Results 1 - 10
of
130
Extracting and Composing Robust Features with Denoising Autoencoders
, 2008
"... Previous work has shown that the difficulties in learning deep generative or discriminative models can be overcome by an initial unsupervised learning step that maps inputs to useful intermediate representations. We introduce and motivate a new training principle for unsupervised learning of a repre ..."
Abstract
-
Cited by 251 (32 self)
- Add to MetaCart
(Show Context)
Previous work has shown that the difficulties in learning deep generative or discriminative models can be overcome by an initial unsupervised learning step that maps inputs to useful intermediate representations. We introduce and motivate a new training principle for unsupervised learning of a representation based on the idea of making the learned representations robust to partial corruption of the input pattern. This approach can be used to train autoencoders, and these denoising autoencoders can be stacked to initialize deep architectures. The algorithm can be motivated from a manifold learning and information theoretic perspective or from a generative model perspective. Comparative experiments clearly show the surprising advantage of corrupting the input of autoencoders on a pattern classification benchmark suite.
Learning mid-level features for recognition
, 2010
"... Many successful models for scene or object recognition transform low-level descriptors (such as Gabor filter responses, or SIFT descriptors) into richer representations of intermediate complexity. This process can often be broken down into two steps: (1) a coding step, which performs a pointwise tra ..."
Abstract
-
Cited by 228 (13 self)
- Add to MetaCart
(Show Context)
Many successful models for scene or object recognition transform low-level descriptors (such as Gabor filter responses, or SIFT descriptors) into richer representations of intermediate complexity. This process can often be broken down into two steps: (1) a coding step, which performs a pointwise transformation of the descriptors into a representation better adapted to the task, and (2) a pooling step, which summarizes the coded features over larger neighborhoods. Several combinations of coding and pooling schemes have been proposed in the literature. The goal of this paper is threefold. We seek to establish the relative importance of each step of mid-level feature extraction through a comprehensive cross evaluation of several types of coding modules (hard and soft vector quantization, sparse coding) and pooling schemes (by taking the average, or the maximum), which obtains state-of-the-art performance or better on several recognition benchmarks. We show how to improve the best performing coding scheme by learning a supervised discriminative dictionary for sparse coding. We provide theoretical and empirical insight into the remarkable performance of max pooling. By teasing apart components shared by modern mid-level feature extractors, our approach aims to facilitate the design of better recognition architectures.
An Analysis of Single-Layer Networks in Unsupervised Feature Learning
"... A great deal of research has focused on algorithms for learning features from unlabeled data. Indeed, much progress has been made on benchmark datasets like NORB and CIFAR by employing increasingly complex unsupervised learning algorithms and deep models. In this paper, however, we show that several ..."
Abstract
-
Cited by 223 (19 self)
- Add to MetaCart
(Show Context)
A great deal of research has focused on algorithms for learning features from unlabeled data. Indeed, much progress has been made on benchmark datasets like NORB and CIFAR by employing increasingly complex unsupervised learning algorithms and deep models. In this paper, however, we show that several very simple factors, such as the number of hidden nodes in the model, may be as important to achieving high performance as the choice of learning algorithm or the depth of the model. Specifically, we will apply several off-the-shelf feature learning algorithms (sparse auto-encoders, sparse RBMs and K-means clustering, Gaussian mixtures) to NORB and CIFAR datasets using only single-layer networks. We then present a detailed analysis of the effect of changes in the model setup: the receptive field size, number of hidden nodes (features), the step-size (“stride”) between extracted features, and the effect of whitening. Our results show that large numbers of hidden nodes and dense feature extraction are as critical to achieving high performance as the choice of algorithm itself—so critical, in fact, that when these parameters are pushed to their limits, we are able to achieve state-of-theart performance on both CIFAR and NORB using only a single layer of features. More surprisingly, our best performance is based on K-means clustering, which is extremely fast, has no hyper-parameters to tune beyond the model structure itself, and is very easy implement. Despite the simplicity of our system, we achieve performance beyond all previously published results on the CIFAR-10 and NORB datasets (79.6 % and 97.0 % accuracy respectively). 1
Learning Deep Architectures for AI
"... Theoretical results suggest that in order to learn the kind of complicated functions that can represent highlevel abstractions (e.g. in vision, language, and other AI-level tasks), one may need deep architectures. Deep architectures are composed of multiple levels of non-linear operations, such as i ..."
Abstract
-
Cited by 183 (30 self)
- Add to MetaCart
Theoretical results suggest that in order to learn the kind of complicated functions that can represent highlevel abstractions (e.g. in vision, language, and other AI-level tasks), one may need deep architectures. Deep architectures are composed of multiple levels of non-linear operations, such as in neural nets with many hidden layers or in complicated propositional formulae re-using many sub-formulae. Searching the parameter space of deep architectures is a difficult task, but learning algorithms such as those for Deep Belief Networks have recently been proposed to tackle this problem with notable success, beating the state-of-the-art in certain areas. This paper discusses the motivations and principles regarding learning algorithms for deep architectures, in particular those exploiting as building blocks unsupervised learning of single-layer models such as Restricted Boltzmann Machines, used to construct deeper models such as Deep Belief Networks.
Representation learning: A review and new perspectives.
- of IEEE Conf. Comp. Vision Pattern Recog. (CVPR),
, 2005
"... Abstract-The success of machine learning algorithms generally depends on data representation, and we hypothesize that this is because different representations can entangle and hide more or less the different explanatory factors of variation behind the data. Although specific domain knowledge can b ..."
Abstract
-
Cited by 173 (4 self)
- Add to MetaCart
(Show Context)
Abstract-The success of machine learning algorithms generally depends on data representation, and we hypothesize that this is because different representations can entangle and hide more or less the different explanatory factors of variation behind the data. Although specific domain knowledge can be used to help design representations, learning with generic priors can also be used, and the quest for AI is motivating the design of more powerful representation-learning algorithms implementing such priors. This paper reviews recent work in the area of unsupervised feature learning and deep learning, covering advances in probabilistic models, autoencoders, manifold learning, and deep networks. This motivates longer term unanswered questions about the appropriate objectives for learning good representations, for computing representations (i.e., inference), and the geometrical connections between representation learning, density estimation, and manifold learning.
Why does unsupervised pre-training help deep learning?
, 2010
"... Much recent research has been devoted to learning algorithms for deep architectures such as Deep Belief Networks and stacks of autoencoder variants with impressive results being obtained in several areas, mostly on vision and language datasets. The best results obtained on supervised learning tasks ..."
Abstract
-
Cited by 155 (20 self)
- Add to MetaCart
(Show Context)
Much recent research has been devoted to learning algorithms for deep architectures such as Deep Belief Networks and stacks of autoencoder variants with impressive results being obtained in several areas, mostly on vision and language datasets. The best results obtained on supervised learning tasks often involve an unsupervised learning component, usually in an unsupervised pre-training phase. The main question investigated here is the following: why does unsupervised pre-training work so well? Through extensive experimentation, we explore several possible explanations discussed in the literature including its action as a regularizer (Erhan et al., 2009b) and as an aid to optimization (Bengio et al., 2007). Our results build on the work of Erhan et al. (2009b), showing that unsupervised pre-training appears to play predominantly a regularization role in subsequent supervised training. However our results in an online setting, with a virtually unlimited data stream, point to a somewhat more nuanced interpretation of the roles of optimization and regularization in the unsupervised pre-training effect.
The Importance of Encoding Versus Training with Sparse Coding and Vector Quantization
, 2011
"... While vector quantization (VQ) has been applied widely to generate features for visual recognition problems, much recent work has focused on more powerful methods. In particular, sparse coding has emerged as a strong alternative to traditional VQ approaches and has been shown to achieve consistently ..."
Abstract
-
Cited by 149 (7 self)
- Add to MetaCart
While vector quantization (VQ) has been applied widely to generate features for visual recognition problems, much recent work has focused on more powerful methods. In particular, sparse coding has emerged as a strong alternative to traditional VQ approaches and has been shown to achieve consistently higher performance on benchmark datasets. Both approaches can be split into a training phase, where the system learns a dictionary of basis functions, and an encoding phase, where the dictionary is used to extract features from new inputs. In this work, we investigate the reasons for the success of sparse coding over VQ by decoupling these phases, allowing us to separate out the contributions of training and encoding in a controlled way. Through extensive experiments on CIFAR, NORB and Caltech 101 datasets, we compare several training and encoding schemes, including sparse coding and a form of VQ with a soft threshold activation function. Our results show not only that we can use fast VQ algorithms for training, but that we can just as well use randomly chosen exemplars from the training set. Rather than spend resources on training, we find it is more important to choose a good encoder—which can often be a simple feed forward non-linearity. Our results include state-of-the-art performance on both CIFAR and NORB.
Curriculum Learning
"... Humans and animals learn much better when the examples are not randomly presented but organized in a meaningful order which illustrates gradually more concepts, and gradually more complex ones. Here, we formalize such training strategies in the context of machine learning, and call them “curriculum ..."
Abstract
-
Cited by 147 (15 self)
- Add to MetaCart
(Show Context)
Humans and animals learn much better when the examples are not randomly presented but organized in a meaningful order which illustrates gradually more concepts, and gradually more complex ones. Here, we formalize such training strategies in the context of machine learning, and call them “curriculum learning”. In the context of recent research studying the difficulty of training in the presence of non-convex training criteria (for deep deterministic and stochastic neural networks), we explore curriculum learning in various set-ups. The experiments show that significant improvements in generalization can be achieved. We hypothesize that curriculum learning has both an effect on the speed of convergence of the training process to a minimum and, in the case of non-convex criteria, on the quality of the local minima obtained: curriculum learning can be seen as a particular form of continuation method (a general strategy for global optimization of non-convex functions). 1.
Semantic segmentation with second-order pooling
- In ECCV
"... Abstract. Feature extraction, coding and pooling, are important components on many contemporary object recognition paradigms. In this paper we explore novel pooling techniques that encode the second-order statistics of local descriptors inside a region. To achieve this effect, we introduce multiplic ..."
Abstract
-
Cited by 91 (12 self)
- Add to MetaCart
(Show Context)
Abstract. Feature extraction, coding and pooling, are important components on many contemporary object recognition paradigms. In this paper we explore novel pooling techniques that encode the second-order statistics of local descriptors inside a region. To achieve this effect, we introduce multiplicative second-order analogues of average and maxpooling that together with appropriate non-linearities lead to state-ofthe-art performance on free-form region recognition, without any type of feature coding. Instead of coding, we found that enriching local descriptors with additional image information leads to large performance gains, especially in conjunction with the proposed pooling methodology. We show that second-order pooling over free-form regions produces results superior to those of the winning systems in the Pascal VOC 2011 semantic segmentation challenge, with models that are 20,000 times faster.
Exploring strategies for training deep neural networks
- Journal of Machine Learning Research
"... Département d’informatique et de recherche opérationnelle ..."
Abstract
-
Cited by 90 (12 self)
- Add to MetaCart
(Show Context)
Département d’informatique et de recherche opérationnelle
