Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Aaqib Saeed

Publications and source records attributed to Aaqib Saeed.

52 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

The Augmented Image Prior: Distilling 1000 Classes by Extrapolating from a Single Image

What can neural networks learn about the visual world when provided with only a single image as input? While any image obviously cannot contain the multitudes of all existing objects, scenes and lighting conditions - within the space of all 256^(3x224x224) possible 224-sized square images, it might still provide a strong prior for natural images. To analyze this `augmented image prior' hypothesis, we develop a simple framework for training neural networks from scratch using a single image and augmentations using knowledge distillation from a supervised pretrained teacher. With this, we find the answer to the above question to be: `surprisingly, a lot'. In quantitative terms, we find accuracies of 94%/74% on CIFAR-10/100, 69% on ImageNet, and by extending this method to video and audio, 51% on Kinetics-400 and 84% on SpeechCommands. In extensive analyses spanning 13 datasets, we disentangle the effect of augmentations, choice of data and network architectures and also provide qualitative evaluations that include lucid `panda neurons' in networks that have never even seen one.

cs.CV↗

Automatic Sleep Scoring from Large-scale Multi-channel Pediatric EEG

Sleep is particularly important to the health of infants, children, and adolescents, and sleep scoring is the first step to accurate diagnosis and treatment of potentially life-threatening conditions. But pediatric sleep is severely under-researched compared to adult sleep in the context of machine learning for health, and sleep scoring algorithms developed for adults usually perform poorly on infants. Here, we present the first automated sleep scoring results on a recent large-scale pediatric sleep study dataset that was collected during standard clinical care. We develop a transformer-based model that learns to classify five sleep stages from millions of multi-channel electroencephalogram (EEG) sleep epochs with 78% overall accuracy. Further, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the model performance based on patient demographics and EEG channels. The results point to the growing need for machine learning research on pediatric sleep.

eess.SP↗

COCOA: Cross Modality Contrastive Learning for Sensor Data

Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) is a new paradigm for learning discriminative representations without labelled data and has reached comparable or even state-of-the-art results in comparison to supervised counterparts. Contrastive Learning (CL) is one of the most well-known approaches in SSL that attempts to learn general, informative representations of data. CL methods have been mostly developed for applications in computer vision and natural language processing where only a single sensor modality is used. A majority of pervasive computing applications, however, exploit data from a range of different sensor modalities. While existing CL methods are limited to learning from one or two data sources, we propose COCOA (Cross mOdality COntrastive leArning), a self-supervised model that employs a novel objective function to learn quality representations from multisensor data by computing the cross-correlation between different data modalities and minimizing the similarity between irrelevant instances. We evaluate the effectiveness of COCOA against eight recently introduced state-of-the-art self-supervised models, and two supervised baselines across five public datasets. We show that COCOA achieves superior classification performance to all other approaches. Also, COCOA is far more label-efficient than the other baselines including the fully supervised model using only one-tenth of available labelled data.

cs.CV↗

Binary Early-Exit Network for Adaptive Inference on Low-Resource Devices

Deep neural networks have significantly improved performance on a range of tasks with the increasing demand for computational resources, leaving deployment on low-resource devices (with limited memory and battery power) infeasible. Binary neural networks (BNNs) tackle the issue to an extent with extreme compression and speed-up gains compared to real-valued models. We propose a simple but effective method to accelerate inference through unifying BNNs with an early-exiting strategy. Our approach allows simple instances to exit early based on a decision threshold and utilizes output layers added to different intermediate layers to avoid executing the entire binary model. We extensively evaluate our method on three audio classification tasks and across four BNNs architectures. Our method demonstrates favorable quality-efficiency trade-offs while being controllable with an entropy-based threshold specified by the system user. It also results in better speed-ups (latency less than 6ms) with a single model based on existing BNN architectures without retraining for different efficiency levels. It also provides a straightforward way to estimate sample difficulty and better understanding of uncertainty around certain classes within the dataset.

cs.LG↗

Beyond Just Vision: A Review on Self-Supervised Representation Learning on Multimodal and Temporal Data

Recently, Self-Supervised Representation Learning (SSRL) has attracted much attention in the field of computer vision, speech, natural language processing (NLP), and recently, with other types of modalities, including time series from sensors. The popularity of self-supervised learning is driven by the fact that traditional models typically require a huge amount of well-annotated data for training. Acquiring annotated data can be a difficult and costly process. Self-supervised methods have been introduced to improve the efficiency of training data through discriminative pre-training of models using supervisory signals that have been freely obtained from the raw data. Unlike existing reviews of SSRL that have pre-dominately focused upon methods in the fields of CV or NLP for a single modality, we aim to provide the first comprehensive review of multimodal self-supervised learning methods for temporal data. To this end, we 1) provide a comprehensive categorization of existing SSRL methods, 2) introduce a generic pipeline by defining the key components of a SSRL framework, 3) compare existing models in terms of their objective function, network architecture and potential applications, and 4) review existing multimodal techniques in each category and various modalities. Finally, we present existing weaknesses and future opportunities. We believe our work develops a perspective on the requirements of SSRL in domains that utilise multimodal and/or temporal data

cs.LG↗

Federated Self-Training for Semi-Supervised Audio Recognition

Federated Learning is a distributed machine learning paradigm dealing with decentralized and personal datasets. Since data reside on devices like smartphones and virtual assistants, labeling is entrusted to the clients, or labels are extracted in an automated way. Specifically, in the case of audio data, acquiring semantic annotations can be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. As a result, an abundance of audio data remains unlabeled and unexploited on users' devices. Most existing federated learning approaches focus on supervised learning without harnessing the unlabeled data. In this work, we study the problem of semi-supervised learning of audio models via self-training in conjunction with federated learning. We propose FedSTAR to exploit large-scale on-device unlabeled data to improve the generalization of audio recognition models. We further demonstrate that self-supervised pre-trained models can accelerate the training of on-device models, significantly improving convergence to within fewer training rounds. We conduct experiments on diverse public audio classification datasets and investigate the performance of our models under varying percentages of labeled and unlabeled data. Notably, we show that with as little as 3% labeled data available, FedSTAR on average can improve the recognition rate by 13.28% compared to the fully supervised federated model.

cs.LG↗

Damage detection using in-domain and cross-domain transfer learning

We investigate the capabilities of transfer learning in the area of structural health monitoring. In particular, we are interested in damage detection for concrete structures. Typical image datasets for such problems are relatively small, calling for the transfer of learned representation from a related large-scale dataset. Past efforts of damage detection using images have mainly considered cross-domain transfer learning approaches using pre-trained IMAGENET models that are subsequently fine-tuned for the target task. However, there are rising concerns about the generalizability of IMAGENET representations for specific target domains, such as for visual inspection and medical imaging. We, therefore, evaluate a combination of in-domain and cross-domain transfer learning strategies for damage detection in bridges. We perform comprehensive comparisons to study the impact of cross-domain and in-domain transfer, with various initialization strategies, using six publicly available visual inspection datasets. The pre-trained models are also evaluated for their ability to cope with the extremely low-data regime. We show that the combination of cross-domain and in-domain transfer persistently shows superior performance specially with tiny datasets. Likewise, we also provide visual explanations of predictive models to enable algorithmic transparency and provide insights to experts about the intrinsic decision logic of typically black-box deep models.

cs.CV↗

Consistency Training of Multi-exit Architectures for Sensor Data

Deep neural networks have become larger over the years with increasing demand of computational resources for inference; incurring exacerbate costs and leaving little room for deployment on devices with limited battery and other resources for real-time applications. The multi-exit architectures are type of deep neural network that are interleaved with several output (or exit) layers at varying depths of the model. They provide a sound approach for improving computational time and energy utilization of running a model through producing predictions from early exits. In this work, we present a novel and architecture-agnostic approach for robust training of multi-exit architectures termed consistent exit training. The crux of the method lies in a consistency-based objective to enforce prediction invariance over clean and perturbed inputs. We leverage weak supervision to align model output with consistency training and jointly optimize dual-losses in a multi-task learning fashion over the exits in a network. Our technique enables exit layers to generalize better when confronted with increasing uncertainty, hence, resulting in superior quality-efficiency trade-offs. We demonstrate through extensive evaluation on challenging learning tasks involving sensor data that our approach allows examples to exit earlier with better detection rate and without executing all the layers in a deep model.

cs.LG↗

Sense and Learn: Self-Supervision for Omnipresent Sensors

Learning general-purpose representations from multisensor data produced by the omnipresent sensing systems (or IoT in general) has numerous applications in diverse use cases. Existing purely supervised end-to-end deep learning techniques depend on the availability of a massive amount of well-curated data, acquiring which is notoriously difficult but required to achieve a sufficient level of generalization on a task of interest. In this work, we leverage the self-supervised learning paradigm towards realizing the vision of continual learning from unlabeled inputs. We present a generalized framework named Sense and Learn for representation or feature learning from raw sensory data. It consists of several auxiliary tasks that can learn high-level and broadly useful features entirely from unannotated data without any human involvement in the tedious labeling process. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on several publicly available datasets from different domains and in various settings, including linear separability, semi-supervised or few shot learning, and transfer learning. Our methodology achieves results that are competitive with the supervised approaches and close the gap through fine-tuning a network while learning the downstream tasks in most cases. In particular, we show that the self-supervised network can be utilized as initialization to significantly boost the performance in a low-data regime with as few as 5 labeled instances per class, which is of high practical importance to real-world problems. Likewise, the learned representations with self-supervision are found to be highly transferable between related datasets, even when few labeled instances are available from the target domains. The self-learning nature of our methodology opens up exciting possibilities for on-device continual learning.

cs.LG↗

ProcessTransformer: Predictive Business Process Monitoring with Transformer Network

Predictive business process monitoring focuses on predicting future characteristics of a running process using event logs. The foresight into process execution promises great potentials for efficient operations, better resource management, and effective customer services. Deep learning-based approaches have been widely adopted in process mining to address the limitations of classical algorithms for solving multiple problems, especially the next event and remaining-time prediction tasks. Nevertheless, designing a deep neural architecture that performs competitively across various tasks is challenging as existing methods fail to capture long-range dependencies in the input sequences and perform poorly for lengthy process traces. In this paper, we propose ProcessTransformer, an approach for learning high-level representations from event logs with an attention-based network. Our model incorporates long-range memory and relies on a self-attention mechanism to establish dependencies between a multitude of event sequences and corresponding outputs. We evaluate the applicability of our technique on nine real event logs. We demonstrate that the transformer-based model outperforms several baselines of prior techniques by obtaining on average above 80% accuracy for the task of predicting the next activity. Our method also perform competitively, compared to baselines, for the tasks of predicting event time and remaining time of a running case

cs.LG↗

Contrastive Learning of General-Purpose Audio Representations

We introduce COLA, a self-supervised pre-training approach for learning a general-purpose representation of audio. Our approach is based on contrastive learning: it learns a representation which assigns high similarity to audio segments extracted from the same recording while assigning lower similarity to segments from different recordings. We build on top of recent advances in contrastive learning for computer vision and reinforcement learning to design a lightweight, easy-to-implement self-supervised model of audio. We pre-train embeddings on the large-scale Audioset database and transfer these representations to 9 diverse classification tasks, including speech, music, animal sounds, and acoustic scenes. We show that despite its simplicity, our method significantly outperforms previous self-supervised systems. We furthermore conduct ablation studies to identify key design choices and release a library to pre-train and fine-tune COLA models.

cs.SD↗

Learning from Heterogeneous EEG Signals with Differentiable Channel Reordering

We propose CHARM, a method for training a single neural network across inconsistent input channels. Our work is motivated by Electroencephalography (EEG), where data collection protocols from different headsets result in varying channel ordering and number, which limits the feasibility of transferring trained systems across datasets. Our approach builds upon attention mechanisms to estimate a latent reordering matrix from each input signal and map input channels to a canonical order. CHARM is differentiable and can be composed further with architectures expecting a consistent channel ordering to build end-to-end trainable classifiers. We perform experiments on four EEG classification datasets and demonstrate the efficacy of CHARM via simulated shuffling and masking of input channels. Moreover, our method improves the transfer of pre-trained representations between datasets collected with different protocols.

eess.SP↗

Federated Self-Supervised Learning of Multi-Sensor Representations for Embedded Intelligence

Smartphones, wearables, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices produce a wealth of data that cannot be accumulated in a centralized repository for learning supervised models due to privacy, bandwidth limitations, and the prohibitive cost of annotations. Federated learning provides a compelling framework for learning models from decentralized data, but conventionally, it assumes the availability of labeled samples, whereas on-device data are generally either unlabeled or cannot be annotated readily through user interaction. To address these issues, we propose a self-supervised approach termed \textit{scalogram-signal correspondence learning} based on wavelet transform to learn useful representations from unlabeled sensor inputs, such as electroencephalography, blood volume pulse, accelerometer, and WiFi channel state information. Our auxiliary task requires a deep temporal neural network to determine if a given pair of a signal and its complementary viewpoint (i.e., a scalogram generated with a wavelet transform) align with each other or not through optimizing a contrastive objective. We extensively assess the quality of learned features with our multi-view strategy on diverse public datasets, achieving strong performance in all domains. We demonstrate the effectiveness of representations learned from an unlabeled input collection on downstream tasks with training a linear classifier over pretrained network, usefulness in low-data regime, transfer learning, and cross-validation. Our methodology achieves competitive performance with fully-supervised networks, and it outperforms pre-training with autoencoders in both central and federated contexts. Notably, it improves the generalization in a semi-supervised setting as it reduces the volume of labeled data required through leveraging self-supervised learning.

cs.LG↗

Multi-task Self-Supervised Learning for Human Activity Detection

Deep learning methods are successfully used in applications pertaining to ubiquitous computing, health, and well-being. Specifically, the area of human activity recognition (HAR) is primarily transformed by the convolutional and recurrent neural networks, thanks to their ability to learn semantic representations from raw input. However, to extract generalizable features, massive amounts of well-curated data are required, which is a notoriously challenging task; hindered by privacy issues, and annotation costs. Therefore, unsupervised representation learning is of prime importance to leverage the vast amount of unlabeled data produced by smart devices. In this work, we propose a novel self-supervised technique for feature learning from sensory data that does not require access to any form of semantic labels. We learn a multi-task temporal convolutional network to recognize transformations applied on an input signal. By exploiting these transformations, we demonstrate that simple auxiliary tasks of the binary classification result in a strong supervisory signal for extracting useful features for the downstream task. We extensively evaluate the proposed approach on several publicly available datasets for smartphone-based HAR in unsupervised, semi-supervised, and transfer learning settings. Our method achieves performance levels superior to or comparable with fully-supervised networks, and it performs significantly better than autoencoders. Notably, for the semi-supervised case, the self-supervised features substantially boost the detection rate by attaining a kappa score between 0.7-0.8 with only 10 labeled examples per class. We get similar impressive performance even if the features are transferred from a different data source. While this paper focuses on HAR as the application domain, the proposed technique is general and could be applied to a wide variety of problems in other areas.

cs.LG↗

Learning behavioral context recognition with multi-stream temporal convolutional networks

Smart devices of everyday use (such as smartphones and wearables) are increasingly integrated with sensors that provide immense amounts of information about a person's daily life such as behavior and context. The automatic and unobtrusive sensing of behavioral context can help develop solutions for assisted living, fitness tracking, sleep monitoring, and several other fields. Towards addressing this issue, we raise the question: can a machine learn to recognize a diverse set of contexts and activities in a real-life through joint learning from raw multi-modal signals (e.g. accelerometer, gyroscope and audio etc.)? In this paper, we propose a multi-stream temporal convolutional network to address the problem of multi-label behavioral context recognition. A four-stream network architecture handles learning from each modality with a contextualization module which incorporates extracted representations to infer a user's context. Our empirical evaluation suggests that a deep convolutional network trained end-to-end achieves an optimal recognition rate. Furthermore, the presented architecture can be extended to include similar sensors for performance improvements and handles missing modalities through multi-task learning without any manual feature engineering on highly imbalanced and sparsely labeled dataset.

cs.LG↗

Personalized Driver Stress Detection with Multi-task Neural Networks using Physiological Signals

Stress can be seen as a physiological response to everyday emotional, mental and physical challenges. A long-term exposure to stressful situations can have negative health consequences, such as increased risk of cardiovascular diseases and immune system disorder. Therefore, a timely stress detection can lead to systems for better management and prevention in future circumstances. In this paper, we suggest a multi-task learning based neural network approach (with hard parameter sharing of mutual representation and task-specific layers) for personalized stress recognition using skin conductance and heart rate from wearable devices. The proposed method is tested on multi-modal physiological responses collected during real-world and simulator driving tasks.

cs.LG↗