arXiv subjects

Anastasios Tefas

Publications and source records attributed to Anastasios Tefas.

35 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Quadratic mutual information regularization in real-time deep CNN models

In this paper, regularized lightweight deep convolutional neural network models, capable of effectively operating in real-time on devices with restricted computational power for high-resolution video input are proposed. Furthermore, a novel regularization method motivated by the Quadratic Mutual Information, in order to improve the generalization ability of the utilized models is proposed. Extensive experiments on various binary classification problems involved in autonomous systems are performed, indicating the effectiveness of the proposed models as well as of the proposed regularizer.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Semantic Scene Segmentation for Robotics Applications

Semantic scene segmentation plays a critical role in a wide range of robotics applications, e.g., autonomous navigation. These applications are accompanied by specific computational restrictions, e.g., operation on low-power GPUs, at sufficient speed, and also for high-resolution input. Existing state-of-the-art segmentation models provide evaluation results under different setups and mainly considering high-power GPUs. In this paper, we investigate the behavior of the most successful semantic scene segmentation models, in terms of deployment (inference) speed, under various setups (GPUs, input sizes, etc.) in the context of robotics applications. The target of this work is to provide a comparative study of current state-of-the-art segmentation models so as to select the most compliant with the robotics applications requirements.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Autoencoder-driven Spiral Representation Learning for Gravitational Wave Surrogate Modelling

Recently, artificial neural networks have been gaining momentum in the field of gravitational wave astronomy, for example in surrogate modelling of computationally expensive waveform models for binary black hole inspiral and merger. Surrogate modelling yields fast and accurate approximations of gravitational waves and neural networks have been used in the final step of interpolating the coefficients of the surrogate model for arbitrary waveforms outside the training sample. We investigate the existence of underlying structures in the empirical interpolation coefficients using autoencoders. We demonstrate that when the coefficient space is compressed to only two dimensions, a spiral structure appears, wherein the spiral angle is linearly related to the mass ratio. Based on this finding, we design a spiral module with learnable parameters, that is used as the first layer in a neural network, which learns to map the input space to the coefficients. The spiral module is evaluated on multiple neural network architectures and consistently achieves better speed-accuracy trade-off than baseline models. A thorough experimental study is conducted and the final result is a surrogate model which can evaluate millions of input parameters in a single forward pass in under 1ms on a desktop GPU, while the mismatch between the corresponding generated waveforms and the ground-truth waveforms is better than the compared baseline methods. We anticipate the existence of analogous underlying structures and corresponding computational gains also in the case of spinning black hole binaries.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Attention-based Neural Bag-of-Features Learning for Sequence Data

In this paper, we propose 2D-Attention (2DA), a generic attention formulation for sequence data, which acts as a complementary computation block that can detect and focus on relevant sources of information for the given learning objective. The proposed attention module is incorporated into the recently proposed Neural Bag of Feature (NBoF) model to enhance its learning capacity. Since 2DA acts as a plug-in layer, injecting it into different computation stages of the NBoF model results in different 2DA-NBoF architectures, each of which possesses a unique interpretation. We conducted extensive experiments in financial forecasting, audio analysis as well as medical diagnosis problems to benchmark the proposed formulations in comparison with existing methods, including the widely used Gated Recurrent Units. Our empirical analysis shows that the proposed attention formulations can not only improve performances of NBoF models but also make them resilient to noisy data.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Heterogeneous Knowledge Distillation using Information Flow Modeling

Knowledge Distillation (KD) methods are capable of transferring the knowledge encoded in a large and complex teacher into a smaller and faster student. Early methods were usually limited to transferring the knowledge only between the last layers of the networks, while latter approaches were capable of performing multi-layer KD, further increasing the accuracy of the student. However, despite their improved performance, these methods still suffer from several limitations that restrict both their efficiency and flexibility. First, existing KD methods typically ignore that neural networks undergo through different learning phases during the training process, which often requires different types of supervision for each one. Furthermore, existing multi-layer KD methods are usually unable to effectively handle networks with significantly different architectures (heterogeneous KD). In this paper we propose a novel KD method that works by modeling the information flow through the various layers of the teacher model and then train a student model to mimic this information flow. The proposed method is capable of overcoming the aforementioned limitations by using an appropriate supervision scheme during the different phases of the training process, as well as by designing and training an appropriate auxiliary teacher model that acts as a proxy model capable of "explaining" the way the teacher works to the student. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated using four image datasets and several different evaluation setups.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Deep Adaptive Input Normalization for Time Series Forecasting

Deep Learning (DL) models can be used to tackle time series analysis tasks with great success. However, the performance of DL models can degenerate rapidly if the data are not appropriately normalized. This issue is even more apparent when DL is used for financial time series forecasting tasks, where the non-stationary and multimodal nature of the data pose significant challenges and severely affect the performance of DL models. In this work, a simple, yet effective, neural layer, that is capable of adaptively normalizing the input time series, while taking into account the distribution of the data, is proposed. The proposed layer is trained in an end-to-end fashion using back-propagation and leads to significant performance improvements compared to other evaluated normalization schemes. The proposed method differs from traditional normalization methods since it learns how to perform normalization for a given task instead of using a fixed normalization scheme. At the same time, it can be directly applied to any new time series without requiring re-training. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated using a large-scale limit order book dataset, as well as a load forecasting dataset.

q-fin.CP↗

arXiv2019

Bag of Color Features For Color Constancy

In this paper, we propose a novel color constancy approach, called Bag of Color Features (BoCF), building upon Bag-of-Features pooling. The proposed method substantially reduces the number of parameters needed for illumination estimation. At the same time, the proposed method is consistent with the color constancy assumption stating that global spatial information is not relevant for illumination estimation and local information ( edges, etc.) is sufficient. Furthermore, BoCF is consistent with color constancy statistical approaches and can be interpreted as a learning-based generalization of many statistical approaches. To further improve the illumination estimation accuracy, we propose a novel attention mechanism for the BoCF model with two variants based on self-attention. BoCF approach and its variants achieve competitive, compared to the state of the art, results while requiring much fewer parameters on three benchmark datasets: ColorChecker RECommended, INTEL-TUT version 2, and NUS8.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Machine Learning for Forecasting Mid Price Movement using Limit Order Book Data

Forecasting the movements of stock prices is one the most challenging problems in financial markets analysis. In this paper, we use Machine Learning (ML) algorithms for the prediction of future price movements using limit order book data. Two different sets of features are combined and evaluated: handcrafted features based on the raw order book data and features extracted by ML algorithms, resulting in feature vectors with highly variant dimensionalities. Three classifiers are evaluated using combinations of these sets of features on two different evaluation setups and three prediction scenarios. Even though the large scale and high frequency nature of the limit order book poses several challenges, the scope of the conducted experiments and the significance of the experimental results indicate that Machine Learning highly befits this task carving the path towards future research in this field.

cs.CE↗

arXiv2019

Learning Deep Representations with Probabilistic Knowledge Transfer

Knowledge Transfer (KT) techniques tackle the problem of transferring the knowledge from a large and complex neural network into a smaller and faster one. However, existing KT methods are tailored towards classification tasks and they cannot be used efficiently for other representation learning tasks. In this paper a novel knowledge transfer technique, that is capable of training a student model that maintains the same amount of mutual information between the learned representation and a set of (possible unknown) labels as the teacher model, is proposed. Apart from outperforming existing KT techniques, the proposed method allows for overcoming several limitations of existing methods providing new insight into KT as well as novel KT applications, ranging from knowledge transfer from handcrafted feature extractors to {cross-modal} KT from the textual modality into the representation extracted from the visual modality of the data.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Temporal Logistic Neural Bag-of-Features for Financial Time series Forecasting leveraging Limit Order Book Data

Time series forecasting is a crucial component of many important applications, ranging from forecasting the stock markets to energy load prediction. The high-dimensionality, velocity and variety of the data collected in these applications pose significant and unique challenges that must be carefully addressed for each of them. In this work, a novel Temporal Logistic Neural Bag-of-Features approach, that can be used to tackle these challenges, is proposed. The proposed method can be effectively combined with deep neural networks, leading to powerful deep learning models for time series analysis. However, combining existing BoF formulations with deep feature extractors pose significant challenges: the distribution of the input features is not stationary, tuning the hyper-parameters of the model can be especially difficult and the normalizations involved in the BoF model can cause significant instabilities during the training process. The proposed method is capable of overcoming these limitations by a employing a novel adaptive scaling mechanism and replacing the classical Gaussian-based density estimation involved in the regular BoF model with a logistic kernel. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated using extensive experiments on a large-scale financial time series dataset that consists of more than 4 million limit orders.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Deep Supervised Hashing leveraging Quadratic Spherical Mutual Information for Content-based Image Retrieval

Several deep supervised hashing techniques have been proposed to allow for efficiently querying large image databases. However, deep supervised image hashing techniques are developed, to a great extent, heuristically often leading to suboptimal results. Contrary to this, we propose an efficient deep supervised hashing algorithm that optimizes the learned codes using an information-theoretic measure, the Quadratic Mutual Information (QMI). The proposed method is adapted to the needs of large-scale hashing and information retrieval leading to a novel information-theoretic measure, the Quadratic Spherical Mutual Information (QSMI). Apart from demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method under different scenarios and outperforming existing state-of-the-art image hashing techniques, this paper provides a structured way to model the process of information retrieval and develop novel methods adapted to the needs of each application.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Style Decomposition for Improved Neural Style Transfer

Universal Neural Style Transfer (NST) methods are capable of performing style transfer of arbitrary styles in a style-agnostic manner via feature transforms in (almost) real-time. Even though their unimodal parametric style modeling approach has been proven adequate to transfer a single style from relatively simple images, they are usually not capable of effectively handling more complex styles, producing significant artifacts, as well as reducing the quality of the synthesized textures in the stylized image. To overcome these limitations, in this paper we propose a novel universal NST approach that separately models each sub-style that exists in a given style image (or a collection of style images). This allows for better modeling the subtle style differences within the same style image and then using the most appropriate sub-style (or mixtures of different sub-styles) to stylize the content image. The ability of the proposed approach to a) perform a wide range of different stylizations using the sub-styles that exist in one style image, while giving the ability to the user to appropriate mix the different sub-styles, b) automatically match the most appropriate sub-style to different semantic regions of the content image, improving existing state-of-the-art universal NST approaches, and c) detecting and transferring the sub-styles from collections of images are demonstrated through extensive experiments.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Interactive dimensionality reduction using similarity projections

Recent advances in machine learning allow us to analyze and describe the content of high-dimensional data like text, audio, images or other signals. In order to visualize that data in 2D or 3D, usually Dimensionality Reduction (DR) techniques are employed. Most of these techniques, e.g., PCA or t-SNE, produce static projections without taking into account corrections from humans or other data exploration scenarios. In this work, we propose the interactive Similarity Projection (iSP), a novel interactive DR framework based on similarity embeddings, where we form a differentiable objective based on the user interactions and perform learning using gradient descent, with an end-to-end trainable architecture. Two interaction scenarios are evaluated. First, a common methodology in multidimensional projection is to project a subset of data, arrange them in classes or clusters, and project the rest unseen dataset based on that manipulation, in a kind of semi-supervised interpolation. We report results that outperform competitive baselines in a wide range of metrics and datasets. Second, we explore the scenario of manipulating some classes, while enriching the optimization with high-dimensional neighbor information. Apart from improving classification precision and clustering on images and text documents, the new emerging structure of the projection unveils semantic manifolds. For example, on the Head Pose dataset, by just dragging the faces looking far left to the left and those looking far right to the right, all faces are re-arranged on a continuum even on the vertical axis (face up and down). This end-to-end framework can be used for fast, visual semi-supervised learning, manifold exploration, interactive domain adaptation of neural embeddings and transfer learning.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Decoding Generic Visual Representations From Human Brain Activity using Machine Learning

Among the most impressive recent applications of neural decoding is the visual representation decoding, where the category of an object that a subject either sees or imagines is inferred by observing his/her brain activity. Even though there is an increasing interest in the aforementioned visual representation decoding task, there is no extensive study of the effect of using different machine learning models on the decoding accuracy. In this paper we provide an extensive evaluation of several machine learning models, along with different similarity metrics, for the aforementioned task, drawing many interesting conclusions. That way, this paper a) paves the way for developing more advanced and accurate methods and b) provides an extensive and easily reproducible baseline for the aforementioned decoding task.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2018

Using Deep Learning for price prediction by exploiting stationary limit order book features

The recent surge in Deep Learning (DL) research of the past decade has successfully provided solutions to many difficult problems. The field of quantitative analysis has been slowly adapting the new methods to its problems, but due to problems such as the non-stationary nature of financial data, significant challenges must be overcome before DL is fully utilized. In this work a new method to construct stationary features, that allows DL models to be applied effectively, is proposed. These features are thoroughly tested on the task of predicting mid price movements of the Limit Order Book. Several DL models are evaluated, such as recurrent Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). Finally a novel model that combines the ability of CNNs to extract useful features and the ability of LSTMs' to analyze time series, is proposed and evaluated. The combined model is able to outperform the individual LSTM and CNN models in the prediction horizons that are tested.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2017

Dimensionality Reduction using Similarity-induced Embeddings

The vast majority of Dimensionality Reduction (DR) techniques rely on second-order statistics to define their optimization objective. Even though this provides adequate results in most cases, it comes with several shortcomings. The methods require carefully designed regularizers and they are usually prone to outliers. In this work, a new DR framework, that can directly model the target distribution using the notion of similarity instead of distance, is introduced. The proposed framework, called Similarity Embedding Framework, can overcome the aforementioned limitations and provides a conceptually simpler way to express optimization targets similar to existing DR techniques. Deriving a new DR technique using the Similarity Embedding Framework becomes simply a matter of choosing an appropriate target similarity matrix. A variety of classical tasks, such as performing supervised dimensionality reduction and providing out-of-of-sample extensions, as well as, new novel techniques, such as providing fast linear embeddings for complex techniques, are demonstrated in this paper using the proposed framework. Six datasets from a diverse range of domains are used to evaluate the proposed method and it is demonstrated that it can outperform many existing DR techniques.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

Learning Bag-of-Features Pooling for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are well established models capable of achieving state-of-the-art classification accuracy for various computer vision tasks. However, they are becoming increasingly larger, using millions of parameters, while they are restricted to handling images of fixed size. In this paper, a quantization-based approach, inspired from the well-known Bag-of-Features model, is proposed to overcome these limitations. The proposed approach, called Convolutional BoF (CBoF), uses RBF neurons to quantize the information extracted from the convolutional layers and it is able to natively classify images of various sizes as well as to significantly reduce the number of parameters in the network. In contrast to other global pooling operators and CNN compression techniques the proposed method utilizes a trainable pooling layer that it is end-to-end differentiable, allowing the network to be trained using regular back-propagation and to achieve greater distribution shift invariance than competitive methods. The ability of the proposed method to reduce the parameters of the network and increase the classification accuracy over other state-of-the-art techniques is demonstrated using three image datasets.

cs.CV↗