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João Paulo Papa

Publications and source records attributed to João Paulo Papa.

33 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Improving Transferability of Domain Adaptation Networks Through Domain Alignment Layers

Deep learning (DL) has been the primary approach used in various computer vision tasks due to its relevant results achieved on many tasks. However, on real-world scenarios with partially or no labeled data, DL methods are also prone to the well-known domain shift problem. Multi-source unsupervised domain adaptation (MSDA) aims at learning a predictor for an unlabeled domain by assigning weak knowledge from a bag of source models. However, most works conduct domain adaptation leveraging only the extracted features and reducing their domain shift from the perspective of loss function designs. In this paper, we argue that it is not sufficient to handle domain shift only based on domain-level features, but it is also essential to align such information on the feature space. Unlike previous works, we focus on the network design and propose to embed Multi-Source version of DomaIn Alignment Layers (MS-DIAL) at different levels of the predictor. These layers are designed to match the feature distributions between different domains and can be easily applied to various MSDA methods. To show the robustness of our approach, we conducted an extensive experimental evaluation considering two challenging scenarios: digit recognition and object classification. The experimental results indicated that our approach can improve state-of-the-art MSDA methods, yielding relative gains of up to +30.64% on their classification accuracies.

cs.CV↗

Handling Imbalanced Datasets Through Optimum-Path Forest

In the last decade, machine learning-based approaches became capable of performing a wide range of complex tasks sometimes better than humans, demanding a fraction of the time. Such an advance is partially due to the exponential growth in the amount of data available, which makes it possible to extract trustworthy real-world information from them. However, such data is generally imbalanced since some phenomena are more likely than others. Such a behavior yields considerable influence on the machine learning model's performance since it becomes biased on the more frequent data it receives. Despite the considerable amount of machine learning methods, a graph-based approach has attracted considerable notoriety due to the outstanding performance over many applications, i.e., the Optimum-Path Forest (OPF). In this paper, we propose three OPF-based strategies to deal with the imbalance problem: the $\text{O}^2$PF and the OPF-US, which are novel approaches for oversampling and undersampling, respectively, as well as a hybrid strategy combining both approaches. The paper also introduces a set of variants concerning the strategies mentioned above. Results compared against several state-of-the-art techniques over public and private datasets confirm the robustness of the proposed approaches.

cs.LG↗

Comparative Study Between Distance Measures On Supervised Optimum-Path Forest Classification

Machine Learning has attracted considerable attention throughout the past decade due to its potential to solve far-reaching tasks, such as image classification, object recognition, anomaly detection, and data forecasting. A standard approach to tackle such applications is based on supervised learning, which is assisted by large sets of labeled data and is conducted by the so-called classifiers, such as Logistic Regression, Decision Trees, Random Forests, and Support Vector Machines, among others. An alternative to traditional classifiers is the parameterless Optimum-Path Forest (OPF), which uses a graph-based methodology and a distance measure to create arcs between nodes and hence sets of trees, responsible for conquering the nodes, defining their labels, and shaping the forests. Nevertheless, its performance is strongly associated with an appropriate distance measure, which may vary according to the dataset's nature. Therefore, this work proposes a comparative study over a wide range of distance measures applied to the supervised Optimum-Path Forest classification. The experimental results are conducted using well-known literature datasets and compared across benchmarking classifiers, illustrating OPF's ability to adapt to distinct domains.

cs.LG↗

Modeling Implicit Bias with Fuzzy Cognitive Maps

This paper presents a Fuzzy Cognitive Map model to quantify implicit bias in structured datasets where features can be numeric or discrete. In our proposal, problem features are mapped to neural concepts that are initially activated by experts when running what-if simulations, whereas weights connecting the neural concepts represent absolute correlation/association patterns between features. In addition, we introduce a new reasoning mechanism equipped with a normalization-like transfer function that prevents neurons from saturating. Another advantage of this new reasoning mechanism is that it can easily be controlled by regulating nonlinearity when updating neurons' activation values in each iteration. Finally, we study the convergence of our model and derive analytical conditions concerning the existence and unicity of fixed-point attractors.

cs.LG↗

Gait Recognition Based on Deep Learning: A Survey

In general, biometry-based control systems may not rely on individual expected behavior or cooperation to operate appropriately. Instead, such systems should be aware of malicious procedures for unauthorized access attempts. Some works available in the literature suggest addressing the problem through gait recognition approaches. Such methods aim at identifying human beings through intrinsic perceptible features, despite dressed clothes or accessories. Although the issue denotes a relatively long-time challenge, most of the techniques developed to handle the problem present several drawbacks related to feature extraction and low classification rates, among other issues. However, deep learning-based approaches recently emerged as a robust set of tools to deal with virtually any image and computer-vision related problem, providing paramount results for gait recognition as well. Therefore, this work provides a surveyed compilation of recent works regarding biometric detection through gait recognition with a focus on deep learning approaches, emphasizing their benefits, and exposing their weaknesses. Besides, it also presents categorized and characterized descriptions of the datasets, approaches, and architectures employed to tackle associated constraints.

cs.CV↗

Avoiding Overfitting: A Survey on Regularization Methods for Convolutional Neural Networks

Several image processing tasks, such as image classification and object detection, have been significantly improved using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). Like ResNet and EfficientNet, many architectures have achieved outstanding results in at least one dataset by the time of their creation. A critical factor in training concerns the network's regularization, which prevents the structure from overfitting. This work analyzes several regularization methods developed in the last few years, showing significant improvements for different CNN models. The works are classified into three main areas: the first one is called "data augmentation", where all the techniques focus on performing changes in the input data. The second, named "internal changes", which aims to describe procedures to modify the feature maps generated by the neural network or the kernels. The last one, called "label", concerns transforming the labels of a given input. This work presents two main differences comparing to other available surveys about regularization: (i) the first concerns the papers gathered in the manuscript, which are not older than five years, and (ii) the second distinction is about reproducibility, i.e., all works refered here have their code available in public repositories or they have been directly implemented in some framework, such as TensorFlow or Torch.

cs.CV↗

OPFython: A Python-Inspired Optimum-Path Forest Classifier

Machine learning techniques have been paramount throughout the last years, being applied in a wide range of tasks, such as classification, object recognition, person identification, and image segmentation. Nevertheless, conventional classification algorithms, e.g., Logistic Regression, Decision Trees, and Bayesian classifiers, might lack complexity and diversity, not suitable when dealing with real-world data. A recent graph-inspired classifier, known as the Optimum-Path Forest, has proven to be a state-of-the-art technique, comparable to Support Vector Machines and even surpassing it in some tasks. This paper proposes a Python-based Optimum-Path Forest framework, denoted as OPFython, where all of its functions and classes are based upon the original C language implementation. Additionally, as OPFython is a Python-based library, it provides a more friendly environment and a faster prototyping workspace than the C language.

cs.LG↗

Speeding Up OPFython with Numba

A graph-inspired classifier, known as Optimum-Path Forest (OPF), has proven to be a state-of-the-art algorithm comparable to Logistic Regressors, Support Vector Machines in a wide variety of tasks. Recently, its Python-based version, denoted as OPFython, has been proposed to provide a more friendly framework and a faster prototyping environment. Nevertheless, Python-based algorithms are slower than their counterpart C-based algorithms, impacting their performance when confronted with large amounts of data. Therefore, this paper proposed a simple yet highly efficient speed up using the Numba package, which accelerates Numpy-based calculations and attempts to increase the algorithm's overall performance. Experimental results showed that the proposed approach achieved better results than the naïve Python-based OPF and speeded up its distance measurement calculation.

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A Layer-Wise Information Reinforcement Approach to Improve Learning in Deep Belief Networks

With the advent of deep learning, the number of works proposing new methods or improving existent ones has grown exponentially in the last years. In this scenario, "very deep" models were emerging, once they were expected to extract more intrinsic and abstract features while supporting a better performance. However, such models suffer from the gradient vanishing problem, i.e., backpropagation values become too close to zero in their shallower layers, ultimately causing learning to stagnate. Such an issue was overcome in the context of convolution neural networks by creating "shortcut connections" between layers, in a so-called deep residual learning framework. Nonetheless, a very popular deep learning technique called Deep Belief Network still suffers from gradient vanishing when dealing with discriminative tasks. Therefore, this paper proposes the Residual Deep Belief Network, which considers the information reinforcement layer-by-layer to improve the feature extraction and knowledge retaining, that support better discriminative performance. Experiments conducted over three public datasets demonstrate its robustness concerning the task of binary image classification.

cs.AI↗

Intestinal Parasites Classification Using Deep Belief Networks

Currently, approximately $4$ billion people are infected by intestinal parasites worldwide. Diseases caused by such infections constitute a public health problem in most tropical countries, leading to physical and mental disorders, and even death to children and immunodeficient individuals. Although subjected to high error rates, human visual inspection is still in charge of the vast majority of clinical diagnoses. In the past years, some works addressed intelligent computer-aided intestinal parasites classification, but they usually suffer from misclassification due to similarities between parasites and fecal impurities. In this paper, we introduce Deep Belief Networks to the context of automatic intestinal parasites classification. Experiments conducted over three datasets composed of eggs, larvae, and protozoa provided promising results, even considering unbalanced classes and also fecal impurities.

cs.CV↗

A Metaheuristic-Driven Approach to Fine-Tune Deep Boltzmann Machines

Deep learning techniques, such as Deep Boltzmann Machines (DBMs), have received considerable attention over the past years due to the outstanding results concerning a variable range of domains. One of the main shortcomings of these techniques involves the choice of their hyperparameters, since they have a significant impact on the final results. This work addresses the issue of fine-tuning hyperparameters of Deep Boltzmann Machines using metaheuristic optimization techniques with different backgrounds, such as swarm intelligence, memory- and evolutionary-based approaches. Experiments conducted in three public datasets for binary image reconstruction showed that metaheuristic techniques can obtain reasonable results.

cs.LG↗

A Nature-Inspired Feature Selection Approach based on Hypercomplex Information

Feature selection for a given model can be transformed into an optimization task. The essential idea behind it is to find the most suitable subset of features according to some criterion. Nature-inspired optimization can mitigate this problem by producing compelling yet straightforward solutions when dealing with complicated fitness functions. Additionally, new mathematical representations, such as quaternions and octonions, are being used to handle higher-dimensional spaces. In this context, we are introducing a meta-heuristic optimization framework in a hypercomplex-based feature selection, where hypercomplex numbers are mapped to real-valued solutions and then transferred onto a boolean hypercube by a sigmoid function. The intended hypercomplex feature selection is tested for several meta-heuristic algorithms and hypercomplex representations, achieving results comparable to some state-of-the-art approaches. The good results achieved by the proposed approach make it a promising tool amongst feature selection research.

cs.NE↗

Learnergy: Energy-based Machine Learners

Throughout the last years, machine learning techniques have been broadly encouraged in the context of deep learning architectures. An exciting algorithm denoted as Restricted Boltzmann Machine relies on energy- and probabilistic-based nature to tackle the most diverse applications, such as classification, reconstruction, and generation of images and signals. Nevertheless, one can see they are not adequately renowned compared to other well-known deep learning techniques, e.g., Convolutional Neural Networks. Such behavior promotes the lack of researches and implementations around the literature, coping with the challenge of sufficiently comprehending these energy-based systems. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a Python-inspired framework in the context of energy-based architectures, denoted as Learnergy. Essentially, Learnergy is built upon PyTorch to provide a more friendly environment and a faster prototyping workspace and possibly the usage of CUDA computations, speeding up their computational time.

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MaxDropout: Deep Neural Network Regularization Based on Maximum Output Values

Different techniques have emerged in the deep learning scenario, such as Convolutional Neural Networks, Deep Belief Networks, and Long Short-Term Memory Networks, to cite a few. In lockstep, regularization methods, which aim to prevent overfitting by penalizing the weight connections, or turning off some units, have been widely studied either. In this paper, we present a novel approach called MaxDropout, a regularizer for deep neural network models that works in a supervised fashion by removing (shutting off) the prominent neurons (i.e., most active) in each hidden layer. The model forces fewer activated units to learn more representative information, thus providing sparsity. Regarding the experiments, we show that it is possible to improve existing neural networks and provide better results in neural networks when Dropout is replaced by MaxDropout. The proposed method was evaluated in image classification, achieving comparable results to existing regularizers, such as Cutout and RandomErasing, also improving the accuracy of neural networks that uses Dropout by replacing the existing layer by MaxDropout.

cs.LG↗

On the Learning of Deep Local Features for Robust Face Spoofing Detection

Biometrics emerged as a robust solution for security systems. However, given the dissemination of biometric applications, criminals are developing techniques to circumvent them by simulating physical or behavioral traits of legal users (spoofing attacks). Despite face being a promising characteristic due to its universality, acceptability and presence of cameras almost everywhere, face recognition systems are extremely vulnerable to such frauds since they can be easily fooled with common printed facial photographs. State-of-the-art approaches, based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), present good results in face spoofing detection. However, these methods do not consider the importance of learning deep local features from each facial region, even though it is known from face recognition that each facial region presents different visual aspects, which can also be exploited for face spoofing detection. In this work we propose a novel CNN architecture trained in two steps for such task. Initially, each part of the neural network learns features from a given facial region. Afterwards, the whole model is fine-tuned on the whole facial images. Results show that such pre-training step allows the CNN to learn different local spoofing cues, improving the performance and the convergence speed of the final model, outperforming the state-of-the-art approaches.

cs.CV↗