Ameen Ali

Ameen Ali, Idan Schwartz, Tamir Hazan et al.

We present a method for matching a text sentence from a given corpus to a given video clip and vice versa. Traditionally video and text matching is done by learning a shared embedding space and the encoding of one modality is independent of the other. In this work, we encode the dataset data in a way that takes into account the query's relevant information. The power of the method is demonstrated to arise from pooling the interaction data between words and frames. Since the encoding of the video clip depends on the sentence compared to it, the representation needs to be recomputed for each potential match. To this end, we propose an efficient shallow neural network. Its training employs a hierarchical triplet loss that is extendable to paragraph/video matching. The method is simple, provides explainability, and achieves state-of-the-art results for both sentence-clip and video-text by a sizable margin across five different datasets: ActivityNet, DiDeMo, YouCook2, MSR-VTT, and LSMDC. We also show that our conditioned representation can be transferred to video-guided machine translation, where we improved the current results on VATEX. Source code is available at https://github.com/AmeenAli/VideoMatch.

Ameen Ali, Tal Shaharabany, Lior Wolf

Radiologist examination of chest CT is an effective way for screening COVID-19 cases. In this work, we overcome three challenges in the automation of this process: (i) the limited number of supervised positive cases, (ii) the lack of region-based supervision, and (iii) the variability across acquisition sites. These challenges are met by incorporating a recent augmentation solution called SnapMix, by a new patch embedding technique, and by performing a test-time stability analysis. The three techniques are complementary and are all based on utilizing the heatmaps produced by the Class Activation Mapping (CAM) explainability method. Compared to the current state of the art, we obtain an increase of five percent in the F1 score on a site with a relatively high number of cases, and a gap twice as large for a site with much fewer training images.

Ameen Ali, Tomer Galanti, Evgeniy Zheltonozhskiy et al.

We consider the problem of the extraction of semantic attributes, supervised only with classification labels. For example, when learning to classify images of birds into species, we would like to observe the emergence of features that zoologists use to classify birds. To tackle this problem, we propose training a neural network with discrete features in the last layer, which is followed by two heads: a multi-layered perceptron (MLP) and a decision tree. Since decision trees utilize simple binary decision stumps we expect those discrete features to obtain semantic meaning. We present a theoretical analysis as well as a practical method for learning in the intersection of two hypothesis classes. Our results on multiple benchmarks show an improved ability to extract a set of features that are highly correlated with the set of unseen attributes.

Shir Gur, Ameen Ali, Lior Wolf

Neural network visualization techniques mark image locations by their relevancy to the network's classification. Existing methods are effective in highlighting the regions that affect the resulting classification the most. However, as we show, these methods are limited in their ability to identify the support for alternative classifications, an effect we name {\em the saliency bias} hypothesis. In this work, we integrate two lines of research: gradient-based methods and attribution-based methods, and develop an algorithm that provides per-class explainability. The algorithm back-projects the per pixel local influence, in a manner that is guided by the local attributions, while correcting for salient features that would otherwise bias the explanation. In an extensive battery of experiments, we demonstrate the ability of our methods to class-specific visualization, and not just the predicted label. Remarkably, the method obtains state of the art results in benchmarks that are commonly applied to gradient-based methods as well as in those that are employed mostly for evaluating attribution methods. Using a new unsupervised procedure, our method is also successful in demonstrating that self-supervised methods learn semantic information.