This paper details a new approach for learning a discriminative model of object classes, incorporating texture, layout, and context information efficiently. The learned model is used for automatic visual understanding and semantic segmentation of photographs. Our discriminative model exploits texture-layout filters, novel features based on textons, which jointly model patterns of texture and their spatial layout. Unary classification and feature selection is achieved using shared boosting to give an efficient classifier which can be applied to a large number of classes. Accurate image segmentation is achieved by incorporating the unary classifier in a conditional random field, which (i) captures the spatial interactions between class labels of neighboring pixels, and (ii) improves the segmentation of specific object instances. Efficient training of the model on large datasets is achieved by exploiting both random feature selection and piecewise training methods. High classification and segmentation accuracy is

In this work, we address the problem of joint modeling of text and citations in the topic modeling framework. We present two different models called the Pairwise-Link-LDA and the Link-LDA-PLSA models. The Pairwise-Link-LDA model combines the ideas of LDA [4] and Mixed Membership Block Stochastic Models [1] and allows modeling arbitrary link structure. However, the model is computationally expensive, since it involves modeling the presence or absence of a citation (link) between every pair of documents. The second model solves this problem by assuming that the link structure is a bipartite graph. As the name indicates, Link-PLSA-LDA model combines the LDA and PLSA models into a single graphical model. Our experiments on a subset of Citeseer data show that both these models are able to predict unseen data better than the baseline model of Erosheva and Lafferty [8], by capturing the notion of topical similarity between the contents of the cited and citing documents. Our experiments on two different data sets on the link prediction task show that the Link-PLSA-LDA model performs the best on the citation prediction task, while also remaining highly scalable. In addition, we also present some interesting visualizations generated by each of the models.

Considerable advances have been made in learning to recognize and localize visual object classes. Simple bag-offeature approaches label each pixel or patch independently. More advanced models attempt to improve the coherence of the labellings by introducing some form of inter-patch coupling: traditional spatial models such as MRF’s provide crisper local labellings by exploiting neighbourhoodlevel couplings, while aspect models such as PLSA and LDA use global relevance estimates (global mixing proportions for the classes appearing in the image) to shape the local choices. We point out that the two approaches are complementary, combining them to produce aspect-based spatial field models that outperform both approaches. We study two spatial models: one based on averaging over forests of minimal spanning trees linking neighboring image regions, the other on an efficient chain-based Expectation Propagation method for regular 8-neighbor Markov Random Fields. The models can be trained using either patch-level labels or image-level keywords. As input features they use factored observation models combining texture, color and position cues. Experimental results on the MSR Cambridge data sets show that combining spatial and aspect models significantly improves the region-level classification accuracy. In fact our models trained with image-level labels outperform PLSA trained with pixel-level ones. 1.

The explosion of the Internet provides us with a tremendous resource of images shared online. It also confronts vision researchers the problem of finding effective methods to navigate the vast amount of visual information. Semantic image understanding plays a vital role towards solving this problem. One important task in image understanding is object recognition, in particular, generic object categorization. Critical to this problem are the issues of learning and dataset. Abundant data helps to train a robust recognition system, while a good object classifier can help to collect a large amount of images. This paper presents a novel object recognition algorithm that performs automatic dataset collecting and incremental model learning simultaneously. The goal of this work is to use the tremendous resources of the web to learn robust object category models for detecting and searching for objects in real-world cluttered scenes. Humans contiguously update the knowledge of objects when new examples are observed. Our framework emulates this human learning process by iteratively accumulating model knowledge and image examples. We adapt a non-parametric latent topic model and propose an incremental learning framework. Our algorithm is capable of automatically collecting much larger object category datasets for 22 randomly selected classes from the Caltech 101 dataset. Furthermore, our system offers not only more images in

Heuristics are efficient cognitive processes that ignore information. In contrast to the widely held view that less processing reduces accuracy, the study of heuristics shows that less information, computation, and time can in fact improve accuracy. We review the major progress made so far: (a) the discovery of less-is-more effects; (b) the study of the ecological rationality of heuristics, which examines in which environments a given strategy succeeds or fails, and why; (c) an advancement from vague labels to computational models of heuristics; (d) the development of a systematic theory of heuristics that identifies their building blocks and the evolved capacities they exploit, and views the cognitive system as relying on an ‘‘adaptive toolbox;’ ’ and (e) the development of an empirical methodology that accounts for individual differences, conducts competitive tests, and has provided evidence for people’s adaptive use of heuristics. Homo heuristicus has a biased mind and ignores part of the available information, yet a biased mind can handle uncertainty more efficiently and robustly than an unbiased mind relying on more resource-intensive and general-purpose processing strategies.

Pseudo-relevance feedback assumes that most frequent terms in the pseudo-feedback documents are useful for the retrieval. In this study, we re-examine this assumption and show that it does not hold in reality – many expansion terms identified in traditional approaches are indeed unrelated to the query and harmful to the retrieval. We also show that good expansion terms cannot be distinguished from bad ones merely on their distributions in the feedback documents and in the whole collection. We then propose to integrate a term classification process to predict the usefulness of expansion terms. Multiple additional features can be integrated in this process. Our experiments on three TREC collections show that retrieval effectiveness can be much improved when term classification is used. In addition, we also demonstrate that good terms should be identified directly according to their possible impact on the retrieval effectiveness, i.e. using supervised learning, instead of unsupervised learning.

We describe a method for retrieving shots containing a particular 2D human pose from unconstrained movie and TV videos. The method involves first localizing the spatial layout of the head, torso and limbs in individual frames using pictorial structures, and associating these through a shot by tracking. A feature vector describing the pose is then constructed from the pictorial structure. Shots can be retrieved either by querying on a single frame with the desired pose, or through a pose classifier trained from a set of pose examples. Our main contribution is an effective system for retrieving people based on their pose, and in particular we propose and investigate several pose descriptors which are person, clothing, background and lighting independent. As a second contribution, we improve the performance over existing methods for localizing upper body layout on unconstrained video. We compare the spatial layout pose retrieval to a baseline method where poses are retrieved using a HOG descriptor. Performance is assessed on five episodes of the TV series ’Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, and pose retrieval is demonstrated also on three Hollywood movies. 1.

Abstract. This paper presents GeoS, a new algorithm for the efficient segmentation of n-dimensional image and video data. The segmentation problem is cast as approximate energy minimization in a conditional random field. A new, parallel filtering operator built upon efficient geodesic distance computation is used to propose a set of spatially smooth, contrast-sensitive segmentation hypotheses. An economical search algorithm finds the solution with minimum energy within a sensible and highly restricted subset of all possible labellings. Advantages include: i) computational efficiency with high segmentation accuracy; ii) the ability to estimate an approximation to the posterior over segmentations; iii) the ability to handle generally complex energy models. Comparison with max-flow indicates up to 60 times greater computational efficiency as well as greater memory efficiency. GeoS is validated quantitatively and qualitatively by thorough comparative experiments on existing and novel ground-truth data. Numerous results on interactive and automatic segmentation of photographs, video and volumetric medical image data are presented. 1

Statistical models in machine translation exhibit spurious ambiguity. That is, the probability of an output string is split among many distinct derivations (e.g., trees or segmentations). In principle, the goodness of a string is measured by the total probability of its many derivations. However, finding the best string (e.g., during decoding) is then computationally intractable. Therefore, most systems use a simple Viterbi approximation that measures the goodness of a string using only its most probable derivation. Instead, we develop a variational approximation, which considers all the derivations but still allows tractable decoding. Our particular variational distributions are parameterized as n-gram models. We also analytically show that interpolating these n-gram models for different n is similar to minimumrisk decoding for BLEU (Tromble et al., 2008). Experiments show that our approach improves the state of the art. 1

For over 200 years, philosophers and mathematicians have been using probability theory to describe human cognition. While the theory of probabilities was first developed as a means of analyzing games of chance, it quickly took on a larger and deeper significance as a formal account of how rational agents should reason in situations of uncertainty