Jingjing Fei

Ye Du, Yujun Shen, Haochen Wang et al.

Self-training has shown great potential in semi-supervised learning. Its core idea is to use the model learned on labeled data to generate pseudo-labels for unlabeled samples, and in turn teach itself. To obtain valid supervision, active attempts typically employ a momentum teacher for pseudo-label prediction yet observe the confirmation bias issue, where the incorrect predictions may provide wrong supervision signals and get accumulated in the training process. The primary cause of such a drawback is that the prevailing self-training framework acts as guiding the current state with previous knowledge, because the teacher is updated with the past student only. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel self-training strategy, which allows the model to learn from the future. Concretely, at each training step, we first virtually optimize the student (i.e., caching the gradients without applying them to the model weights), then update the teacher with the virtual future student, and finally ask the teacher to produce pseudo-labels for the current student as the guidance. In this way, we manage to improve the quality of pseudo-labels and thus boost the performance. We also develop two variants of our future-self-training (FST) framework through peeping at the future both deeply (FST-D) and widely (FST-W). Taking the tasks of unsupervised domain adaptive semantic segmentation and semi-supervised semantic segmentation as the instances, we experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our approach under a wide range of settings. Code will be made publicly available.

Tianpeng Bao, Jiadong Chen, Wei Li et al.

Visual anomaly detection plays a crucial role in not only manufacturing inspection to find defects of products during manufacturing processes, but also maintenance inspection to keep equipment in optimum working condition particularly outdoors. Due to the scarcity of the defective samples, unsupervised anomaly detection has attracted great attention in recent years. However, existing datasets for unsupervised anomaly detection are biased towards manufacturing inspection, not considering maintenance inspection which is usually conducted under outdoor uncontrolled environment such as varying camera viewpoints, messy background and degradation of object surface after long-term working. We focus on outdoor maintenance inspection and contribute a comprehensive Maintenance Inspection Anomaly Detection (MIAD) dataset which contains more than 100K high-resolution color images in various outdoor industrial scenarios. This dataset is generated by a 3D graphics software and covers both surface and logical anomalies with pixel-precise ground truth. Extensive evaluations of representative algorithms for unsupervised anomaly detection are conducted, and we expect MIAD and corresponding experimental results can inspire research community in outdoor unsupervised anomaly detection tasks. Worthwhile and related future work can be spawned from our new dataset.

Jingjing Fei, Shiliang Sun

Online anomaly detection of time-series data is an important and challenging task in machine learning. Gaussian processes (GPs) are powerful and flexible models for modeling time-series data. However, the high time complexity of GPs limits their applications in online anomaly detection. Attributed to some internal or external changes, concept drift usually occurs in time-series data, where the characteristics of data and meanings of abnormal behaviors alter over time. Online anomaly detection methods should have the ability to adapt to concept drift. Motivated by the above facts, this paper proposes the method of sparse Gaussian processes with Q-function (SGP-Q). The SGP-Q employs sparse Gaussian processes (SGPs) whose time complexity is lower than that of GPs, thus significantly speeding up online anomaly detection. By using Q-function properly, the SGP-Q can adapt to concept drift well. Moreover, the SGP-Q makes use of few abnormal data in the training data by its strategy of updating training data, resulting in more accurate sparse Gaussian process regression models and better anomaly detection results. We evaluate the SGP-Q on various artificial and real-world datasets. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the SGP-Q.