Vikas Singh

Yunyang Xiong, Hanxiao Liu, Suyog Gupta et al.

Inverted bottleneck layers, which are built upon depthwise convolutions, have been the predominant building blocks in state-of-the-art object detection models on mobile devices. In this work, we investigate the optimality of this design pattern over a broad range of mobile accelerators by revisiting the usefulness of regular convolutions. We discover that regular convolutions are a potent component to boost the latency-accuracy trade-off for object detection on accelerators, provided that they are placed strategically in the network via neural architecture search. By incorporating regular convolutions in the search space and directly optimizing the network architectures for object detection, we obtain a family of object detection models, MobileDets, that achieve state-of-the-art results across mobile accelerators. On the COCO object detection task, MobileDets outperform MobileNetV3+SSDLite by 1.7 mAP at comparable mobile CPU inference latencies. MobileDets also outperform MobileNetV2+SSDLite by 1.9 mAP on mobile CPUs, 3.7 mAP on Google EdgeTPU, 3.4 mAP on Qualcomm Hexagon DSP and 2.7 mAP on Nvidia Jetson GPU without increasing latency. Moreover, MobileDets are comparable with the state-of-the-art MnasFPN on mobile CPUs even without using the feature pyramid, and achieve better mAP scores on both EdgeTPUs and DSPs with up to 2x speedup. Code and models are available in the TensorFlow Object Detection API: https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/research/object_detection.

Vikas Singh

Noise is inevitably common in digital images, leading to visual image deterioration. Therefore, a suitable filtering method is required to lessen the noise while preserving the image features (edges, corners, etc.). This paper presents the efficient type-2 fuzzy weighted mean filter with an adaptive threshold to remove the SAP noise. The present filter has two primary steps: The first stage categorizes images as lightly, medium, and heavily corrupted based on an adaptive threshold by comparing the M-ALD of processed pixels with the upper and lower MF of the type-2 fuzzy identifier. The second stage eliminates corrupted pixels by computing the appropriate weight using GMF with the mean and variance of the uncorrupted pixels in the filter window. Simulation results vividly show that the obtained denoised images preserve image features, i.e., edges, corners, and other sharp structures, compared with different filtering methods.

Zihang Meng, Vikas Singh, Sathya N. Ravi

We study how stochastic differential equation (SDE) based ideas can inspire new modifications to existing algorithms for a set of problems in computer vision. Loosely speaking, our formulation is related to both explicit and implicit strategies for data augmentation and group equivariance, but is derived from new results in the SDE literature on estimating infinitesimal generators of a class of stochastic processes. If and when there is nominal agreement between the needs of an application/task and the inherent properties and behavior of the types of processes that we can efficiently handle, we obtain a very simple and efficient plug-in layer that can be incorporated within any existing network architecture, with minimal modification and only a few additional parameters. We show promising experiments on a number of vision tasks including few shot learning, point cloud transformers and deep variational segmentation obtaining efficiency or performance improvements.

Zihang Meng, Rudrasis Chakraborty, Vikas Singh

We present an efficient stochastic algorithm (RSG+) for canonical correlation analysis (CCA) using a reparametrization of the projection matrices. We show how this reparametrization (into structured matrices), simple in hindsight, directly presents an opportunity to repurpose/adjust mature techniques for numerical optimization on Riemannian manifolds. Our developments nicely complement existing methods for this problem which either require $O(d^3)$ time complexity per iteration with $O(\frac{1}{\sqrt{t}})$ convergence rate (where $d$ is the dimensionality) or only extract the top $1$ component with $O(\frac{1}{t})$ convergence rate. In contrast, our algorithm offers a strict improvement for this classical problem: it achieves $O(d^2k)$ runtime complexity per iteration for extracting the top $k$ canonical components with $O(\frac{1}{t})$ convergence rate. While the paper primarily focuses on the formulation and technical analysis of its properties, our experiments show that the empirical behavior on common datasets is quite promising. We also explore a potential application in training fair models where the label of protected attribute is missing or otherwise unavailable.

Zihang Meng, Licheng Yu, Ning Zhang et al.

We introduce a unified framework to jointly model images, text, and human attention traces. Our work is built on top of the recent Localized Narratives annotation framework [30], where each word of a given caption is paired with a mouse trace segment. We propose two novel tasks: (1) predict a trace given an image and caption (i.e., visual grounding), and (2) predict a caption and a trace given only an image. Learning the grounding of each word is challenging, due to noise in the human-provided traces and the presence of words that cannot be meaningfully visually grounded. We present a novel model architecture that is jointly trained on dual tasks (controlled trace generation and controlled caption generation). To evaluate the quality of the generated traces, we propose a local bipartite matching (LBM) distance metric which allows the comparison of two traces of different lengths. Extensive experiments show our model is robust to the imperfect training data and outperforms the baselines by a clear margin. Moreover, we demonstrate that our model pre-trained on the proposed tasks can be also beneficial to the downstream task of COCO's guided image captioning. Our code and project page are publicly available.

Teja Kanchinadam, Zihang Meng, Joseph Bockhorst et al.

Customer satisfaction is an important factor in creating and maintaining long-term relationships with customers. Near real-time identification of potentially dissatisfied customers following phone calls can provide organizations the opportunity to take meaningful interventions and to foster ongoing customer satisfaction and loyalty. This work describes a fully operational system we have developed at a large US company for predicting customer satisfaction following incoming phone calls. The system takes as an input speech-to-text transcriptions of calls and predicts call satisfaction reported by customers on post-call surveys (scale from 1 to 10). Because of its ordinal, subjective, and often highly-skewed nature, predicting survey scores is not a trivial task and presents several modeling challenges. We introduce a graph neural network (GNN) approach that takes into account the comparative nature of the problem by considering the relative scores among batches, instead of only pairs of calls when training. This approach produces more accurate predictions than previous approaches including standard regression and classification models that directly fit the survey scores with call data. Our proposed approach can be easily generalized to other customer satisfaction prediction problems.

Vikas Singh, Homanga Bharadhwaj, Nishchal K Verma

Clustering techniques have been proved highly suc-cessful for Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy model identification. Inparticular, fuzzyc-regression clustering based on type-2 fuzzyset has been shown the remarkable results on non-sparse databut their performance degraded on sparse data. In this paper, aninnovative architecture for fuzzyc-regression model is presentedand a novel student-tdistribution based membership functionis designed for sparse data modelling. To avoid the overfitting,we have adopted a Bayesian approach for incorporating aGaussian prior on the regression coefficients. Additional noveltyof our approach lies in type-reduction where the final output iscomputed using Karnik Mendel algorithm and the consequentparameters of the model are optimized using Stochastic GradientDescent method. As detailed experimentation, the result showsthat proposed approach outperforms on standard datasets incomparison of various state-of-the-art methods.

Vikas Singh, Pooja Agrawal, Teena Sharma et al.

Image denoising is one of the preliminary steps in image processing methods in which the presence of noise can deteriorate the image quality. To overcome this limitation, in this paper a improved two-stage fuzzy filter is proposed for filtering salt and pepper noise from the images. In the first-stage, the pixels in the image are categorized as good or noisy based on adaptive thresholding using type-2 fuzzy logic with exclusively two different membership functions in the filter window. In the second-stage, the noisy pixels are denoised using modified ordinary fuzzy logic in the respective filter window. The proposed filter is validated on standard images with various noise levels. The proposed filter removes the noise and preserves useful image characteristics, i.e., edges and corners at higher noise level. The performance of the proposed filter is compared with the various state-of-the-art methods in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio and computation time. To show the effectiveness of filter statistical tests, i.e., Friedman test and Bonferroni-Dunn (BD) test are also carried out which clearly ascertain that the proposed filter outperforms in comparison of various filtering approaches.

Nishchal K. Verma, T. Sharma, S. Dixit et al.

This paper introduces a novel toolbox named BIDEAL for the generation of biclusters, their analysis, visualization, and validation. The objective is to facilitate researchers to use forefront biclustering algorithms embedded on a single platform. A single toolbox comprising various biclustering algorithms play a vital role to extract meaningful patterns from the data for detecting diseases, biomarkers, gene-drug association, etc. BIDEAL consists of seventeen biclustering algorithms, three biclusters visualization techniques, and six validation indices. The toolbox can analyze several types of data, including biological data through a graphical user interface. It also facilitates data preprocessing techniques i.e., binarization, discretization, normalization, elimination of null and missing values. The effectiveness of the developed toolbox has been presented through testing and validations on Saccharomyces cerevisiae cell cycle, Leukemia cancer, Mammary tissue profile, and Ligand screen in B-cells datasets. The biclusters of these datasets have been generated using BIDEAL and evaluated in terms of coherency, differential co-expression ranking, and similarity measure. The visualization of generated biclusters has also been provided through a heat map and gene plot.

Vikas Singh, Nishchal K. Verma

In recent years, intelligent condition-based monitor-ing of rotary machinery systems has become a major researchfocus of machine fault diagnosis. In condition-based monitoring,it is challenging to form a large-scale well-annotated datasetdue to the expense of data acquisition and costly annotation.The generated data have a large number of redundant featureswhich degraded the performance of the machine learning models.To overcome this, we have utilized the advantages of minimumredundancy maximum relevance (mRMR) and transfer learningwith a deep learning model. In this work,mRMRis combinedwith deep learning and deep transfer learning framework toimprove the fault diagnostics performance in terms of accuracyand computational complexity. ThemRMRreduces the redundantinformation from data and increases the deep learning perfor-mance, whereas transfer learning, reduces a large amount of datadependency for training the model. In the proposed work, twoframeworks, i.e.,mRMRwith deep learning andmRMRwith deeptransfer learning, have explored and validated on CWRU andIMS rolling element bearings datasets. The analysis shows thatthe proposed frameworks can obtain better diagnostic accuracycompared to existing methods and can handle the data with alarge number of features more quickly.

Vikas Singh, Nishchal K. Verma

This paper presents a new fuzzy k-means algorithm for the clustering of high-dimensional data in various subspaces. Since high-dimensional data, some features might be irrelevant and relevant but may have different significance in the clustering process. For better clustering, it is crucial to incorporate the contribution of these features in the clustering process. To combine these features, in this paper, we have proposed a novel fuzzy k-means clustering algorithm by modifying the objective function of the fuzzy k-means using two different entropy terms. The first entropy term helps to minimize the within-cluster dispersion and maximize the negative entropy to determine clusters to contribute to the association of data points. The second entropy term helps control the weight of the features because different features have different contributing weights during the clustering to obtain a better partition. The proposed approach performance is presented in various clustering measures (AR, RI and NMI) on multiple datasets and compared with six other state-of-the-art methods. Impact Statement- In real-world applications, cluster-dependent feature weights help in partitioning the data set into more meaningful clusters. These features may be relevant, irrelevant, or redundant, but they each have different contributions during the clustering process. In this paper, a cluster-dependent feature weights approach is presented using fuzzy k-means to assign higher weights to relevant features and lower weights to irrelevant features during clustering. The method is validated using both supervised and unsupervised performance measures on real-world and synthetic datasets to demonstrate its effectiveness compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Haoliang Sun, Ronak Mehta, Hao H. Zhou et al.

Positron emission tomography (PET) imaging is an imaging modality for diagnosing a number of neurological diseases. In contrast to Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), PET is costly and involves injecting a radioactive substance into the patient. Motivated by developments in modality transfer in vision, we study the generation of certain types of PET images from MRI data. We derive new flow-based generative models which we show perform well in this small sample size regime (much smaller than dataset sizes available in standard vision tasks). Our formulation, DUAL-GLOW, is based on two invertible networks and a relation network that maps the latent spaces to each other. We discuss how given the prior distribution, learning the conditional distribution of PET given the MRI image reduces to obtaining the conditional distribution between the two latent codes w.r.t. the two image types. We also extend our framework to leverage 'side' information (or attributes) when available. By controlling the PET generation through 'conditioning' on age, our model is also able to capture brain FDG-PET (hypometabolism) changes, as a function of age. We present experiments on the Alzheimers Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset with 826 subjects, and obtain good performance in PET image synthesis, qualitatively and quantitatively better than recent works.

Yunyang Xiong, Ronak Mehta, Vikas Singh

The design of neural network architectures is frequently either based on human expertise using trial/error and empirical feedback or tackled via large scale reinforcement learning strategies performed over distinct discrete architecture choices. In the latter case, the optimization is often non-differentiable and also not very amenable to derivative-free optimization methods. Most methods in use today require sizable computational resources. And if we want networks that additionally satisfy resource constraints, the above challenges are exacerbated because the search must now balance accuracy with certain budget constraints on resources. We formulate this problem as the optimization of a set function -- we find that the empirical behavior of this set function often (but not always) satisfies marginal gain and monotonicity principles -- properties central to the idea of submodularity. Based on this observation, we adapt algorithms within discrete optimization to obtain heuristic schemes for neural network architecture search, where we have resource constraints on the architecture. This simple scheme when applied on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet, identifies resource-constrained architectures with quantifiably better performance than current state-of-the-art models designed for mobile devices. Specifically, we find high-performing architectures with fewer parameters and computations by a search method that is much faster.

Vamsi K Ithapu, Sathya Ravi, Vikas Singh

The success of deep architectures is at least in part attributed to the layer-by-layer unsupervised pre-training that initializes the network. Various papers have reported extensive empirical analysis focusing on the design and implementation of good pre-training procedures. However, an understanding pertaining to the consistency of parameter estimates, the convergence of learning procedures and the sample size estimates is still unavailable in the literature. In this work, we study pre-training in classical and distributed denoising autoencoders with these goals in mind. We show that the gradient converges at the rate of $\frac{1}{\sqrt{N}}$ and has a sub-linear dependence on the size of the autoencoder network. In a distributed setting where disjoint sections of the whole network are pre-trained synchronously, we show that the convergence improves by at least $τ^{3/4}$, where $τ$ corresponds to the size of the sections. We provide a broad set of experiments to empirically evaluate the suggested behavior.