Models, code, and papers for "Changshui Zhang":

##### Relaxed Sparse Eigenvalue Conditions for Sparse Estimation via Non-convex Regularized Regression

Feb 12, 2014
Zheng Pan, Changshui Zhang

Non-convex regularizers usually improve the performance of sparse estimation in practice. To prove this fact, we study the conditions of sparse estimations for the sharp concave regularizers which are a general family of non-convex regularizers including many existing regularizers. For the global solutions of the regularized regression, our sparse eigenvalue based conditions are weaker than that of L1-regularization for parameter estimation and sparseness estimation. For the approximate global and approximate stationary (AGAS) solutions, almost the same conditions are also enough. We show that the desired AGAS solutions can be obtained by coordinate descent (CD) based methods. Finally, we perform some experiments to show the performance of CD methods on giving AGAS solutions and the degree of weakness of the estimation conditions required by the sharp concave regularizers.

##### Traffic Flow Forecasting Using a Spatio-Temporal Bayesian Network Predictor

Dec 24, 2017
Shiliang Sun, Changshui Zhang, Yi Zhang

A novel predictor for traffic flow forecasting, namely spatio-temporal Bayesian network predictor, is proposed. Unlike existing methods, our approach incorporates all the spatial and temporal information available in a transportation network to carry our traffic flow forecasting of the current site. The Pearson correlation coefficient is adopted to rank the input variables (traffic flows) for prediction, and the best-first strategy is employed to select a subset as the cause nodes of a Bayesian network. Given the derived cause nodes and the corresponding effect node in the spatio-temporal Bayesian network, a Gaussian Mixture Model is applied to describe the statistical relationship between the input and output. Finally, traffic flow forecasting is performed under the criterion of Minimum Mean Square Error (M.M.S.E.). Experimental results with the urban vehicular flow data of Beijing demonstrate the effectiveness of our presented spatio-temporal Bayesian network predictor.

* The 15th International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN), 2005, pp. 273-278

Nov 14, 2019
Ziang Yan, Yiwen Guo, Changshui Zhang

The tremendous recent success of deep neural networks (DNNs) has sparked a surge of interest in understanding their predictive ability. Unlike the human visual system which is able to generalize robustly and learn with little supervision, DNNs normally require a massive amount of data to learn new concepts. In addition, research works also show that DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial examples-maliciously generated images which seem perceptually similar to the natural ones but are actually formed to fool learning models, which means the models have problem generalizing to unseen data with certain type of distortions. In this paper, we analyze the generalization ability of DNNs comprehensively and attempt to improve it from a geometric point of view. We propose adversarial margin maximization (AMM), a learning-based regularization which exploits an adversarial perturbation as a proxy. It encourages a large margin in the input space, just like the support vector machines. With a differentiable formulation of the perturbation, we train the regularized DNNs simply through back-propagation in an end-to-end manner. Experimental results on various datasets (including MNIST, CIFAR-10/100, SVHN and ImageNet) and different DNN architectures demonstrate the superiority of our method over previous state-of-the-arts. Code and models for reproducing our results will be made publicly available.

* 11 pages + 1 page appendix, accepted by T-PAMI
##### Self-reinforcing Unsupervised Matching

Aug 23, 2019
Jiang Lu, Lei Li, Changshui Zhang

Remarkable gains in deep learning usually rely on tremendous supervised data. Ensuring the modality diversity for one object in training set is critical for the generalization of cutting-edge deep models, but it burdens human with heavy manual labor on data collection and annotation. In addition, some rare or unexpected modalities are new for the current model, causing reduced performance under such emerging modalities. Inspired by the achievements in speech recognition, psychology and behavioristics, we present a practical solution, self-reinforcing unsupervised matching (SUM), to annotate the images with 2D structure-preserving property in an emerging modality by cross-modality matching. This approach requires no any supervision in emerging modality and only one template in seen modality, providing a possible route towards continual learning.

* 15 pages
##### Subspace Attack: Exploiting Promising Subspaces for Query-Efficient Black-box Attacks

Jun 11, 2019
Ziang Yan, Yiwen Guo, Changshui Zhang

Unlike the white-box counterparts that are widely studied and readily accessible, adversarial examples in black-box settings are generally more Herculean on account of the difficulty of estimating gradients. Many methods achieve the task by issuing numerous queries to target classification systems, which makes the whole procedure costly and suspicious to the systems. In this paper, we aim at reducing the query complexity of black-box attacks in this category. We propose to exploit gradients of a few reference models which arguably span some promising search subspaces. Experimental results show that, in comparison with the state-of-the-arts, our method can gain up to 2x and 4x reductions in the requisite mean and medium numbers of queries with much lower failure rates even if the reference models are trained on a small and inadequate dataset disjoint to the one for training the victim model. Code and models for reproducing our results will be made publicly available.

* 10 pages + 3 pages supplementary material
##### Deep Defense: Training DNNs with Improved Adversarial Robustness

May 30, 2018
Ziang Yan, Yiwen Guo, Changshui Zhang

Despite the efficacy on a variety of computer vision tasks, deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, limiting their applications in security-critical systems. Recent works have shown the possibility of generating imperceptibly perturbed image inputs (a.k.a., adversarial examples) to fool well-trained DNN classifiers into making arbitrary predictions. To address this problem, we propose a training recipe named "deep defense". Our core idea is to integrate an adversarial perturbation-based regularizer into the classification objective, such that the obtained models learn to resist potential attacks, directly and precisely. The whole optimization problem is solved just like training a recursive network. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms training with adversarial/Parseval regularizations by large margins on various datasets (including MNIST, CIFAR-10 and ImageNet) and different DNN architectures. Code and models for reproducing our results will be made publicly available.

* 10 pages + 6 pages supplementary material
##### A DNN Framework For Text Image Rectification From Planar Transformations

Nov 14, 2016
Chengzhe Yan, Jie Hu, Changshui Zhang

In this paper, a novel neural network architecture is proposed attempting to rectify text images with mild assumptions. A new dataset of text images is collected to verify our model and open to public. We explored the capability of deep neural network in learning geometric transformation and found the model could segment the text image without explicit supervised segmentation information. Experiments show the architecture proposed can restore planar transformations with wonderful robustness and effectiveness.

* 9 pages, 10 figures
##### Audio Classical Composer Identification by Deep Neural Network

Mar 16, 2016
Zhen Hu, Kun Fu, Changshui Zhang

Audio Classical Composer Identification (ACC) is an important problem in Music Information Retrieval (MIR) which aims at identifying the composer for audio classical music clips. The famous annual competition, Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange (MIREX), also takes it as one of the four training&testing tasks. We built a hybrid model based on Deep Belief Network (DBN) and Stacked Denoising Autoencoder (SDA) to identify the composer from audio signal. As a matter of copyright, sponsors of MIREX cannot publish their data set. We built a comparable data set to test our model. We got an accuracy of 76.26% in our data set which is better than some pure models and shallow models. We think our method is promising even though we test it in a different data set, since our data set is comparable to that in MIREX by size. We also found that samples from different classes become farther away from each other when transformed by more layers in our model.

* I will update it

Oct 22, 2012
Pinghua Gong, Jieping Ye, Changshui Zhang

Multi-task sparse feature learning aims to improve the generalization performance by exploiting the shared features among tasks. It has been successfully applied to many applications including computer vision and biomedical informatics. Most of the existing multi-task sparse feature learning algorithms are formulated as a convex sparse regularization problem, which is usually suboptimal, due to its looseness for approximating an $\ell_0$-type regularizer. In this paper, we propose a non-convex formulation for multi-task sparse feature learning based on a novel non-convex regularizer. To solve the non-convex optimization problem, we propose a Multi-Stage Multi-Task Feature Learning (MSMTFL) algorithm; we also provide intuitive interpretations, detailed convergence and reproducibility analysis for the proposed algorithm. Moreover, we present a detailed theoretical analysis showing that MSMTFL achieves a better parameter estimation error bound than the convex formulation. Empirical studies on both synthetic and real-world data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of MSMTFL in comparison with the state of the art multi-task sparse feature learning algorithms.

* The short version appears in NIPS 2012
##### Knowledge Distillation from Few Samples

Dec 05, 2018
Tianhong Li, Jianguo Li, Zhuang Liu, Changshui Zhang

Current knowledge distillation methods require full training data to distill knowledge from a large "teacher" network to a compact "student" network by matching certain statistics between "teacher" and "student" such as softmax outputs and feature responses. This is not only time-consuming but also inconsistent with human cognition in which children can learn knowledge from adults with few examples. This paper proposes a novel and simple method for knowledge distillation from few samples. Taking the assumption that both "teacher" and "student" have the same feature map sizes at each corresponding block, we add a 1x1 conv-layer at the end of each block in the student-net, and align the block-level outputs between "teacher" and "student" by estimating the parameters of the added layer with limited samples. We prove that the added layer can be absorbed/merged into the previous conv-layer to formulate a new conv-layer with the same size of parameters and computation cost as the previous one. Experiments verify that the proposed method is very efficient and effective to distill knowledge from teacher-net to student-net constructing in different ways on various datasets.

##### Sparse DNNs with Improved Adversarial Robustness

Oct 23, 2018
Yiwen Guo, Chao Zhang, Changshui Zhang, Yurong Chen

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are computationally/memory-intensive and vulnerable to adversarial attacks, making them prohibitive in some real-world applications. By converting dense models into sparse ones, pruning appears to be a promising solution to reducing the computation/memory cost. This paper studies classification models, especially DNN-based ones, to demonstrate that there exists intrinsic relationships between their sparsity and adversarial robustness. Our analyses reveal, both theoretically and empirically, that nonlinear DNN-based classifiers behave differently under $l_2$ attacks from some linear ones. We further demonstrate that an appropriately higher model sparsity implies better robustness of nonlinear DNNs, whereas over-sparsified models can be more difficult to resist adversarial examples.

* To appear in NIPS2018
##### RL-Duet: Online Music Accompaniment Generation Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Feb 08, 2020
Nan Jiang, Sheng Jin, Zhiyao Duan, Changshui Zhang

This paper presents a deep reinforcement learning algorithm for online accompaniment generation, with potential for real-time interactive human-machine duet improvisation. Different from offline music generation and harmonization, online music accompaniment requires the algorithm to respond to human input and generate the machine counterpart in a sequential order. We cast this as a reinforcement learning problem, where the generation agent learns a policy to generate a musical note (action) based on previously generated context (state). The key of this algorithm is the well-functioning reward model. Instead of defining it using music composition rules, we learn this model from monophonic and polyphonic training data. This model considers the compatibility of the machine-generated note with both the machine-generated context and the human-generated context. Experiments show that this algorithm is able to respond to the human part and generate a melodic, harmonic and diverse machine part. Subjective evaluations on preferences show that the proposed algorithm generates music pieces of higher quality than the baseline method.

##### What You See is What You Get: Visual Pronoun Coreference Resolution in Dialogues

Sep 01, 2019
Xintong Yu, Hongming Zhang, Yangqiu Song, Yan Song, Changshui Zhang

Grounding a pronoun to a visual object it refers to requires complex reasoning from various information sources, especially in conversational scenarios. For example, when people in a conversation talk about something all speakers can see, they often directly use pronouns (e.g., it) to refer to it without previous introduction. This fact brings a huge challenge for modern natural language understanding systems, particularly conventional context-based pronoun coreference models. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we formally define the task of visual-aware pronoun coreference resolution (PCR) and introduce VisPro, a large-scale dialogue PCR dataset, to investigate whether and how the visual information can help resolve pronouns in dialogues. We then propose a novel visual-aware PCR model, VisCoref, for this task and conduct comprehensive experiments and case studies on our dataset. Results demonstrate the importance of the visual information in this PCR case and show the effectiveness of the proposed model.

* 10 pages, 7 figures. Accepted by EMNLP 2019
##### Deep Likelihood Network for Image Restoration with Multiple Degradations

Apr 19, 2019
Yiwen Guo, Wangmeng Zuo, Changshui Zhang, Yurong Chen

Convolutional neural networks have been proven very effective in a variety of image restoration tasks. Most state-of-the-art solutions, however, are trained using images with a single particular degradation level, and can deteriorate drastically when being applied to some other degradation settings. In this paper, we propose a novel method dubbed deep likelihood network (DL-Net), aiming at generalizing off-the-shelf image restoration networks to succeed over a spectrum of degradation settings while keeping their original learning objectives and core architectures. In particular, we slightly modify the original restoration networks by appending a simple yet effective recursive module, which is derived from a fidelity term for disentangling the effect of degradations. Extensive experimental results on image inpainting, interpolation and super-resolution demonstrate the effectiveness of our DL-Net.

* 10 pages, 4 figures
##### Zero-Shot Learning by Generating Pseudo Feature Representations

Mar 19, 2017
Jiang Lu, Jin Li, Ziang Yan, Changshui Zhang

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) is a challenging task aiming at recognizing novel classes without any training instances. In this paper we present a simple but high-performance ZSL approach by generating pseudo feature representations (GPFR). Given the dataset of seen classes and side information of unseen classes (e.g. attributes), we synthesize feature-level pseudo representations for novel concepts, which allows us access to the formulation of unseen class predictor. Firstly we design a Joint Attribute Feature Extractor (JAFE) to acquire understandings about attributes, then construct a cognitive repository of attributes filtered by confidence margins, and finally generate pseudo feature representations using a probability based sampling strategy to facilitate subsequent training process of class predictor. We demonstrate the effectiveness in ZSL settings and the extensibility in supervised recognition scenario of our method on a synthetic colored MNIST dataset (C-MNIST). For several popular ZSL benchmark datasets, our approach also shows compelling results on zero-shot recognition task, especially leading to tremendous improvement to state-of-the-art mAP on zero-shot retrieval task.

* Pattern Recognition, Volume 80, August 2018, Pages 129-142
* 9 pages
##### Efficient Superimposition Recovering Algorithm

Nov 19, 2012
Han Li, Kun Gai, Pinghua Gong, Changshui Zhang

In this article, we address the issue of recovering latent transparent layers from superimposition images. Here, we assume we have the estimated transformations and extracted gradients of latent layers. To rapidly recover high-quality image layers, we propose an Efficient Superimposition Recovering Algorithm (ESRA) by extending the framework of accelerated gradient method. In addition, a key building block (in each iteration) in our proposed method is the proximal operator calculating. Here we propose to employ a dual approach and present our Parallel Algorithm with Constrained Total Variation (PACTV) method. Our recovering method not only reconstructs high-quality layers without color-bias problem, but also theoretically guarantees good convergence performance.

##### Optimizing Recurrent Neural Networks Architectures under Time Constraints

Feb 21, 2018
Junqi Jin, Ziang Yan, Kun Fu, Nan Jiang, Changshui Zhang

Recurrent neural network (RNN)'s architecture is a key factor influencing its performance. We propose algorithms to optimize hidden sizes under running time constraint. We convert the discrete optimization into a subset selection problem. By novel transformations, the objective function becomes submodular and constraint becomes supermodular. A greedy algorithm with bounds is suggested to solve the transformed problem. And we show how transformations influence the bounds. To speed up optimization, surrogate functions are proposed which balance exploration and exploitation. Experiments show that our algorithms can find more accurate models or faster models than manually tuned state-of-the-art and random search. We also compare popular RNN architectures using our algorithms.

* Withdrawn due to incompleteness and some overlaps with existing literatures, I will resubmit adding further results
##### Neural Network Architecture Optimization through Submodularity and Supermodularity

Feb 21, 2018
Junqi Jin, Ziang Yan, Kun Fu, Nan Jiang, Changshui Zhang

Deep learning models' architectures, including depth and width, are key factors influencing models' performance, such as test accuracy and computation time. This paper solves two problems: given computation time budget, choose an architecture to maximize accuracy, and given accuracy requirement, choose an architecture to minimize computation time. We convert this architecture optimization into a subset selection problem. With accuracy's submodularity and computation time's supermodularity, we propose efficient greedy optimization algorithms. The experiments demonstrate our algorithm's ability to find more accurate models or faster models. By analyzing architecture evolution with growing time budget, we discuss relationships among accuracy, time and architecture, and give suggestions on neural network architecture design.

* Withdrawn due to incompleteness and some overlaps with existing literatures, I will resubmit adding further results
##### An In-field Automatic Wheat Disease Diagnosis System

Sep 26, 2017
Jiang Lu, Jie Hu, Guannan Zhao, Fenghua Mei, Changshui Zhang

Crop diseases are responsible for the major production reduction and economic losses in agricultural industry world- wide. Monitoring for health status of crops is critical to control the spread of diseases and implement effective management. This paper presents an in-field automatic wheat disease diagnosis system based on a weakly super- vised deep learning framework, i.e. deep multiple instance learning, which achieves an integration of identification for wheat diseases and localization for disease areas with only image-level annotation for training images in wild conditions. Furthermore, a new in-field image dataset for wheat disease, Wheat Disease Database 2017 (WDD2017), is collected to verify the effectiveness of our system. Under two different architectures, i.e. VGG-FCN-VD16 and VGG-FCN-S, our system achieves the mean recognition accuracies of 97.95% and 95.12% respectively over 5-fold cross-validation on WDD2017, exceeding the results of 93.27% and 73.00% by two conventional CNN frameworks, i.e. VGG-CNN-VD16 and VGG-CNN-S. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system outperforms conventional CNN architectures on recognition accuracy under the same amount of parameters, meanwhile main- taining accurate localization for corresponding disease areas. Moreover, the proposed system has been packed into a real-time mobile app to provide support for agricultural disease diagnosis.

* Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, 142PA (2017): 369-379
* 15 pages
##### Weakly- and Semi-Supervised Object Detection with Expectation-Maximization Algorithm

Feb 28, 2017
Ziang Yan, Jian Liang, Weishen Pan, Jin Li, Changshui Zhang

Object detection when provided image-level labels instead of instance-level labels (i.e., bounding boxes) during training is an important problem in computer vision, since large scale image datasets with instance-level labels are extremely costly to obtain. In this paper, we address this challenging problem by developing an Expectation-Maximization (EM) based object detection method using deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Our method is applicable to both the weakly-supervised and semi-supervised settings. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC 2007 benchmark show that (1) in the weakly supervised setting, our method provides significant detection performance improvement over current state-of-the-art methods, (2) having access to a small number of strongly (instance-level) annotated images, our method can almost match the performace of the fully supervised Fast RCNN. We share our source code at https://github.com/ZiangYan/EM-WSD.

* 9 pages