Mohammad Rahmati

Zahra Dehghanian, Saeed Saravani, Maryam Amirmazlaghani et al.

This study presents an adversarial method for anomaly detection in real-world applications, leveraging the power of generative adversarial neural networks (GANs) through cycle consistency in reconstruction error. Previous methods suffer from the high variance between class-wise accuracy which leads to not being applicable for all types of anomalies. The proposed method named RCALAD tries to solve this problem by introducing a novel discriminator to the structure, which results in a more efficient training process. Additionally, RCALAD employs a supplementary distribution in the input space to steer reconstructions toward the normal data distribution, effectively separating anomalous samples from their reconstructions and facilitating more accurate anomaly detection. To further enhance the performance of the model, two novel anomaly scores are introduced. The proposed model has been thoroughly evaluated through extensive experiments on six various datasets, yielding results that demonstrate its superiority over existing state-of-the-art models. The code is readily available to the research community at https://github.com/zahraDehghanian97/RCALAD.

Ramin Barati, Reza Safabakhsh, Mohammad Rahmati

The reliability of a learning model is key to the successful deployment of machine learning in various applications. However, it is difficult to describe the phenomenon due to the complicated nature of the problems in machine learning. It has been shown that adversarial training can improve the robustness of the hypothesis. However, this improvement usually comes at the cost of decreased performance on natural samples. Hence, it has been suggested that robustness and accuracy of a hypothesis are at odds with each other. In this paper, we put forth the alternative proposal that it is the continuity of a hypothesis that is incompatible with its robustness and accuracy in many of these scenarios. In other words, a continuous function cannot effectively learn the optimal robust hypothesis. We introduce a framework for a rigorous study of harmonic and holomorphic hypothesis in learning theory terms and provide empirical evidence that continuous hypotheses do not perform as well as discontinuous hypotheses in some common machine learning tasks. From a practical point of view, our results suggests that a robust and accurate learning rule would train different continuous hypotheses for different regions of the domain. From a theoretical perspective, our analysis explains the adversarial examples phenomenon in these situations as a conflict between the continuity of a sequence of functions and its uniform convergence to a discontinuous function. Given that many of the contemporary machine learning models are continuous functions, it is important to theoretically study the continuity of robust and accurate classifiers as it is consequential in their construction, analysis and evaluation.

Ramin Barati, Reza Safabakhsh, Mohammad Rahmati

The reliability of a learning model is key to the successful deployment of machine learning in various industries. Creating a robust model, particularly one unaffected by adversarial attacks, requires a comprehensive understanding of the adversarial examples phenomenon. However, it is difficult to describe the phenomenon due to the complicated nature of the problems in machine learning. Consequently, many studies investigate the phenomenon by proposing a simplified model of how adversarial examples occur and validate it by predicting some aspect of the phenomenon. While these studies cover many different characteristics of the adversarial examples, they have not reached a holistic approach to the geometric and analytic modeling of the phenomenon. This paper propose a formal framework to study the phenomenon in learning theory and make use of complex analysis and holomorphicity to offer a robust learning rule for artificial neural networks. With the help of complex analysis, we can effortlessly move between geometric and analytic perspectives of the phenomenon and offer further insights on the phenomenon by revealing its connection with harmonic functions. Using our model, we can explain some of the most intriguing characteristics of adversarial examples, including transferability of adversarial examples, and pave the way for novel approaches to mitigate the effects of the phenomenon.

Hanieh Naderi, Mohammad Rahmati

In this paper, we propose a novel motion-compensated frame rate up-conversion (MC-FRUC) algorithm. The proposed algorithm creates interpolated frames by first estimating motion vectors using unilateral (jointing forward and backward) and bilateral motion estimation. Then motion vectors are combined based on adaptive threshold, in order to creates high-quality interpolated frames and reduce block artifacts. Since motion-compensated frame interpolation along unilateral motion trajectories yields holes, a new algorithm is introduced to resolve this problem. The experimental results show that the quality of the interpolated frames using the proposed algorithm is much higher than the existing algorithms.

Amirhossein Nouranizadeh, Fatemeh Tabatabaei Far, Mohammad Rahmati

Evolving networks are complex data structures that emerge in a wide range of systems in science and engineering. Learning expressive representations for such networks that encode their structural connectivity and temporal evolution is essential for downstream data analytics and machine learning applications. In this study, we introduce a self-supervised method for learning representations of temporal networks and employ these representations in the dynamic link prediction task. While temporal networks are typically characterized as a sequence of interactions over the continuous time domain, our study focuses on their discrete-time versions. This enables us to balance the trade-off between computational complexity and precise modeling of the interactions. We propose a recurrent message-passing neural network architecture for modeling the information flow over time-respecting paths of temporal networks. The key feature of our method is the contrastive training objective of the model, which is a combination of three loss functions: link prediction, graph reconstruction, and contrastive predictive coding losses. The contrastive predictive coding objective is implemented using infoNCE losses at both local and global scales of the input graphs. We empirically show that the additional self-supervised losses enhance the training and improve the model's performance in the dynamic link prediction task. The proposed method is tested on Enron, COLAB, and Facebook datasets and exhibits superior results compared to existing models.

Shervin Halat, Mohammad Rahmati, Ehsan Nazerfard

Recently, significant advancements in artificial intelligence have been attributed to the integration of self-supervised learning (SSL) scheme. While SSL has shown impressive achievements in natural language processing (NLP), its progress in computer vision has comparatively lagged behind. However, the incorporation of contrastive learning into existing visual SSL models has led to considerable progress, often surpassing supervised counterparts. Nonetheless, these improvements have been mostly limited to classification tasks. Moreover, few studies have evaluated visual SSL models in real-world scenarios, as most have focused on datasets with class-wise portrait images, notably ImageNet. Here, we focus on dense prediction tasks using security inspection x-ray images to evaluate our proposed model, Segment Localization (SegLoc). Based upon the Instance Localization (InsLoc) model, SegLoc addresses one of the key challenges of contrastive learning, i.e., false negative pairs of query embeddings. Our pre-training dataset is synthesized by cutting, transforming, and pasting labeled segments from an existing labeled dataset (PIDray) as foregrounds onto instances from an unlabeled dataset (SIXray) as backgrounds. Furthermore, we fully leverage the labeled data by incorporating the concept, one queue per class, into the MoCo-v2 memory bank, thereby avoiding false negative pairs. In our experiments, SegLoc outperformed random initialization by 3% to 6% while underperformed supervised initialization, in terms of AR and AP metrics across different IoU values over 20 to 30 pre-training epochs.

Maryam Abdolali, Romina Zakerian, Behnam Roshanfekr et al.

In this paper, we propose a novel framework that combines ensemble learning with augmented graph structures to improve the performance and robustness of semi-supervised node classification in graphs. By creating multiple augmented views of the same graph, our approach harnesses the "wisdom of a diverse crowd", mitigating the challenges posed by noisy graph structures. Leveraging ensemble learning allows us to simultaneously achieve three key goals: adaptive confidence threshold selection based on model agreement, dynamic determination of the number of high-confidence samples for training, and robust extraction of pseudo-labels to mitigate confirmation bias. Our approach uniquely integrates adaptive ensemble consensus to flexibly guide pseudo-label extraction and sample selection, reducing the risks of error accumulation and improving robustness. Furthermore, the use of ensemble-driven consensus for pseudo-labeling captures subtle patterns that individual models often overlook, enabling the model to generalize better. Experiments on several real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Fardin Ayar, Ehsan Javanmardi, Manabu Tsukada et al.

Panoptic segmentation, which combines instance and semantic segmentation, has gained a lot of attention in autonomous vehicles, due to its comprehensive representation of the scene. This task can be applied for cameras and LiDAR sensors, but there has been a limited focus on combining both sensors to enhance image panoptic segmentation (PS). Although previous research has acknowledged the benefit of 3D data on camera-based scene perception, no specific study has explored the influence of 3D data on image and video panoptic segmentation (VPS).This work seeks to introduce a feature fusion module that enhances PS and VPS by fusing LiDAR and image data for autonomous vehicles. We also illustrate that, in addition to this fusion, our proposed model, which utilizes two simple modifications, can further deliver even more high-quality VPS without being trained on video data. The results demonstrate a substantial improvement in both the image and video panoptic segmentation evaluation metrics by up to 5 points.

Ali Abbasi, Mohammad Rahmati

Over the past few decades, numerous attempts have been made to address the problem of recovering a high-resolution (HR) facial image from its corresponding low-resolution (LR) counterpart, a task commonly referred to as face hallucination. Despite the impressive performance achieved by position-patch and deep learning-based methods, most of these techniques are still unable to recover identity-specific features of faces. The former group of algorithms often produces blurry and oversmoothed outputs particularly in the presence of higher levels of degradation, whereas the latter generates faces which sometimes by no means resemble the individuals in the input images. In this paper, a novel face super-resolution approach will be introduced, in which the hallucinated face is forced to lie in a subspace spanned by the available training faces. Therefore, in contrast to the majority of existing face hallucination techniques and thanks to this face subspace prior, the reconstruction is performed in favor of recovering person-specific facial features, rather than merely increasing image quantitative scores. Furthermore, inspired by recent advances in the area of 3D face reconstruction, an efficient 3D dictionary alignment scheme is also presented, through which the algorithm becomes capable of dealing with low-resolution faces taken in uncontrolled conditions. In extensive experiments carried out on several well-known face datasets, the proposed algorithm shows remarkable performance by generating detailed and close to ground truth results which outperform the state-of-the-art face hallucination algorithms by significant margins both in quantitative and qualitative evaluations.

Bahman Rouhani, Mohammad Rahmati

Video Generation is a relatively new and yet popular subject in machine learning due to its vast variety of potential applications and its numerous challenges. Current methods in Video Generation provide the user with little or no control over the exact specification of how the objects in the generate video are to be moved and located at each frame, that is, the user can't explicitly control how each object in the video should move. In this paper we propose a novel method that allows the user to move any number of objects of a single initial frame just by drawing bounding boxes over those objects and then moving those boxes in the desired path. Our model utilizes two Autoencoders to fully decompose the motion and content information in a video and achieves results comparable to well-known baseline and state of the art methods.

Ramin Barati, Reza Safabakhsh, Mohammad Rahmati

In this paper, we study the adversarial examples existence and adversarial training from the standpoint of convergence and provide evidence that pointwise convergence in ANNs can explain these observations. The main contribution of our proposal is that it relates the objective of the evasion attacks and adversarial training with concepts already defined in learning theory. Also, we extend and unify some of the other proposals in the literature and provide alternative explanations on the observations made in those proposals. Through different experiments, we demonstrate that the framework is valuable in the study of the phenomenon and is applicable to real-world problems.

Amirhossein Nouranizadeh, Mohammadjavad Matinkia, Mohammad Rahmati et al.

In this paper, we propose a novel pooling layer for graph neural networks based on maximizing the mutual information between the pooled graph and the input graph. Since the maximum mutual information is difficult to compute, we employ the Shannon capacity of a graph as an inductive bias to our pooling method. More precisely, we show that the input graph to the pooling layer can be viewed as a representation of a noisy communication channel. For such a channel, sending the symbols belonging to an independent set of the graph yields a reliable and error-free transmission of information. We show that reaching the maximum mutual information is equivalent to finding a maximum weight independent set of the graph where the weights convey entropy contents. Through this communication theoretic standpoint, we provide a distinct perspective for posing the problem of graph pooling as maximizing the information transmission rate across a noisy communication channel, implemented by a graph neural network. We evaluate our method, referred to as Maximum Entropy Weighted Independent Set Pooling (MEWISPool), on graph classification tasks and the combinatorial optimization problem of the maximum independent set. Empirical results demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art and competitive results on graph classification tasks and the maximum independent set problem in several benchmark datasets.

Ali Atghaei, Soroush Ziaeinejad, Mohammad Rahmati

Abnormal event detection (AED) in urban surveillance videos has multiple challenges. Unlike other computer vision problems, the AED is not solely dependent on the content of frames. It also depends on the appearance of the objects and their movements in the scene. Various methods have been proposed to address the AED problem. Among those, deep learning based methods show the best results. This paper is based on deep learning methods and provides an effective way to detect and locate abnormal events in videos by handling spatio temporal data. This paper uses generative adversarial networks (GANs) and performs transfer learning algorithms on pre trained convolutional neural network (CNN) which result in an accurate and efficient model. The efficiency of the model is further improved by processing the optical flow information of the video. This paper runs experiments on two benchmark datasets for AED problem (UCSD Peds1 and UCSD Peds2) and compares the results with other previous methods. The comparisons are based on various criteria such as area under curve (AUC) and true positive rate (TPR). Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively detect and locate abnormal events in crowd scenes.

Seyed Mohammad Hashemi, Mohammad Rahmati

Recommender systems provide personalized recommendations to the users from a large number of possible options in online stores. Matrix factorization is a well-known and accurate collaborative filtering approach for recommender system, which suffers from cold-start problem for new users and items. Whenever a new user participate with the system there is not enough interactions with the system, therefore there are not enough ratings in the user-item matrix to learn the matrix factorization model. Using auxiliary data such as users demographic, ratings and reviews in relevant domains, is an effective solution to reduce the new user problem. In this paper, we used data of users from other domains and build a common space to represent the latent factors of users from different domains. In this representation we proposed an iterative method which applied MAX-VAR generalized canonical correlation analysis (GCCA) on users latent factors learned from matrix factorization on each domain. Also, to improve the capability of GCCA to learn latent factors for new users, we propose generalized canonical correlation analysis by inverse sum of selection matrices (GCCA-ISSM) approach, which provides better recommendations in cold-start scenarios. The proposed approach is extended using content-based features from topic modeling extracted from users reviews. We demonstrate the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed approaches on cross-domain ratings predictions using comprehensive experiments on Amazon and MovieLens datasets.

Maryam Abdolali, Mohammad Rahmati

In this paper, we consider the problem of subspace clustering in presence of contiguous noise, occlusion and disguise. We argue that self-expressive representation of data in current state-of-the-art approaches is severely sensitive to occlusions and complex real-world noises. To alleviate this problem, we propose a hierarchical framework that brings robustness of local patches-based representations and discriminant property of global representations together. This approach consists of 1) a top-down stage, in which the input data is subject to repeated division to smaller patches and 2) a bottom-up stage, in which the low rank embedding of local patches in field of view of a corresponding patch in upper level are merged on a Grassmann manifold. This summarized information provides two key information for the corresponding patch on the upper level: cannot-links and recommended-links. This information is employed for computing a self-expressive representation of each patch at upper levels using a weighted sparse group lasso optimization problem. Numerical results on several real data sets confirm the efficiency of our approach.

Maryam Abdolali, Nicolas Gillis, Mohammad Rahmati

Sparse subspace clustering (SSC) is one of the current state-of-the-art methods for partitioning data points into the union of subspaces, with strong theoretical guarantees. However, it is not practical for large data sets as it requires solving a LASSO problem for each data point, where the number of variables in each LASSO problem is the number of data points. To improve the scalability of SSC, we propose to select a few sets of anchor points using a randomized hierarchical clustering method, and, for each set of anchor points, solve the LASSO problems for each data point allowing only anchor points to have a non-zero weight (this reduces drastically the number of variables). This generates a multilayer graph where each layer corresponds to a different set of anchor points. Using the Grassmann manifold of orthogonal matrices, the shared connectivity among the layers is summarized within a single subspace. Finally, we use $k$-means clustering within that subspace to cluster the data points, similarly as done by spectral clustering in SSC. We show on both synthetic and real-world data sets that the proposed method not only allows SSC to scale to large-scale data sets, but that it is also much more robust as it performs significantly better on noisy data and on data with close susbspaces and outliers, while it is not prone to oversegmentation.

Roohollah Aslanzadeh, Kazem Qazanfari, Mohammad Rahmati

The goal of this paper is to present a new efficient image segmentation method based on evolutionary computation which is a model inspired from human behavior. Based on this model, a four layer process for image segmentation is proposed using the split/merge approach. In the first layer, an image is split into numerous regions using the watershed algorithm. In the second layer, a co-evolutionary process is applied to form centers of finals segments by merging similar primary regions. In the third layer, a meta-heuristic process uses two operators to connect the residual regions to their corresponding determined centers. In the final layer, an evolutionary algorithm is used to combine the resulted similar and neighbor regions. Different layers of the algorithm are totally independent, therefore for certain applications a specific layer can be changed without constraint of changing other layers. Some properties of this algorithm like the flexibility of its method, the ability to use different feature vectors for segmentation (grayscale, color, texture, etc), the ability to control uniformity and the number of final segments using free parameters and also maintaining small regions, makes it possible to apply the algorithm to different applications. Moreover, the independence of each region from other regions in the second layer, and the independence of centers in the third layer, makes parallel implementation possible. As a result the algorithm speed will increase. The presented algorithm was tested on a standard dataset (BSDS 300) of images, and the region boundaries were compared with different people segmentation contours. Results show the efficiency of the algorithm and its improvement to similar methods. As an instance, in 70% of tested images, results are better than ACT algorithm, besides in 100% of tested images, we had better results in comparison with VSP algorithm.

Erfan Zangeneh, Mohammad Rahmati, Yalda Mohsenzadeh

We propose a novel couple mappings method for low resolution face recognition using deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs). The proposed architecture consists of two branches of DCNNs to map the high and low resolution face images into a common space with nonlinear transformations. The branch corresponding to transformation of high resolution images consists of 14 layers and the other branch which maps the low resolution face images to the common space includes a 5-layer super-resolution network connected to a 14-layer network. The distance between the features of corresponding high and low resolution images are backpropagated to train the networks. Our proposed method is evaluated on FERET data set and compared with state-of-the-art competing methods. Our extensive experimental results show that the proposed method significantly improves the recognition performance especially for very low resolution probe face images (11.4% improvement in recognition accuracy). Furthermore, it can reconstruct a high resolution image from its corresponding low resolution probe image which is comparable with state-of-the-art super-resolution methods in terms of visual quality.