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The problem of detecting and quantifying the presence of symmetries in datasets is useful for model selection, generative modeling, and data analysis, amongst others. While existing methods for hard-coding transformations in neural networks require prior knowledge of the symmetries of the task at hand, this work focuses on discovering and characterizing unknown symmetries present in the dataset, namely, Lie group symmetry transformations beyond the traditional ones usually considered in the field (rotation, scaling, and translation). Specifically, we consider a scenario in which a dataset has been transformed by a one-parameter subgroup of transformations with different parameter values for each data point. Our goal is to characterize the transformation group and the distribution of the parameter values. The results showcase the effectiveness of the approach in both these settings., 9 pages, 5 figures, Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Workshop on Topology, Algebra, and Geometry in Machine Learning (TAG-ML) at the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. 2023

We present WeakSTIL, an interpretable two-stage weak label deep learning pipeline for scoring the percentage of stromal tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (sTIL%) in H&E-stained whole-slide images (WSIs) of breast cancer tissue. The sTIL% score is a prognostic and predictive biomarker for many solid tumor types. However, due to the high labeling efforts and high intra- and interobserver variability within and between expert annotators, this biomarker is currently not used in routine clinical decision making. WeakSTIL compresses tiles of a WSI using a feature extractor pre-trained with self-supervised learning on unlabeled histopathology data and learns to predict precise sTIL% scores for each tile in the tumor bed by using a multiple instance learning regressor that only requires a weak WSI-level label. By requiring only a weak label, we overcome the large annotation efforts required to train currently existing TIL detection methods. We show that WeakSTIL is at least as good as other TIL detection methods when predicting the WSI-level sTIL% score, reaching a coefficient of determination of $0.45\pm0.15$ when compared to scores generated by an expert pathologist, and an AUC of $0.89\pm0.05$ when treating it as the clinically interesting sTIL-high vs sTIL-low classification task. Additionally, we show that the intermediate tile-level predictions of WeakSTIL are highly interpretable, which suggests that WeakSTIL pays attention to latent features related to the number of TILs and the tissue type. In the future, WeakSTIL may be used to provide consistent and interpretable sTIL% predictions to stratify breast cancer patients into targeted therapy arms., 8 pages, 8 figures, 1 table, 4 pages supplementary

Machine learning recently proved efficient in learning differential equations and dynamical systems from data. However, the data is commonly assumed to originate from a single never-changing system. In contrast, when modeling real-world dynamical processes, the data distribution often shifts due to changes in the underlying system dynamics. Continual learning of these processes aims to rapidly adapt to abrupt system changes without forgetting previous dynamical regimes. This work proposes an approach to continual learning based on reservoir computing, a state-of-the-art method for training recurrent neural networks on complex spatiotemporal dynamical systems. Reservoir computing fixes the recurrent network weights - hence these cannot be forgotten - and only updates linear projection heads to the output. We propose to train multiple competitive prediction heads concurrently. Inspired by neuroscience's predictive coding, only the most predictive heads activate, laterally inhibiting and thus protecting the inactive heads from forgetting induced by interfering parameter updates. We show that this multi-head reservoir minimizes interference and catastrophic forgetting on several dynamical systems, including the Van-der-Pol oscillator, the chaotic Lorenz attractor, and the high-dimensional Lorenz-96 weather model. Our results suggest that reservoir computing is a promising candidate framework for the continual learning of dynamical systems. We provide our code for data generation, method, and comparisons at \url{https://github.com/leonardbereska/multiheadreservoir}., Comment: CoLLAs 2022

This paper aims to accelerate video stream processing, such as object detection and semantic segmentation, by leveraging the temporal redundancies that exist between video frames. Instead of propagating and warping features using motion alignment, such as optical flow, we propose a novel knowledge distillation schema coined as Delta Distillation. In our proposal, the student learns the variations in the teacher’s intermediate features over time. We demonstrate that these temporal variations can be effectively distilled due to the temporal redundancies within video frames. During inference, both teacher and student cooperate for providing predictions: the former by providing initial representations extracted only on the key-frame, and the latter by iteratively estimating and applying deltas for the successive frames. Moreover, we consider various design choices to learn optimal student architectures including an end-to-end learnable architecture search. By extensive experiments on a wide range of architectures, including the most efficient ones, we demonstrate that delta distillation sets a new state of the art in terms of accuracy vs. efficiency trade-off for semantic segmentation and object detection in videos. Finally, we show that, as a by-product, delta distillation improves the temporal consistency of the teacher model.

In recent years, neural implicit representations have made remarkable progress in modeling of 3D shapes with arbitrary topology. In this work, we address two key limitations of such representations, in failing to capture local 3D geometric fine details, and to learn from and generalize to shapes with unseen 3D transformations. To this end, we introduce a novel family of graph implicit functions with equivariant layers that facilitates modeling fine local details and guaranteed robustness to various groups of geometric transformations, through local $k$-NN graph embeddings with sparse point set observations at multiple resolutions. Our method improves over the existing rotation-equivariant implicit function from 0.69 to 0.89 (IoU) on the ShapeNet reconstruction task. We also show that our equivariant implicit function can be extended to other types of similarity transformations and generalizes to unseen translations and scaling., Comment: Video: https://youtu.be/W7goOzZP2Kc

Modelling interactions is critical in learning complex dynamical systems, namely systems of interacting objects with highly non-linear and time-dependent behaviour. A large class of such systems can be formalized as geometric graphs, i.e. graphs with nodes positioned in the Euclidean space given an arbitrarily chosen global coordinate system, for instance vehicles in a traffic scene. Notwithstanding the arbitrary global coordinate system, the governing dynamics of the respective dynamical systems are invariant to rotations and translations, also known as Galilean invariance. As ignoring these invariances leads to worse generalization, in this work we propose local coordinate systems per node-object to induce roto-translation invariance to the geometric graph of the interacting dynamical system. Further, the local coordinate systems allow for a natural definition of anisotropic filtering in graph neural networks. Experiments in traffic scenes, 3D motion capture, and colliding particles demonstrate the proposed approach comfortably outperforms the recent state-of-the-art.

Variational autoencoders with deep hierarchies of stochastic layers have been known to suffer from the problem of posterior collapse, where the top layers fall back to the prior and become independent of input. We suggest that the hierarchical VAE objective explicitly includes the variance of the function parameterizing the mean and variance of the latent Gaussian distribution which itself is often a high variance function. Building on this we generalize VAE neural networks by incorporating a smoothing parameter motivated by Gaussian analysis to reduce higher frequency components and consequently the variance in parameterizing functions and show that this can help to solve the problem of posterior collapse. We further show that under such smoothing the VAE loss exhibits a phase transition, where the top layer KL divergence sharply drops to zero at a critical value of the smoothing parameter that is similar for the same model across datasets. We validate the phenomenon across model configurations and datasets.

Recently, neural implicit functions have achieved impressive results for encoding 3D shapes. Conditioning on low-dimensional latent codes generalises a single implicit function to learn shared representation space for a variety of shapes, with the advantage of smooth interpolation. While the benefits from the global latent space do not correspond to explicit points at local level, we propose to track the continuous point trajectory by matching implicit features with the latent code interpolating between shapes, from which we corroborate the hierarchical functionality of the deep implicit functions, where early layers map the latent code to fitting the coarse shape structure, and deeper layers further refine the shape details. Furthermore, the structured representation space of implicit functions enables to apply feature matching for shape deformation, with the benefits to handle topology and semantics inconsistency, such as from an armchair to a chair with no arms, without explicit flow functions or manual annotations.

Tracking and segmentation of biological cells in video sequences is a challenging problem, especially due to the similarity of the cells and high levels of inherent noise. Most machine learning-based approaches lack robustness and suffer from sensitivity to less prominent events such as mitosis, apoptosis and cell collisions. Due to the large variance in medical image characteristics, most approaches are dataset-specific and do not generalise well on other datasets. In this paper, we propose a simple end-to-end cascade neural architecture that can effectively model the movement behaviour of biological cells and predict collision and mitosis events. Our approach uses U-Net for an initial segmentation which is then improved through processing by a siamese tracker capable of matching each cell along the temporal axis. By facilitating the re-segmentation of collided and mitotic cells, our method demonstrates its capability to handle volatile trajectories and unpredictable cell locations while being invariant to cell morphology. We demonstrate that our tracking approach achieves state-of-the-art results on PhC-C2DL-PSC and Fluo-N2DH-SIM+ datasets and ranks second on the DIC-C2DH-HeLa dataset of the cell tracking challenge benchmarks.

Stochastic neural networks with discrete random variables are an important class of models for their expressiveness and interpretability. Since direct differentiation and backpropagation is not possible, Monte Carlo gradient estimation techniques are a popular alternative. Efficient stochastic gradient estimators, such Straight-Through and Gumbel-Softmax, work well for shallow stochastic models. Their performance, however, suffers with hierarchical, more complex models. We focus on stochastic networks with Boolean latent variables. To analyze such networks, we introduce the framework of harmonic analysis for Boolean functions to derive an analytic formulation for the bias and variance in the Straight-Through estimator. Exploiting these formulations, we propose \emph{FouST}, a low-bias and low-variance gradient estimation algorithm that is just as efficient. Extensive experiments show that FouST performs favorably compared to state-of-the-art biased estimators and is much faster than unbiased ones.

The Visual Object Tracking challenge VOT2019 is the seventh annual tracker benchmarking activity organized by the VOT initiative. Results of 81 trackers are presented; many are state-of-the-art trackers published at major computer vision conferences or in journals in the recent years. The evaluation included the standard VOT and other popular methodologies for short-term tracking analysis as well as the standard VOT methodology for long-term tracking analysis. The VOT2019 challenge was composed of five challenges focusing on different tracking domains: (i) VOT-ST2019 challenge focused on short-term tracking in RGB, (ii) VOT-RT2019 challenge focused on "real-time" short-term tracking in RGB, (iii) VOT-LT2019 focused on long-term tracking namely coping with target disappearance and reappearance. Two new challenges have been introduced: (iv) VOT-RGBT2019 challenge focused on short-term tracking in RGB and thermal imagery and (v) VOT-RGBD2019 challenge focused on long-term tracking in RGB and depth imagery. The VOT-ST2019, VOT-RT2019 and VOT-LT2019 datasets were refreshed while new datasets were introduced for VOT-RGBT2019 and VOT-RGBD2019. The VOT toolkit has been updated to support both standard short-term, long-term tracking and tracking with multi-channel imagery. Performance of the tested trackers typically by far exceeds standard baselines. The source code for most of the trackers is publicly available from the VOT page. The dataset, the evaluation kit and the results are publicly available at the challenge website(1). Funding Agencies|Slovenian research agencySlovenian Research Agency - Slovenia [J2-8175, P2-0214, P2-0094]; Czech Science Foundation Project GACR [P103/12/G084]; MURI project - MoD/DstlMURI; EPSRCEngineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) [EP/N019415/1]; WASP; VR (ELLIIT, LAST, and NCNN); SSF (SymbiCloud); AIT Strategic Research Programme; Faculty of Computer Science, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

Neural network quantization has become an important research area due to its great impact on deployment of large models on resource constrained devices. In order to train networks that can be effectively discretized without loss of performance, we introduce a differentiable quantization procedure. Differentiability can be achieved by transforming continuous distributions over the weights and activations of the network to categorical distributions over the quantization grid. These are subsequently relaxed to continuous surrogates that can allow for efficient gradient-based optimization. We further show that stochastic rounding can be seen as a special case of the proposed approach and that under this formulation the quantization grid itself can also be optimized with gradient descent. We experimentally validate the performance of our method on MNIST, CIFAR 10 and Imagenet classification. © 7th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2019. All Rights Reserved.

Deep neural networks are almost universally trained with reverse-mode automatic differentiation (a.k.a. backpropagation). Biological networks, on the other hand, appear to lack any mechanism for sending gradients back to their input neurons, and thus cannot be learning in this way. In response to this, Scellier & Bengio (2017) proposed Equilibrium Propagation - a method for gradient-based train- ing of neural networks which uses only local learning rules and, crucially, does not rely on neurons having a mechanism for back-propagating an error gradient. Equilibrium propagation, however, has a major practical limitation: inference involves doing an iterative optimization of neural activations to find a fixed-point, and the number of steps required to closely approximate this fixed point scales poorly with the depth of the network. In response to this problem, we propose Initialized Equilibrium Propagation, which trains a feedforward network to initialize the iterative inference procedure for Equilibrium propagation. This feed-forward network learns to approximate the state of the fixed-point using a local learning rule. After training, we can simply use this initializing network for inference, resulting in a learned feedforward network. Our experiments show that this network appears to work as well or better than the original version of Equilibrium propagation. This shows how we might go about training deep networks without using backpropagation.

Backpropagation is almost universally used to train artificial neural networks. However, there are several reasons that backpropagation could not be plausibly implemented by biological neurons. Among these are the facts that (1) biological neurons appear to lack any mechanism for sending gradients backwards across synapses, and (2) biological “spiking” neurons emit binary signals, whereas back-propagation requires that neurons communicate continuous values between one another. Recently, Scellier and Bengio [2017], demonstrated an alternative to backpropagation, called Equilibrium Propagation, wherein gradients are implicitly computed by the dynamics of the neural network, so that neurons do not need an internal mechanism for backpropagation of gradients. This provides an interesting solution to problem (1). In this paper, we address problem (2) by proposing a way in which Equilibrium Propagation can be implemented with neurons which are constrained to just communicate binary values at each time step. We show that with appropriate step-size annealing, we can converge to the same fixed-point as a real-valued neural network, and that with predictive coding, we can make this convergence much faster. We demonstrate that the resulting model can be used to train a spiking neural network using the update scheme from Equilibrium propagation.

We introduce the OxUvA dataset and benchmark for evaluating single-object tracking algorithms. Benchmarks have enabled great strides in the field of object tracking by defining standardized evaluations on large sets of diverse videos. However, these works have focused exclusively on sequences that are just tens of seconds in length and in which the target is always visible. Consequently, most researchers have designed methods tailored to this "short-term" scenario, which is poorly representative of practitioners' needs. Aiming to address this disparity, we compile a long-term, large-scale tracking dataset of sequences with average length greater than two minutes and with frequent target object disappearance. The OxUvA dataset is much larger than the object tracking datasets of recent years: it comprises 366 sequences spanning 14 hours of video. We assess the performance of several algorithms, considering both the ability to locate the target and to determine whether it is present or absent. Our goal is to offer the community a large and diverse benchmark to enable the design and evaluation of tracking methods ready to be used "in the wild". The project website is http://oxuva.net, Comment: To appear at ECCV 2018

In online action detection, the goal is to detect the start of an action in a video stream as soon as it happens. For instance, if a child is chasing a ball, an autonomous car should recognize what is going on and respond immediately. This is a very challenging problem for four reasons. First, only partial actions are observed. Second, there is a large variability in negative data. Third, the start of the action is unknown, so it is unclear over what time window the information should be integrated. Finally, in real world data, large within-class variability exists. This problem has been addressed before, but only to some extent. Our contributions to online action detection are threefold. First, we introduce a realistic dataset composed of 27 episodes from 6 popular TV series. The dataset spans over 16 h of footage annotated with 30 action classes, totaling 6,231 action instances. Second, we analyze and compare various baseline methods, showing this is a challenging problem for which none of the methods provides a good solution. Third, we analyze the change in performance when there is a variation in viewpoint, occlusion, truncation, etc. We introduce an evaluation protocol for fair comparison. The dataset, the baselines and the models will all be made publicly available to encourage (much needed) further research on online action detection on realistic data.

In this paper we aim for object classification and segmentation by attributes. Where existing work considers attributes either for the global image or for the parts of the object, we propose, as our first novelty, to learn and extract attributes on segments containing the entire object. Object-level attributes suffer less from accidental content around the object and accidental image conditions such as partial occlusions, scale changes and viewpoint changes. As our second novelty, we propose joint learning for simultaneous object classification and segment proposal ranking, solely on the basis of attributes. This naturally brings us to our third novelty: object-level attributes for zero-shot, where we use attribute descriptions of unseen classes for localizing their instances in new images and classifying them accordingly. Results on the Caltech UCSD Birds, Leeds Butterflies, and an a-Pascal subset demonstrate that i) extracting attributes on oracle object-level brings substantial benefits ii) our joint learning model leads to accurate attribute-based classification and segmentation, approaching the oracle results and iii) object-level attributes also allow for zero-shot classification and segmentation.We conclude that attributes make sense on segmented objects.

In this paper we describe our TRECVID 2010 video retrieval experiments. The MediaMill team participated in three tasks: semantic indexing, known-item search, and instance search. The starting point for the MediaMill concept detection approach is our top-performing bag-of-words system of TRECVID 2009, which uses multiple color SIFT descriptors, sparse codebooks with spatial pyramids, kernel-based machine learning, and multi-frame video processing. We improve upon this baseline system by further speeding up its execution times for both training and classification using GPU-optimized algorithms, approximated histogram intersection kernels, and several multi-frame combination methods. Being more efficient allowed us to supplement the Internet video training collection with positively labeled examples from international news broadcasts and Dutch documentary video from the TRECVID 2005-2009 benchmarks. Our experimental setup covered a huge training set of 170 thousand keyframes and a test set of 600 thousand keyframes in total. Ultimately leading to 130 robust concept detectors for video retrieval. For retrieval, a robust but limited set of concept detectors justifies the need to rely on as many auxiliary information channels as possible. For automatic known item search we therefore explore how we can learn to rank various information channels simultaneously to maximize video search results for a given topic. To further improve the video retrieval results, our interactive known item search experiments investigate how to combine metadata search and visualization into a single interface. The 2010 edition of the TRECVID benchmark has again been a fruitful participation for the MediaMill team, resulting in the top ranking for concept detection in the semantic indexing task. Again a lot has been learned during this year’s TRECVID campaign; we highlight the most important lessons at the end of this paper.