneous sample and feature selection, which is in contrast to existing works which mainly tackle these two problems separately. In fact the two tasks are often interleaved with each other: noisy and high-dimensional features will bring adverse effect on sample selection, while informative or representative samples will be beneficial to feature selection. Specifically, we propose a framework to jointly conduct active learning and feature selection based on the CUR matrix decomposition. From the data reconstruction perspective, both the selected samples and features can best approximate the original dataset respectively, such that the selected samples characterized by the features are highly representative. In particular, our method runs in one-shot without the procedure of iterative sample selection for progressive labeling. Thus, our model is especially suitable when there are few labeled samples or even in the absence of supervision, which is a particular challenge for existing methods. As the joint learning problem is NP-hard, the proposed formulation involves a convex but non-smooth optimization problem. We solve it efficiently by an iterative algorithm, and prove its global convergence. Experimental results on publicly available datasets corroborate the efficacy of our method compared with the state-of-the-art.

Fast and Robust Subspace Clustering Using Random Projections

Over the past several decades, subspace clustering has been receiving increasing interest and continuous progress. However, due to the lack of scalability and/or robustness, existing methods still have difficulty in dealing with the data that possesses simultaneously three characteristics: high-dimensional, massive and grossly corrupted. To tackle the scalability and robustness issues simultaneously, in this paper we suggest to consider a problem called compressive robust subspace clustering, which is to perform robust subspace clustering with the compressed data, and which is generated by projecting the original high-dimensional data onto a lower-dimensional subspace chosen at random. Given these random projections, the proposed method, row space pursuit (RSP), recovers not only the authentic row space, which provably leads to correct clustering results under certain conditions, but also the gross errors possibly existing in data. The compressive nature of the random projections gives our RSP high computational and storage efficiency, and the recovery property enables the ability for RSP to deal with the grossly corrupted data. Extensive experiments on high-dimensional and/or large-scale datasets show that RSP can maintain comparable accuracies to to prevalent methods with significant reductions in the computational time.

Dual Iterative Hard Thresholding: From Non-convex Sparse Minimization to Non-smooth Concave Maximization

Iterative Hard Thresholding (IHT) is a class of projected gradient descent methods for optimizing sparsity-constrained minimization models, with the best known efficiency and scalability in practice. As far as we know, the existing IHT-style methods are designed for sparse minimization in primal form. It remains open to explore duality theory and algorithms in such a non-convex and NP-hard problem setting. In this paper, we bridge this gap by establishing a duality theory for sparsity-constrained minimization with $\ell_2$-regularized loss function and proposing an IHT-style algorithm for dual maximization. Our sparse duality theory provides a set of sufficient and necessary conditions under which the original NP-hard/non-convex problem can be equivalently solved in a dual formulation. The proposed dual IHT algorithm is a super-gradient method for maximizing the non-smooth dual objective. An interesting finding is that the sparse recovery performance of dual IHT is invariant to the Restricted Isometry Property (RIP), which is required by virtually all the existing primal IHT algorithms without sparsity relaxation. Moreover, a stochastic variant of dual IHT is proposed for large-scale stochastic optimization. Numerical results demonstrate the superiority of dual IHT algorithms to the state-of-the-art primal IHT-style algorithms in model estimation accuracy and computational efficiency.

Max-Margin based Discriminative Feature Learning

In this paper, we propose a new max-margin based discriminative feature learning method. Specifically, we aim at learning a low-dimensional feature representation, so as to maximize the global margin of the data and make the samples from the same class as close as possible. In order to enhance the robustness to noise, a $l_{2,1}$ norm constraint is introduced to make the transformation matrix in group sparsity. In addition, for multi-class classification tasks, we further intend to learn and leverage the correlation relationships among multiple class tasks for assisting in learning discriminative features. The experimental results demonstrate the power of the proposed method against the related state-of-the-art methods.

Self-Paced Multi-Task Learning

In this paper, we propose a novel multi-task learning (MTL) framework, called Self-Paced Multi-Task Learning (SPMTL). Different from previous works treating all tasks and instances equally when training, SPMTL attempts to jointly learn the tasks by taking into consideration the complexities of both tasks and instances. This is inspired by the cognitive process of human brain that often learns from the easy to the hard. We construct a compact SPMTL formulation by proposing a new task-oriented regularizer that can jointly prioritize the tasks and the instances. Thus it can be interpreted as a self-paced learner for MTL. A simple yet effective algorithm is designed for optimizing the proposed objective function. An error bound for a simplified formulation is also analyzed theoretically. Experimental results on toy and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

Bidirectional-Convolutional LSTM Based Spectral-Spatial Feature Learning for Hyperspectral Image Classification

This paper proposes a novel deep learning framework named bidirectional-convolutional long short term memory (Bi-CLSTM) network to automatically learn the spectral-spatial feature from hyperspectral images (HSIs). In the network, the issue of spectral feature extraction is considered as a sequence learning problem, and a recurrent connection operator across the spectral domain is used to address it. Meanwhile, inspired from the widely used convolutional neural network (CNN), a convolution operator across the spatial domain is incorporated into the network to extract the spatial feature. Besides, to sufficiently capture the spectral information, a bidirectional recurrent connection is proposed. In the classification phase, the learned features are concatenated into a vector and fed to a softmax classifier via a fully-connected operator. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed Bi-CLSTM framework, we compare it with several state-of-the-art methods, including the CNN framework, on three widely used HSIs. The obtained results show that Bi-CLSTM can improve the classification performance as compared to other methods.

Unsupervised Video Segmentation via Spatio-Temporally Nonlocal Appearance Learning

Video object segmentation is challenging due to the factors like rapidly fast motion, cluttered backgrounds, arbitrary object appearance variation and shape deformation. Most existing methods only explore appearance information between two consecutive frames, which do not make full use of the usefully long-term nonlocal information that is helpful to make the learned appearance stable, and hence they tend to fail when the targets suffer from large viewpoint changes and significant non-rigid deformations. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective approach to mine the long-term sptatio-temporally nonlocal appearance information for unsupervised video segmentation. The motivation of our algorithm comes from the spatio-temporal nonlocality of the region appearance reoccurrence in a video. Specifically, we first generate a set of superpixels to represent the foreground and background, and then update the appearance of each superpixel with its long-term sptatio-temporally nonlocal counterparts generated by the approximate nearest neighbor search method with the efficient KD-tree algorithm. Then, with the updated appearances, we formulate a spatio-temporal graphical model comprised of the superpixel label consistency potentials. Finally, we generate the segmentation by optimizing the graphical model via iteratively updating the appearance model and estimating the labels. Extensive evaluations on the SegTrack and Youtube-Objects datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which performs favorably against some state-of-art methods.

Learning Multi-Scale Deep Features for High-Resolution Satellite Image Classification

In this paper, we propose a multi-scale deep feature learning method for high-resolution satellite image classification. Specifically, we firstly warp the original satellite image into multiple different scales. The images in each scale are employed to train a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN). However, simultaneously training multiple DCNNs is time-consuming. To address this issue, we explore DCNN with spatial pyramid pooling (SPP-net). Since different SPP-nets have the same number of parameters, which share the identical initial values, and only fine-tuning the parameters in fully-connected layers ensures the effectiveness of each network, thereby greatly accelerating the training process. Then, the multi-scale satellite images are fed into their corresponding SPP-nets respectively to extract multi-scale deep features. Finally, a multiple kernel learning method is developed to automatically learn the optimal combination of such features. Experiments on two difficult datasets show that the proposed method achieves favorable performance compared to other state-of-the-art methods.

Adaptive Deep Pyramid Matching for Remote Sensing Scene Classification

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have attracted increasing attention in the remote sensing community. Most CNNs only take the last fully-connected layers as features for the classification of remotely sensed images, discarding the other convolutional layer features which may also be helpful for classification purposes. In this paper, we propose a new adaptive deep pyramid matching (ADPM) model that takes advantage of the features from all of the convolutional layers for remote sensing image classification. To this end, the optimal fusing weights for different convolutional layers are learned from the data itself. In remotely sensed scenes, the objects of interest exhibit different scales in distinct scenes, and even a single scene may contain objects with different sizes. To address this issue, we select the CNN with spatial pyramid pooling (SPP-net) as the basic deep network, and further construct a multi-scale ADPM model to learn complementary information from multi-scale images. Our experiments have been conducted using two widely used remote sensing image databases, and the results show that the proposed method significantly improves the performance when compared to other state-of-the-art methods.

Visual Tracking via Boolean Map Representations

In this paper, we present a simple yet effective Boolean map based representation that exploits connectivity cues for visual tracking. We describe a target object with histogram of oriented gradients and raw color features, of which each one is characterized by a set of Boolean maps generated by uniformly thresholding their values. The Boolean maps effectively encode multi-scale connectivity cues of the target with different granularities. The fine-grained Boolean maps capture spatially structural details that are effective for precise target localization while the coarse-grained ones encode global shape information that are robust to large target appearance variations. Finally, all the Boolean maps form together a robust representation that can be approximated by an explicit feature map of the intersection kernel, which is fed into a logistic regression classifier with online update, and the target location is estimated within a particle filter framework. The proposed representation scheme is computationally efficient and facilitates achieving favorable performance in terms of accuracy and robustness against the state-of-the-art tracking methods on a large benchmark dataset of 50 image sequences.