arXiv subjects

Steven C. H. Hoi

Publications and source records attributed to Steven C. H. Hoi.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Theory-Inspired Path-Regularized Differential Network Architecture Search

Despite its high search efficiency, differential architecture search (DARTS) often selects network architectures with dominated skip connections which lead to performance degradation. However, theoretical understandings on this issue remain absent, hindering the development of more advanced methods in a principled way. In this work, we solve this problem by theoretically analyzing the effects of various types of operations, e.g. convolution, skip connection and zero operation, to the network optimization. We prove that the architectures with more skip connections can converge faster than the other candidates, and thus are selected by DARTS. This result, for the first time, theoretically and explicitly reveals the impact of skip connections to fast network optimization and its competitive advantage over other types of operations in DARTS. Then we propose a theory-inspired path-regularized DARTS that consists of two key modules: (i) a differential group-structured sparse binary gate introduced for each operation to avoid unfair competition among operations, and (ii) a path-depth-wise regularization used to incite search exploration for deep architectures that often converge slower than shallow ones as shown in our theory and are not well explored during the search. Experimental results on image classification tasks validate its advantages.

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arXiv2020

MoPro: Webly Supervised Learning with Momentum Prototypes

We propose a webly-supervised representation learning method that does not suffer from the annotation unscalability of supervised learning, nor the computation unscalability of self-supervised learning. Most existing works on webly-supervised representation learning adopt a vanilla supervised learning method without accounting for the prevalent noise in the training data, whereas most prior methods in learning with label noise are less effective for real-world large-scale noisy data. We propose momentum prototypes (MoPro), a simple contrastive learning method that achieves online label noise correction, out-of-distribution sample removal, and representation learning. MoPro achieves state-of-the-art performance on WebVision, a weakly-labeled noisy dataset. MoPro also shows superior performance when the pretrained model is transferred to down-stream image classification and detection tasks. It outperforms the ImageNet supervised pretrained model by +10.5 on 1-shot classification on VOC, and outperforms the best self-supervised pretrained model by +17.3 when finetuned on 1\% of ImageNet labeled samples. Furthermore, MoPro is more robust to distribution shifts. Code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/salesforce/MoPro.

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arXiv2020

Structure-Aware Generation Network for Recipe Generation from Images

Sharing food has become very popular with the development of social media. For many real-world applications, people are keen to know the underlying recipes of a food item. In this paper, we are interested in automatically generating cooking instructions for food. We investigate an open research task of generating cooking instructions based on only food images and ingredients, which is similar to the image captioning task. However, compared with image captioning datasets, the target recipes are long-length paragraphs and do not have annotations on structure information. To address the above limitations, we propose a novel framework of Structure-aware Generation Network (SGN) to tackle the food recipe generation task. Our approach brings together several novel ideas in a systematic framework: (1) exploiting an unsupervised learning approach to obtain the sentence-level tree structure labels before training; (2) generating trees of target recipes from images with the supervision of tree structure labels learned from (1); and (3) integrating the inferred tree structures with the recipe generation procedure. Our proposed model can produce high-quality and coherent recipes, and achieve the state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark Recipe1M dataset.

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arXiv2020

Photon: A Robust Cross-Domain Text-to-SQL System

Natural language interfaces to databases (NLIDB) democratize end user access to relational data. Due to fundamental differences between natural language communication and programming, it is common for end users to issue questions that are ambiguous to the system or fall outside the semantic scope of its underlying query language. We present Photon, a robust, modular, cross-domain NLIDB that can flag natural language input to which a SQL mapping cannot be immediately determined. Photon consists of a strong neural semantic parser (63.2\% structure accuracy on the Spider dev benchmark), a human-in-the-loop question corrector, a SQL executor and a response generator. The question corrector is a discriminative neural sequence editor which detects confusion span(s) in the input question and suggests rephrasing until a translatable input is given by the user or a maximum number of iterations are conducted. Experiments on simulated data show that the proposed method effectively improves the robustness of text-to-SQL system against untranslatable user input. The live demo of our system is available at http://naturalsql.com.

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arXiv2020

Multi-label Thoracic Disease Image Classification with Cross-Attention Networks

Automated disease classification of radiology images has been emerging as a promising technique to support clinical diagnosis and treatment planning. Unlike generic image classification tasks, a real-world radiology image classification task is significantly more challenging as it is far more expensive to collect the training data where the labeled data is in nature multi-label; and more seriously samples from easy classes often dominate; training data is highly class-imbalanced problem exists in practice as well. To overcome these challenges, in this paper, we propose a novel scheme of Cross-Attention Networks (CAN) for automated thoracic disease classification from chest x-ray images, which can effectively excavate more meaningful representation from data to boost the performance through cross-attention by only image-level annotations. We also design a new loss function that beyond cross-entropy loss to help cross-attention process and is able to overcome the imbalance between classes and easy-dominated samples within each class. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results.

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arXiv2020

Adaptive Task Sampling for Meta-Learning

Meta-learning methods have been extensively studied and applied in computer vision, especially for few-shot classification tasks. The key idea of meta-learning for few-shot classification is to mimic the few-shot situations faced at test time by randomly sampling classes in meta-training data to construct few-shot tasks for episodic training. While a rich line of work focuses solely on how to extract meta-knowledge across tasks, we exploit the complementary problem on how to generate informative tasks. We argue that the randomly sampled tasks could be sub-optimal and uninformative (e.g., the task of classifying "dog" from "laptop" is often trivial) to the meta-learner. In this paper, we propose an adaptive task sampling method to improve the generalization performance. Unlike instance based sampling, task based sampling is much more challenging due to the implicit definition of the task in each episode. Therefore, we accordingly propose a greedy class-pair based sampling method, which selects difficult tasks according to class-pair potentials. We evaluate our adaptive task sampling method on two few-shot classification benchmarks, and it achieves consistent improvements across different feature backbones, meta-learning algorithms and datasets.

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arXiv2020

Video-Grounded Dialogues with Pretrained Generation Language Models

Pre-trained language models have shown remarkable success in improving various downstream NLP tasks due to their ability to capture dependencies in textual data and generate natural responses. In this paper, we leverage the power of pre-trained language models for improving video-grounded dialogue, which is very challenging and involves complex features of different dynamics: (1) Video features which can extend across both spatial and temporal dimensions; and (2) Dialogue features which involve semantic dependencies over multiple dialogue turns. We propose a framework by extending GPT-2 models to tackle these challenges by formulating video-grounded dialogue tasks as a sequence-to-sequence task, combining both visual and textual representation into a structured sequence, and fine-tuning a large pre-trained GPT-2 network. Our framework allows fine-tuning language models to capture dependencies across multiple modalities over different levels of information: spatio-temporal level in video and token-sentence level in dialogue context. We achieve promising improvement on the Audio-Visual Scene-Aware Dialogues (AVSD) benchmark from DSTC7, which supports a potential direction in this line of research.

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arXiv2020

Explicit Memory Tracker with Coarse-to-Fine Reasoning for Conversational Machine Reading

The goal of conversational machine reading is to answer user questions given a knowledge base text which may require asking clarification questions. Existing approaches are limited in their decision making due to struggles in extracting question-related rules and reasoning about them. In this paper, we present a new framework of conversational machine reading that comprises a novel Explicit Memory Tracker (EMT) to track whether conditions listed in the rule text have already been satisfied to make a decision. Moreover, our framework generates clarification questions by adopting a coarse-to-fine reasoning strategy, utilizing sentence-level entailment scores to weight token-level distributions. On the ShARC benchmark (blind, held-out) testset, EMT achieves new state-of-the-art results of 74.6% micro-averaged decision accuracy and 49.5 BLEU4. We also show that EMT is more interpretable by visualizing the entailment-oriented reasoning process as the conversation flows. Code and models are released at https://github.com/Yifan-Gao/explicit_memory_tracker.

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arXiv2020

Learning Video Object Segmentation from Unlabeled Videos

We propose a new method for video object segmentation (VOS) that addresses object pattern learning from unlabeled videos, unlike most existing methods which rely heavily on extensive annotated data. We introduce a unified unsupervised/weakly supervised learning framework, called MuG, that comprehensively captures intrinsic properties of VOS at multiple granularities. Our approach can help advance understanding of visual patterns in VOS and significantly reduce annotation burden. With a carefully-designed architecture and strong representation learning ability, our learned model can be applied to diverse VOS settings, including object-level zero-shot VOS, instance-level zero-shot VOS, and one-shot VOS. Experiments demonstrate promising performance in these settings, as well as the potential of MuG in leveraging unlabeled data to further improve the segmentation accuracy.

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arXiv2020

Non-Autoregressive Dialog State Tracking

Recent efforts in Dialogue State Tracking (DST) for task-oriented dialogues have progressed toward open-vocabulary or generation-based approaches where the models can generate slot value candidates from the dialogue history itself. These approaches have shown good performance gain, especially in complicated dialogue domains with dynamic slot values. However, they fall short in two aspects: (1) they do not allow models to explicitly learn signals across domains and slots to detect potential dependencies among (domain, slot) pairs; and (2) existing models follow auto-regressive approaches which incur high time cost when the dialogue evolves over multiple domains and multiple turns. In this paper, we propose a novel framework of Non-Autoregressive Dialog State Tracking (NADST) which can factor in potential dependencies among domains and slots to optimize the models towards better prediction of dialogue states as a complete set rather than separate slots. In particular, the non-autoregressive nature of our method not only enables decoding in parallel to significantly reduce the latency of DST for real-time dialogue response generation, but also detect dependencies among slots at token level in addition to slot and domain level. Our empirical results show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art joint accuracy across all domains on the MultiWOZ 2.1 corpus, and the latency of our model is an order of magnitude lower than the previous state of the art as the dialogue history extends over time.

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arXiv2020

Tree-structured Attention with Hierarchical Accumulation

Incorporating hierarchical structures like constituency trees has been shown to be effective for various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, it is evident that state-of-the-art (SOTA) sequence-based models like the Transformer struggle to encode such structures inherently. On the other hand, dedicated models like the Tree-LSTM, while explicitly modeling hierarchical structures, do not perform as efficiently as the Transformer. In this paper, we attempt to bridge this gap with "Hierarchical Accumulation" to encode parse tree structures into self-attention at constant time complexity. Our approach outperforms SOTA methods in four IWSLT translation tasks and the WMT'14 English-German translation task. It also yields improvements over Transformer and Tree-LSTM on three text classification tasks. We further demonstrate that using hierarchical priors can compensate for data shortage, and that our model prefers phrase-level attentions over token-level attentions.

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arXiv2020

DivideMix: Learning with Noisy Labels as Semi-supervised Learning

Deep neural networks are known to be annotation-hungry. Numerous efforts have been devoted to reducing the annotation cost when learning with deep networks. Two prominent directions include learning with noisy labels and semi-supervised learning by exploiting unlabeled data. In this work, we propose DivideMix, a novel framework for learning with noisy labels by leveraging semi-supervised learning techniques. In particular, DivideMix models the per-sample loss distribution with a mixture model to dynamically divide the training data into a labeled set with clean samples and an unlabeled set with noisy samples, and trains the model on both the labeled and unlabeled data in a semi-supervised manner. To avoid confirmation bias, we simultaneously train two diverged networks where each network uses the dataset division from the other network. During the semi-supervised training phase, we improve the MixMatch strategy by performing label co-refinement and label co-guessing on labeled and unlabeled samples, respectively. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate substantial improvements over state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/LiJunnan1992/DivideMix .

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arXiv2020

Deep Learning for Image Super-resolution: A Survey

Image Super-Resolution (SR) is an important class of image processing techniques to enhance the resolution of images and videos in computer vision. Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress of image super-resolution using deep learning techniques. This article aims to provide a comprehensive survey on recent advances of image super-resolution using deep learning approaches. In general, we can roughly group the existing studies of SR techniques into three major categories: supervised SR, unsupervised SR, and domain-specific SR. In addition, we also cover some other important issues, such as publicly available benchmark datasets and performance evaluation metrics. Finally, we conclude this survey by highlighting several future directions and open issues which should be further addressed by the community in the future.

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arXiv2019

Attribute-aware Pedestrian Detection in a Crowd

Pedestrian detection is an initial step to perform outdoor scene analysis, which plays an essential role in many real-world applications. Although having enjoyed the merits of deep learning frameworks from the generic object detectors, pedestrian detection is still a very challenging task due to heavy occlusion and highly crowded group. Generally, the conventional detectors are unable to differentiate individuals from each other effectively under such a dense environment. To tackle this critical problem, we propose an attribute-aware pedestrian detector to explicitly model people's semantic attributes in a high-level feature detection fashion. Besides the typical semantic features, center position, target's scale and offset, we introduce a pedestrian-oriented attribute feature to encode the high-level semantic differences among the crowd. Moreover, a novel attribute-feature-based Non-Maximum Suppression~(NMS) is proposed to distinguish the person from a highly overlapped group by adaptively rejecting the false-positive results in a very crowd settings. Furthermore, a novel ground truth target is designed to alleviate the difficulties caused by the attribute configuration and extremely class imbalance issues during training. Finally, we evaluate our proposed attribute-aware pedestrian detector on two benchmark datasets including CityPersons and CrowdHuman. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods at a large margin on pedestrian detection.

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arXiv2019

Detecting Cyberattacks in Industrial Control Systems Using Online Learning Algorithms

Industrial control systems are critical to the operation of industrial facilities, especially for critical infrastructures, such as refineries, power grids, and transportation systems. Similar to other information systems, a significant threat to industrial control systems is the attack from cyberspace---the offensive maneuvers launched by "anonymous" in the digital world that target computer-based assets with the goal of compromising a system's functions or probing for information. Owing to the importance of industrial control systems, and the possibly devastating consequences of being attacked, significant endeavors have been attempted to secure industrial control systems from cyberattacks. Among them are intrusion detection systems that serve as the first line of defense by monitoring and reporting potentially malicious activities. Classical machine-learning-based intrusion detection methods usually generate prediction models by learning modest-sized training samples all at once. Such approach is not always applicable to industrial control systems, as industrial control systems must process continuous control commands with limited computational resources in a nonstop way. To satisfy such requirements, we propose using online learning to learn prediction models from the controlling data stream. We introduce several state-of-the-art online learning algorithms categorically, and illustrate their efficacies on two typically used testbeds---power system and gas pipeline. Further, we explore a new cost-sensitive online learning algorithm to solve the class-imbalance problem that is pervasive in industrial intrusion detection systems. Our experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm can achieve an overall improvement in the detection rate of cyberattacks in industrial control systems.

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arXiv2019

FoodAI: Food Image Recognition via Deep Learning for Smart Food Logging

An important aspect of health monitoring is effective logging of food consumption. This can help management of diet-related diseases like obesity, diabetes, and even cardiovascular diseases. Moreover, food logging can help fitness enthusiasts, and people who wanting to achieve a target weight. However, food-logging is cumbersome, and requires not only taking additional effort to note down the food item consumed regularly, but also sufficient knowledge of the food item consumed (which is difficult due to the availability of a wide variety of cuisines). With increasing reliance on smart devices, we exploit the convenience offered through the use of smart phones and propose a smart-food logging system: FoodAI, which offers state-of-the-art deep-learning based image recognition capabilities. FoodAI has been developed in Singapore and is particularly focused on food items commonly consumed in Singapore. FoodAI models were trained on a corpus of 400,000 food images from 756 different classes. In this paper we present extensive analysis and insights into the development of this system. FoodAI has been deployed as an API service and is one of the components powering Healthy 365, a mobile app developed by Singapore's Heath Promotion Board. We have over 100 registered organizations (universities, companies, start-ups) subscribing to this service and actively receive several API requests a day. FoodAI has made food logging convenient, aiding smart consumption and a healthy lifestyle.

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arXiv2019

Malicious URL Detection using Machine Learning: A Survey

Malicious URL, a.k.a. malicious website, is a common and serious threat to cybersecurity. Malicious URLs host unsolicited content (spam, phishing, drive-by exploits, etc.) and lure unsuspecting users to become victims of scams (monetary loss, theft of private information, and malware installation), and cause losses of billions of dollars every year. It is imperative to detect and act on such threats in a timely manner. Traditionally, this detection is done mostly through the usage of blacklists. However, blacklists cannot be exhaustive, and lack the ability to detect newly generated malicious URLs. To improve the generality of malicious URL detectors, machine learning techniques have been explored with increasing attention in recent years. This article aims to provide a comprehensive survey and a structural understanding of Malicious URL Detection techniques using machine learning. We present the formal formulation of Malicious URL Detection as a machine learning task, and categorize and review the contributions of literature studies that addresses different dimensions of this problem (feature representation, algorithm design, etc.). Further, this article provides a timely and comprehensive survey for a range of different audiences, not only for machine learning researchers and engineers in academia, but also for professionals and practitioners in cybersecurity industry, to help them understand the state of the art and facilitate their own research and practical applications. We also discuss practical issues in system design, open research challenges, and point out some important directions for future research.

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arXiv2019

Recent Advances in Deep Learning for Object Detection

Object detection is a fundamental visual recognition problem in computer vision and has been widely studied in the past decades. Visual object detection aims to find objects of certain target classes with precise localization in a given image and assign each object instance a corresponding class label. Due to the tremendous successes of deep learning based image classification, object detection techniques using deep learning have been actively studied in recent years. In this paper, we give a comprehensive survey of recent advances in visual object detection with deep learning. By reviewing a large body of recent related work in literature, we systematically analyze the existing object detection frameworks and organize the survey into three major parts: (i) detection components, (ii) learning strategies, and (iii) applications & benchmarks. In the survey, we cover a variety of factors affecting the detection performance in detail, such as detector architectures, feature learning, proposal generation, sampling strategies, etc. Finally, we discuss several future directions to facilitate and spur future research for visual object detection with deep learning. Keywords: Object Detection, Deep Learning, Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

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