arXiv subjects

Hugo Jair Escalante

Publications and source records attributed to Hugo Jair Escalante.

34 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Automated Machine Learning -- a brief review at the end of the early years

Automated machine learning (AutoML) is the sub-field of machine learning that aims at automating, to some extend, all stages of the design of a machine learning system. In the context of supervised learning, AutoML is concerned with feature extraction, pre processing, model design and post processing. Major contributions and achievements in AutoML have been taking place during the recent decade. We are therefore in perfect timing to look back and realize what we have learned. This chapter aims to summarize the main findings in the early years of AutoML. More specifically, in this chapter an introduction to AutoML for supervised learning is provided and an historical review of progress in this field is presented. Likewise, the main paradigms of AutoML are described and research opportunities are outlined.

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arXiv2020

Cross-ethnicity Face Anti-spoofing Recognition Challenge: A Review

Face anti-spoofing is critical to prevent face recognition systems from a security breach. The biometrics community has %possessed achieved impressive progress recently due the excellent performance of deep neural networks and the availability of large datasets. Although ethnic bias has been verified to severely affect the performance of face recognition systems, it still remains an open research problem in face anti-spoofing. Recently, a multi-ethnic face anti-spoofing dataset, CASIA-SURF CeFA, has been released with the goal of measuring the ethnic bias. It is the largest up to date cross-ethnicity face anti-spoofing dataset covering $3$ ethnicities, $3$ modalities, $1,607$ subjects, 2D plus 3D attack types, and the first dataset including explicit ethnic labels among the recently released datasets for face anti-spoofing. We organized the Chalearn Face Anti-spoofing Attack Detection Challenge which consists of single-modal (e.g., RGB) and multi-modal (e.g., RGB, Depth, Infrared (IR)) tracks around this novel resource to boost research aiming to alleviate the ethnic bias. Both tracks have attracted $340$ teams in the development stage, and finally 11 and 8 teams have submitted their codes in the single-modal and multi-modal face anti-spoofing recognition challenges, respectively. All the results were verified and re-ran by the organizing team, and the results were used for the final ranking. This paper presents an overview of the challenge, including its design, evaluation protocol and a summary of results. We analyze the top ranked solutions and draw conclusions derived from the competition. In addition we outline future work directions.

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arXiv2020

CASIA-SURF: A Large-scale Multi-modal Benchmark for Face Anti-spoofing

Face anti-spoofing is essential to prevent face recognition systems from a security breach. Much of the progresses have been made by the availability of face anti-spoofing benchmark datasets in recent years. However, existing face anti-spoofing benchmarks have limited number of subjects ($\le\negmedspace170$) and modalities ($\leq\negmedspace2$), which hinder the further development of the academic community. To facilitate face anti-spoofing research, we introduce a large-scale multi-modal dataset, namely CASIA-SURF, which is the largest publicly available dataset for face anti-spoofing in terms of both subjects and modalities. Specifically, it consists of $1,000$ subjects with $21,000$ videos and each sample has $3$ modalities (i.e., RGB, Depth and IR). We also provide comprehensive evaluation metrics, diverse evaluation protocols, training/validation/testing subsets and a measurement tool, developing a new benchmark for face anti-spoofing. Moreover, we present a novel multi-modal multi-scale fusion method as a strong baseline, which performs feature re-weighting to select the more informative channel features while suppressing the less useful ones for each modality across different scales. Extensive experiments have been conducted on the proposed dataset to verify its significance and generalization capability. The dataset is available at https://sites.google.com/qq.com/face-anti-spoofing/welcome/challengecvpr2019?authuser=0

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arXiv2019

Explaining First Impressions: Modeling, Recognizing, and Explaining Apparent Personality from Videos

Explainability and interpretability are two critical aspects of decision support systems. Within computer vision, they are critical in certain tasks related to human behavior analysis such as in health care applications. Despite their importance, it is only recently that researchers are starting to explore these aspects. This paper provides an introduction to explainability and interpretability in the context of computer vision with an emphasis on looking at people tasks. Specifically, we review and study those mechanisms in the context of first impressions analysis. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort in this direction. Additionally, we describe a challenge we organized on explainability in first impressions analysis from video. We analyze in detail the newly introduced data set, the evaluation protocol, and summarize the results of the challenge. Finally, derived from our study, we outline research opportunities that we foresee will be decisive in the near future for the development of the explainable computer vision field.

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arXiv2019

Towards AutoML in the presence of Drift: first results

Research progress in AutoML has lead to state of the art solutions that can cope quite wellwith supervised learning task, e.g., classification with AutoSklearn. However, so far thesesystems do not take into account the changing nature of evolving data over time (i.e., theystill assume i.i.d. data); even when this sort of domains are increasingly available in realapplications (e.g., spam filtering, user preferences, etc.). We describe a first attempt to de-velop an AutoML solution for scenarios in which data distribution changes relatively slowlyover time and in which the problem is approached in a lifelong learning setting. We extendAuto-Sklearn with sound and intuitive mechanisms that allow it to cope with this sort ofproblems. The extended Auto-Sklearn is combined with concept drift detection techniquesthat allow it to automatically determine when the initial models have to be adapted. Wereport experimental results in benchmark data from AutoML competitions that adhere tothis scenario. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.

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arXiv2019

Meta-learning of textual representations

Recent progress in AutoML has lead to state-of-the-art methods (e.g., AutoSKLearn) that can be readily used by non-experts to approach any supervised learning problem. Whereas these methods are quite effective, they are still limited in the sense that they work for tabular (matrix formatted) data only. This paper describes one step forward in trying to automate the design of supervised learning methods in the context of text mining. We introduce a meta learning methodology for automatically obtaining a representation for text mining tasks starting from raw text. We report experiments considering 60 different textual representations and more than 80 text mining datasets associated to a wide variety of tasks. Experimental results show the proposed methodology is a promising solution to obtain highly effective off the shell text classification pipelines.

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arXiv2019

First Impressions: A Survey on Vision-Based Apparent Personality Trait Analysis

Personality analysis has been widely studied in psychology, neuropsychology, and signal processing fields, among others. From the past few years, it also became an attractive research area in visual computing. From the computational point of view, by far speech and text have been the most considered cues of information for analyzing personality. However, recently there has been an increasing interest from the computer vision community in analyzing personality from visual data. Recent computer vision approaches are able to accurately analyze human faces, body postures and behaviors, and use these information to infer apparent personality traits. Because of the overwhelming research interest in this topic, and of the potential impact that this sort of methods could have in society, we present in this paper an up-to-date review of existing vision-based approaches for apparent personality trait recognition. We describe seminal and cutting edge works on the subject, discussing and comparing their distinctive features and limitations. Future venues of research in the field are identified and discussed. Furthermore, aspects on the subjectivity in data labeling/evaluation, as well as current datasets and challenges organized to push the research on the field are reviewed.

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arXiv2019

AutoML @ NeurIPS 2018 challenge: Design and Results

We organized a competition on Autonomous Lifelong Machine Learning with Drift that was part of the competition program of NeurIPS 2018. This data driven competition asked participants to develop computer programs capable of solving supervised learning problems where the i.i.d. assumption did not hold. Large data sets were arranged in a lifelong learning and evaluation scenario and CodaLab was used as the challenge platform. The challenge attracted more than 300 participants in its two month duration. This chapter describes the design of the challenge and summarizes its main results.

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arXiv2018

A visual approach for age and gender identification on Twitter

The goal of Author Profiling (AP) is to identify demographic aspects (e.g., age, gender) from a given set of authors by analyzing their written texts. Recently, the AP task has gained interest in many problems related to computer forensics, psychology, marketing, but specially in those related with social media exploitation. As known, social media data is shared through a wide range of modalities (e.g., text, images and audio), representing valuable information to be exploited for extracting valuable insights from users. Nevertheless, most of the current work in AP using social media data has been devoted to analyze textual information only, and there are very few works that have started exploring the gender identification using visual information. Contrastingly, this paper focuses in exploiting the visual modality to perform both age and gender identification in social media, specifically in Twitter. Our goal is to evaluate the pertinence of using visual information in solving the AP task. Accordingly, we have extended the Twitter corpus from PAN 2014, incorporating posted images from all the users, making a distinction between tweeted and retweeted images. Performed experiments provide interesting evidence on the usefulness of visual information in comparison with traditional textual representations for the AP task.

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arXiv2018

Towards Deep Representation Learning with Genetic Programming

Genetic Programming (GP) is an evolutionary algorithm commonly used for machine learning tasks. In this paper we present a method that allows GP to transform the representation of a large-scale machine learning dataset into a more compact representation, by means of processing features from the original representation at individual level. We develop as a proof of concept of this method an autoencoder. We tested a preliminary version of our approach in a variety of well-known machine learning image datasets. We speculate that this method, used in an iterative manner, can produce results competitive with state-of-art deep neural networks.

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arXiv2017

Fractal dimension analysis for automatic morphological galaxy classification

In this report we present experimental results using \emph{Haussdorf-Besicovich} fractal dimension for performing morphological galaxy classification. The fractal dimension is a topological, structural and spatial property that give us information about the space were an object lives. We have calculated the fractal dimension value of the main types of galaxies: ellipticals, spirals and irregulars; and we use it as a feature for classifying them. Also, we have performed an image analysis process in order to standardize the galaxy images, and we have used principal component analysis to obtain the main attributes in the images. Galaxy classification was performed using machine learning algorithms: C4.5, k-nearest neighbors, random forest and support vector machines. Preliminary experimental results using 10-fold cross-validation show that fractal dimension helps to improve classification, with over 88 per cent accuracy for elliptical galaxies, 100 per cent accuracy for spiral galaxies and over 40 per cent for irregular galaxies.

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arXiv2017

ChaLearn Looking at People: A Review of Events and Resources

This paper reviews the historic of ChaLearn Looking at People (LAP) events. We started in 2011 (with the release of the first Kinect device) to run challenges related to human action/activity and gesture recognition. Since then we have regularly organized events in a series of competitions covering all aspects of visual analysis of humans. So far we have organized more than 10 international challenges and events in this field. This paper reviews associated events, and introduces the ChaLearn LAP platform where public resources (including code, data and preprints of papers) related to the organized events are available. We also provide a discussion on perspectives of ChaLearn LAP activities.

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arXiv2015

Early text classification: a Naive solution

Text classification is a widely studied problem, and it can be considered solved for some domains and under certain circumstances. There are scenarios, however, that have received little or no attention at all, despite its relevance and applicability. One of such scenarios is early text classification, where one needs to know the category of a document by using partial information only. A document is processed as a sequence of terms, and the goal is to devise a method that can make predictions as fast as possible. The importance of this variant of the text classification problem is evident in domains like sexual predator detection, where one wants to identify an offender as early as possible. This paper analyzes the suitability of the standard naive Bayes classifier for approaching this problem. Specifically, we assess its performance when classifying documents after seeing an increasingly number of terms. A simple modification to the standard naive Bayes implementation allows us to make predictions with partial information. To the best of our knowledge naive Bayes has not been used for this purpose before. Throughout an extensive experimental evaluation we show the effectiveness of the classifier for early text classification. What is more, we show that this simple solution is very competitive when compared with state of the art methodologies that are more elaborated. We foresee our work will pave the way for the development of more effective early text classification techniques based in the naive Bayes formulation.

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arXiv2014

Term-Weighting Learning via Genetic Programming for Text Classification

This paper describes a novel approach to learning term-weighting schemes (TWSs) in the context of text classification. In text mining a TWS determines the way in which documents will be represented in a vector space model, before applying a classifier. Whereas acceptable performance has been obtained with standard TWSs (e.g., Boolean and term-frequency schemes), the definition of TWSs has been traditionally an art. Further, it is still a difficult task to determine what is the best TWS for a particular problem and it is not clear yet, whether better schemes, than those currently available, can be generated by combining known TWS. We propose in this article a genetic program that aims at learning effective TWSs that can improve the performance of current schemes in text classification. The genetic program learns how to combine a set of basic units to give rise to discriminative TWSs. We report an extensive experimental study comprising data sets from thematic and non-thematic text classification as well as from image classification. Our study shows the validity of the proposed method; in fact, we show that TWSs learned with the genetic program outperform traditional schemes and other TWSs proposed in recent works. Further, we show that TWSs learned from a specific domain can be effectively used for other tasks.

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arXiv2014

Principal motion components for gesture recognition using a single-example

This paper introduces principal motion components (PMC), a new method for one-shot gesture recognition. In the considered scenario a single training-video is available for each gesture to be recognized, which limits the application of traditional techniques (e.g., HMMs). In PMC, a 2D map of motion energy is obtained per each pair of consecutive frames in a video. Motion maps associated to a video are processed to obtain a PCA model, which is used for recognition under a reconstruction-error approach. The main benefits of the proposed approach are its simplicity, easiness of implementation, competitive performance and efficiency. We report experimental results in one-shot gesture recognition using the ChaLearn Gesture Dataset; a benchmark comprising more than 50,000 gestures, recorded as both RGB and depth video with a Kinect camera. Results obtained with PMC are competitive with alternative methods proposed for the same data set.

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arXiv2013

An estimation of distribution algorithm with adaptive Gibbs sampling for unconstrained global optimization

In this paper is proposed a new heuristic approach belonging to the field of evolutionary Estimation of Distribution Algorithms (EDAs). EDAs builds a probability model and a set of solutions is sampled from the model which characterizes the distribution of such solutions. The main framework of the proposed method is an estimation of distribution algorithm, in which an adaptive Gibbs sampling is used to generate new promising solutions and, in combination with a local search strategy, it improves the individual solutions produced in each iteration. The Estimation of Distribution Algorithm with Adaptive Gibbs Sampling we are proposing in this paper is called AGEDA. We experimentally evaluate and compare this algorithm against two deterministic procedures and several stochastic methods in three well known test problems for unconstrained global optimization. It is empirically shown that our heuristic is robust in problems that involve three central aspects that mainly determine the difficulty of global optimization problems, namely high-dimensionality, multi-modality and non-smoothness.

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