Thomas M. Breuel

Muhammet Bastan, S. Saqib Bukhari, Thomas M. Breuel

We introduce an edge detection and recovery framework based on open active contour models (snakelets). This is motivated by the noisy or broken edges output by standard edge detection algorithms, like Canny. The idea is to utilize the local continuity and smoothness cues provided by strong edges and grow them to recover the missing edges. This way, the strong edges are used to recover weak or missing edges by considering the local edge structures, instead of blindly linking them if gradient magnitudes are above some threshold. We initialize short snakelets on the gradient magnitudes or binary edges automatically and then deform and grow them under the influence of gradient vector flow. The output snakelets are able to recover most of the breaks or weak edges, and they provide a smooth edge representation of the image; they can also be used for higher level analysis, like contour segmentation.

Federico Raue, Andreas Dengel, Thomas M. Breuel et al.

In this paper, we extend a symbolic association framework for being able to handle missing elements in multimodal sequences. The general scope of the work is the symbolic associations of object-word mappings as it happens in language development in infants. In other words, two different representations of the same abstract concepts can associate in both directions. This scenario has been long interested in Artificial Intelligence, Psychology, and Neuroscience. In this work, we extend a recent approach for multimodal sequences (visual and audio) to also cope with missing elements in one or both modalities. Our method uses two parallel Long Short-Term Memories (LSTMs) with a learning rule based on EM-algorithm. It aligns both LSTM outputs via Dynamic Time Warping (DTW). We propose to include an extra step for the combination with the max operation for exploiting the common elements between both sequences. The motivation behind is that the combination acts as a condition selector for choosing the best representation from both LSTMs. We evaluated the proposed extension in the following scenarios: missing elements in one modality (visual or audio) and missing elements in both modalities (visual and sound). The performance of our extension reaches better results than the original model and similar results to individual LSTM trained in each modality.

Thomas M. Breuel

The paper introduces a biologically and evolutionarily plausible neural architecture that allows a single group of neurons, or an entire cortical pathway, to be dynamically reconfigured to perform multiple, potentially very different computations. The paper shows that reconfigurability can account for the observed stochastic and distributed coding behavior of neurons and provides a parsimonious explanation for timing phenomena in psychophysical experiments. It also shows that reconfigurable pathways correspond to classes of statistical classifiers that include decision lists, decision trees, and hierarchical Bayesian methods. Implications for the interpretation of neurophysiological and psychophysical results are discussed, and future experiments for testing the reconfigurability hypothesis are explored.

Thomas M. Breuel

Neural networks are usually trained by some form of stochastic gradient descent (SGD)). A number of strategies are in common use intended to improve SGD optimization, such as learning rate schedules, momentum, and batching. These are motivated by ideas about the occurrence of local minima at different scales, valleys, and other phenomena in the objective function. Empirical results presented here suggest that these phenomena are not significant factors in SGD optimization of MLP-related objective functions, and that the behavior of stochastic gradient descent in these problems is better described as the simultaneous convergence at different rates of many, largely non-interacting subproblems

Thomas M. Breuel

The performance of neural network classifiers is determined by a number of hyperparameters, including learning rate, batch size, and depth. A number of attempts have been made to explore these parameters in the literature, and at times, to develop methods for optimizing them. However, exploration of parameter spaces has often been limited. In this note, I report the results of large scale experiments exploring these different parameters and their interactions.

Thomas M. Breuel

LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) recurrent neural networks have been highly successful in a number of application areas. This technical report describes the use of the MNIST and UW3 databases for benchmarking LSTM networks and explores the effect of different architectural and hyperparameter choices on performance. Significant findings include: (1) LSTM performance depends smoothly on learning rates, (2) batching and momentum has no significant effect on performance, (3) softmax training outperforms least square training, (4) peephole units are not useful, (5) the standard non-linearities (tanh and sigmoid) perform best, (6) bidirectional training combined with CTC performs better than other methods.