Research papers and code for "Xiao Chen":
A propagation matting method based on the Local Sampling and KNN Classification with adaptive feature space
May 03, 2016
Xiao Chen, Fazhi He

Closed Form is a propagation based matting algorithm, functioning well on images with good propagation . The deficiency of the Closed Form method is that for complex areas with poor image propagation , such as hole areas or areas of long and narrow structures. The right results are usually hard to get. On these areas, if certain flags are provided, it can improve the effects of matting. In this paper, we design a matting algorithm by local sampling and the KNN classifier propagation based matting algorithm. First of all, build the corresponding features space according to the different components of image colors to reduce the influence of overlapping between the foreground and background, and to improve the classification accuracy of KNN classifier. Second, adaptively use local sampling or using local KNN classifier for processing based on the pros and cons of the sample performance of unknown image areas. Finally, based on different treatment methods for the unknown areas, we will use different weight for augmenting constraints to make the treatment more effective. In this paper, by combining qualitative observation and quantitative analysis, we will make evaluation of the experimental results through online standard set of evaluation tests. It shows that on images with good propagation , this method is as effective as the Closed Form method, while on images in complex regions, it can perform even better than Closed Form.

Click to Read Paper and Get Code
Trading the Twitter Sentiment with Reinforcement Learning
Jan 07, 2018
Catherine Xiao, Wanfeng Chen

This paper is to explore the possibility to use alternative data and artificial intelligence techniques to trade stocks. The efficacy of the daily Twitter sentiment on predicting the stock return is examined using machine learning methods. Reinforcement learning(Q-learning) is applied to generate the optimal trading policy based on the sentiment signal. The predicting power of the sentiment signal is more significant if the stock price is driven by the expectation of the company growth and when the company has a major event that draws the public attention. The optimal trading strategy based on reinforcement learning outperforms the trading strategy based on the machine learning prediction.

* 5 pages
Click to Read Paper and Get Code
A Near-Optimal Dynamic Learning Algorithm for Online Matching Problems with Concave Returns
Jun 06, 2015
Xiao Alison Chen, Zizhuo Wang

We consider an online matching problem with concave returns. This problem is a significant generalization of the Adwords allocation problem and has vast applications in online advertising. In this problem, a sequence of items arrive sequentially and each has to be allocated to one of the bidders, who bid a certain value for each item. At each time, the decision maker has to allocate the current item to one of the bidders without knowing the future bids and the objective is to maximize the sum of some concave functions of each bidder's aggregate value. In this work, we propose an algorithm that achieves near-optimal performance for this problem when the bids arrive in a random order and the input data satisfies certain conditions. The key idea of our algorithm is to learn the input data pattern dynamically: we solve a sequence of carefully chosen partial allocation problems and use their optimal solutions to assist with the future decision. Our analysis belongs to the primal-dual paradigm, however, the absence of linearity of the objective function and the dynamic feature of the algorithm makes our analysis quite unique.

Click to Read Paper and Get Code
Understanding Video Content: Efficient Hero Detection and Recognition for the Game "Honor of Kings"
Jul 18, 2019
Wentao Yao, Zixun Sun, Xiao Chen

In order to understand content and automatically extract labels for videos of the game "Honor of Kings", it is necessary to detect and recognize characters (called "hero") together with their camps in the game video. In this paper, we propose an efficient two-stage algorithm to detect and recognize heros in game videos. First, we detect all heros in a video frame based on blood bar template-matching method, and classify them according to their camps (self/ friend/ enemy). Then we recognize the name of each hero using one or more deep convolution neural networks. Our method needs almost no work for labelling training and testing samples in the recognition stage. Experiments show its efficiency and accuracy in the task of hero detection and recognition in game videos.

Click to Read Paper and Get Code
End-to-end Segmentation with Recurrent Attention Neural Network
Dec 05, 2018
Qiaoying Huang, Xiao Chen, Mariappan Nadar

Image segmentation quality depends heavily on the quality of the image. For many medical imaging modalities, image reconstruction is required to convert acquired raw data to images before any analysis. However, imperfect reconstruction with artifacts and loss of information is almost inevitable, which compromises the final performance of segmentation. In this study, we present a novel end-to-end deep learning framework that performs magnetic resonance brain image segmentation directly from the raw data. The end-to-end framework consists a unique task-driven attention module that recurrently utilizes intermediate segmentation result to facilitate image-domain feature extraction from the raw data for segmentation, thus closely bridging the reconstruction and the segmentation tasks. In addition, we introduce a novel workflow to generate labeled training data for segmentation by exploiting imaging modality simulators and digital phantoms. Extensive experiment results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

* 14 pages;
Click to Read Paper and Get Code
Deep Inception Generative Network for Cognitive Image Inpainting
Dec 01, 2018
Qingguo Xiao, Guangyao Li, Qiaochuan Chen

Recent advances in deep learning have shown exciting promise in filling large holes and lead to another orientation for image inpainting. However, existing learning-based methods often create artifacts and fallacious textures because of insufficient cognition understanding. Previous generative networks are limited with single receptive type and give up pooling in consideration of detail sharpness. Human cognition is constant regardless of the target attribute. As multiple receptive fields improve the ability of abstract image characterization and pooling can keep feature invariant, specifically, deep inception learning is adopted to promote high-level feature representation and enhance model learning capacity for local patches. Moreover, approaches for generating diverse mask images are introduced and a random mask dataset is created. We benchmark our methods on ImageNet, Places2 dataset, and CelebA-HQ. Experiments for regular, irregular, and custom regions completion are all performed and free-style image inpainting is also presented. Quantitative comparisons with previous state-of-the-art methods show that ours obtain much more natural image completions.

Click to Read Paper and Get Code
Understanding Compressive Adversarial Privacy
Oct 02, 2018
Xiao Chen, Peter Kairouz, Ram Rajagopal

Designing a data sharing mechanism without sacrificing too much privacy can be considered as a game between data holders and malicious attackers. This paper describes a compressive adversarial privacy framework that captures the trade-off between the data privacy and utility. We characterize the optimal data releasing mechanism through convex optimization when assuming that both the data holder and attacker can only modify the data using linear transformations. We then build a more realistic data releasing mechanism that can rely on a nonlinear compression model while the attacker uses a neural network. We demonstrate in a series of empirical applications that this framework, consisting of compressive adversarial privacy, can preserve sensitive information.

Click to Read Paper and Get Code
Constrained Generation of Semantically Valid Graphs via Regularizing Variational Autoencoders
Sep 19, 2018
Tengfei Ma, Jie Chen, Cao Xiao

Deep generative models have achieved remarkable success in various data domains, including images, time series, and natural languages. There remain, however, substantial challenges for combinatorial structures, including graphs. One of the key challenges lies in the difficulty of ensuring semantic validity in context. For examples, in molecular graphs, the number of bonding-electron pairs must not exceed the valence of an atom; whereas in protein interaction networks, two proteins may be connected only when they belong to the same or correlated gene ontology terms. These constraints are not easy to be incorporated into a generative model. In this work, we propose a regularization framework for variational autoencoders as a step toward semantic validity. We focus on the matrix representation of graphs and formulate penalty terms that regularize the output distribution of the decoder to encourage the satisfaction of validity constraints. Experimental results confirm a much higher likelihood of sampling valid graphs in our approach, compared with others reported in the literature.

* NIPS 2018
Click to Read Paper and Get Code
Multi-Perspective Neural Architecture for Recommendation System
Jul 12, 2018
Han Xiao, Yidong Chen, Xiaodong Shi

Currently, there starts a research trend to leverage neural architecture for recommendation systems. Though several deep recommender models are proposed, most methods are too simple to characterize users' complex preference. In this paper, for a fine-grain analysis, users' ratings are explained from multiple perspectives, based on which, we propose our neural architecture. Specifically, our model employs several sequential stages to encode the user and item into hidden representations. In one stage, the user and item are represented from multiple perspectives and in each perspective, the representations of user and item put attentions to each other. Last, we metric the output representations of final stage to approach the users' rating. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves substantial improvements against baselines.

Click to Read Paper and Get Code
Component SPD Matrices: A lower-dimensional discriminative data descriptor for image set classification
Jun 16, 2018
Kai-Xuan Chen, Xiao-Jun Wu

In the domain of pattern recognition, using the SPD (Symmetric Positive Definite) matrices to represent data and taking the metrics of resulting Riemannian manifold into account have been widely used for the task of image set classification. In this paper, we propose a new data representation framework for image sets named CSPD (Component Symmetric Positive Definite). Firstly, we obtain sub-image sets by dividing the image set into square blocks with the same size, and use traditional SPD model to describe them. Then, we use the results of the Riemannian kernel on SPD matrices as similarities of corresponding sub-image sets. Finally, the CSPD matrix appears in the form of the kernel matrix for all the sub-image sets, and CSPDi,j denotes the similarity between i-th sub-image set and j-th sub-image set. Here, the Riemannian kernel is shown to satisfy the Mercer's theorem, so our proposed CSPD matrix is symmetric and positive definite and also lies on a Riemannian manifold. On three benchmark datasets, experimental results show that CSPD is a lower-dimensional and more discriminative data descriptor for the task of image set classification.

* 8 pages,5 figures, Computational Visual Media, 2018
Click to Read Paper and Get Code
Hungarian Layer: Logics Empowered Neural Architecture
May 17, 2018
Han Xiao, Yidong Chen, Xiaodong Shi

Neural architecture is a purely numeric framework, which fits the data as a continuous function. However, lacking of logic flow (e.g. \textit{if, for, while}), traditional algorithms (e.g. \textit{Hungarian algorithm, A$^*$ searching, decision tress algorithm}) could not be embedded into this paradigm, which limits the theories and applications. In this paper, we reform the calculus graph as a dynamic process, which is guided by logic flow. Within our novel methodology, traditional algorithms could empower numerical neural network. Specifically, regarding the subject of sentence matching, we reformulate this issue as the form of task-assignment, which is solved by Hungarian algorithm. First, our model applies BiLSTM to parse the sentences. Then Hungarian layer aligns the matching positions. Last, we transform the matching results for soft-max regression by another BiLSTM. Extensive experiments show that our model outperforms other state-of-the-art baselines substantially.

* This is the draft submitting to ICML 2018. You could expect the final version, which is more perfect
Click to Read Paper and Get Code
Towards Training Probabilistic Topic Models on Neuromorphic Multi-chip Systems
Apr 10, 2018
Zihao Xiao, Jianfei Chen, Jun Zhu

Probabilistic topic models are popular unsupervised learning methods, including probabilistic latent semantic indexing (pLSI) and latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). By now, their training is implemented on general purpose computers (GPCs), which are flexible in programming but energy-consuming. Towards low-energy implementations, this paper investigates their training on an emerging hardware technology called the neuromorphic multi-chip systems (NMSs). NMSs are very effective for a family of algorithms called spiking neural networks (SNNs). We present three SNNs to train topic models. The first SNN is a batch algorithm combining the conventional collapsed Gibbs sampling (CGS) algorithm and an inference SNN to train LDA. The other two SNNs are online algorithms targeting at both energy- and storage-limited environments. The two online algorithms are equivalent with training LDA by using maximum-a-posterior estimation and maximizing the semi-collapsed likelihood, respectively. They use novel, tailored ordinary differential equations for stochastic optimization. We simulate the new algorithms and show that they are comparable with the GPC algorithms, while being suitable for NMS implementation. We also propose an extension to train pLSI and a method to prune the network to obey the limited fan-in of some NMSs.

* Accepted by AAAI-18, oral
Click to Read Paper and Get Code
Tracking Multiple Moving Objects Using Unscented Kalman Filtering Techniques
Feb 05, 2018
Xi Chen, Xiao Wang, Jianhua Xuan

It is an important task to reliably detect and track multiple moving objects for video surveillance and monitoring. However, when occlusion occurs in nonlinear motion scenarios, many existing methods often fail to continuously track multiple moving objects of interest. In this paper we propose an effective approach for detection and tracking of multiple moving objects with occlusion. Moving targets are initially detected using a simple yet efficient block matching technique, providing rough location information for multiple object tracking. More accurate location information is then estimated for each moving object by a nonlinear tracking algorithm. Considering the ambiguity caused by the occlusion among multiple moving objects, we apply an unscented Kalman filtering (UKF) technique for reliable object detection and tracking. Different from conventional Kalman filtering (KF), which cannot achieve the optimal estimation in nonlinear tracking scenarios, UKF can be used to track both linear and nonlinear motions due to the unscented transform. Further, it estimates the velocity information for each object to assist to the object detection algorithm, effectively delineating multiple moving objects of occlusion. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can correctly detect and track multiple moving objects with nonlinear motion patterns and occlusions.

* 2012 International Conference on Engineering and Applied Science (ICEAS 2012)
Click to Read Paper and Get Code
FastGCN: Fast Learning with Graph Convolutional Networks via Importance Sampling
Jan 30, 2018
Jie Chen, Tengfei Ma, Cao Xiao

The graph convolutional networks (GCN) recently proposed by Kipf and Welling are an effective graph model for semi-supervised learning. This model, however, was originally designed to be learned with the presence of both training and test data. Moreover, the recursive neighborhood expansion across layers poses time and memory challenges for training with large, dense graphs. To relax the requirement of simultaneous availability of test data, we interpret graph convolutions as integral transforms of embedding functions under probability measures. Such an interpretation allows for the use of Monte Carlo approaches to consistently estimate the integrals, which in turn leads to a batched training scheme as we propose in this work---FastGCN. Enhanced with importance sampling, FastGCN not only is efficient for training but also generalizes well for inference. We show a comprehensive set of experiments to demonstrate its effectiveness compared with GCN and related models. In particular, training is orders of magnitude more efficient while predictions remain comparably accurate.

* ICLR 2018
Click to Read Paper and Get Code
Texture Object Segmentation Based on Affine Invariant Texture Detection
Dec 23, 2017
Jianwei Zhang, Xu Chen, Xuezhong Xiao

To solve the issue of segmenting rich texture images, a novel detection methods based on the affine invariable principle is proposed. Considering the similarity between the texture areas, we first take the affine transform to get numerous shapes, and utilize the KLT algorithm to verify the similarity. The transforms include rotation, proportional transformation and perspective deformation to cope with a variety of situations. Then we propose an improved LBP method combining canny edge detection to handle the boundary in the segmentation process. Moreover, human-computer interaction of this method which helps splitting the matched texture area from the original images is user-friendly.

* 6pages, 15 figures
Click to Read Paper and Get Code
An Approximate Bayesian Long Short-Term Memory Algorithm for Outlier Detection
Dec 23, 2017
Chao Chen, Xiao Lin, Gabriel Terejanu

Long Short-Term Memory networks trained with gradient descent and back-propagation have received great success in various applications. However, point estimation of the weights of the networks is prone to over-fitting problems and lacks important uncertainty information associated with the estimation. However, exact Bayesian neural network methods are intractable and non-applicable for real-world applications. In this study, we propose an approximate estimation of the weights uncertainty using Ensemble Kalman Filter, which is easily scalable to a large number of weights. Furthermore, we optimize the covariance of the noise distribution in the ensemble update step using maximum likelihood estimation. To assess the proposed algorithm, we apply it to outlier detection in five real-world events retrieved from the Twitter platform.

Click to Read Paper and Get Code
Transition Subspace Learning based Least Squares Regression for Image Classification
May 14, 2019
Zhe Chen, Xiao-Jun Wu, Josef Kittler

Only learning one projection matrix from original samples to the corresponding binary labels is too strict and will consequentlly lose some intrinsic geometric structures of data. In this paper, we propose a novel transition subspace learning based least squares regression (TSL-LSR) model for multicategory image classification. The main idea of TSL-LSR is to learn a transition subspace between the original samples and binary labels to alleviate the problem of overfitting caused by strict projection learning. Moreover, in order to reflect the underlying low-rank structure of transition matrix and learn more discriminative projection matrix, a low-rank constraint is added to the transition subspace. Experimental results on several image datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed TSL-LSR model in comparison with state-of-the-art algorithms

Click to Read Paper and Get Code
Comparative evaluation of 2D feature correspondence selection algorithms
Apr 30, 2019
Chen Zhao, Jiaqi Yang, Yang Xiao, Zhiguo Cao

Correspondence selection aiming at seeking correct feature correspondences from raw feature matches is pivotal for a number of feature-matching-based tasks. Various 2D (image) correspondence selection algorithms have been presented with decades of progress. Unfortunately, the lack of an in-depth evaluation makes it difficult for developers to choose a proper algorithm given a specific application. This paper fills this gap by evaluating eight 2D correspondence selection algorithms ranging from classical methods to the most recent ones on four standard datasets. The diversity of experimental datasets brings various nuisances including zoom, rotation, blur, viewpoint change, JPEG compression, light change, different rendering styles and multi-structures for comprehensive test. To further create different distributions of initial matches, a set of combinations of detector and descriptor is also taken into consideration. We measure the quality of a correspondence selection algorithm from four perspectives, i.e., precision, recall, F-measure and efficiency. According to evaluation results, the current advantages and limitations of all considered algorithms are aggregately summarized which could be treated as a "user guide" for the following developers.

Click to Read Paper and Get Code
Low-Rank Discriminative Least Squares Regression for Image Classification
Apr 16, 2019
Zhe Chen, Xiao-Jun Wu, Josef Kittler

Latest least squares regression (LSR) methods mainly try to learn slack regression targets to replace strict zero-one labels. However, the difference of intra-class targets can also be highlighted when enlarging the distance between different classes, and roughly persuing relaxed targets may lead to the problem of overfitting. To solve above problems, we propose a low-rank discriminative least squares regression model (LRDLSR) for multi-class image classification. Specifically, LRDLSR class-wisely imposes low-rank constraint on the intra-class regression targets to encourage its compactness and similarity. Moreover, LRDLSR introduces an additional regularization term on the learned targets to avoid the problem of overfitting. These two improvements are helpful to learn a more discriminative projection for regression and thus achieving better classification performance. Experimental results over a range of image databases demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed LRDLSR method.

Click to Read Paper and Get Code
Non-negative representation based discriminative dictionary learning for face recognition
Mar 19, 2019
Zhe Chen, Xiao-Jun Wu, Josef Kittler

In this paper, we propose a non-negative representation based discriminative dictionary learning algorithm (NRDL) for multicategory face classification. In contrast to traditional dictionary learning methods, NRDL investigates the use of non-negative representation (NR), which contributes to learning discriminative dictionary atoms. In order to make the learned dictionary more suitable for classification, NRDL seamlessly incorporates nonnegative representation constraint, discriminative dictionary learning and linear classifier training into a unified model. Specifically, NRDL introduces a positive constraint on representation matrix to find distinct atoms from heterogeneous training samples, which results in sparse and discriminative representation. Moreover, a discriminative dictionary encouraging function is proposed to enhance the uniqueness of class-specific sub-dictionaries. Meanwhile, an inter-class incoherence constraint and a compact graph based regularization term are constructed to respectively improve the discriminability of learned classifier. Experimental results on several benchmark face data sets verify the advantages of our NRDL algorithm over the state-of-the-art dictionary learning methods.

Click to Read Paper and Get Code