Given semantic descriptions of object classes, zeroshot learning aims to accurately recognize objects of the unseen classes, from which no examples are available at the training stage, by associating them to the seen classes, from which labeled examples are provided. We propose to tackle this problem from the perspective of manifold learning. Our main idea is to align the semantic space that is derived from external information to the model space that concerns itself with recognizing visual features. To this end, we introduce a set of "phantom" object classes whose coordinates live in both the semantic space and the model space. Serving as bases in a dictionary, they can be optimized from labeled data such that the synthesized real object classifiers achieve optimal discriminative performance. We demonstrate superior accuracy of our approach over the state of the art on four benchmark datasets for zero-shot learning, including the full ImageNet Fall 2011 dataset with more than 20,000 unseen classes.

Abstract. We propose a novel supervised learning technique for summarizing videos by automatically selecting keyframes or key subshots. Casting the task as a structured prediction problem, our main idea is to use Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to model the variable-range temporal dependency among video frames, so as to derive both representative and compact video summaries. The proposed model successfully accounts for the sequential structure crucial to generating meaningful video summaries, leading to state-of-the-art results on two benchmark datasets. In addition to advances in modeling techniques, we introduce a strategy to address the need for a large amount of annotated data for training complex learning approaches to summarization. There, our main idea is to exploit auxiliary annotated video summarization datasets, in spite of their heterogeneity in visual styles and contents. Specifically, we show that domain adaptation techniques can improve learning by reducing the discrepancies in the original datasets' statistical properties.

Conditional random fields for sequence labeling offer advantages over both generative models like HMMs and classifiers applied at each sequence position. Among sequence labeling tasks in language processing, shallow parsing has received much attention, with the development of standard evaluation datasets and extensive comparison among methods. We show here how to train a conditional random field to achieve performance as good as any reported base noun-phrase chunking method on the CoNLL task, and better than any reported single model. Improved training methods based on modern optimization algorithms were critical in achieving these results. We present extensive comparisons between models and training methods that confirm and strengthen previous results on shallow parsing and training methods for maximum-entropy models.

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Abstract. Zero-shot learning (ZSL) methods have been studied in the unrealistic setting where test data are assumed to come from unseen classes only. In this paper, we advocate studying the problem of generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL) where the test data's class memberships are unconstrained. We show empirically that naively using the classifiers constructed by ZSL approaches does not perform well in the generalized setting. Motivated by this, we propose a simple but effective calibration method that can be used to balance two conflicting forces: recognizing data from seen classes versus those from unseen ones. We develop a performance metric to characterize such a trade-off and examine the utility of this metric in evaluating various ZSL approaches. Our analysis further shows that there is a large gap between the performance of existing approaches and an upper bound established via idealized semantic embeddings, suggesting that improving class semantic embeddings is vital to GZSL.

We introduce a fast deformable spatial pyramid (DSP)

We address the problem of visual category recognition by learning an image-to-image distance function that attempts to satisfy the following property Figure 1. Three images from the Caltech101 data set, two from the dog category, one from the Faces category. We want to learn distance functions between pairs of images such that the distance from j to i (Dji) is smaller than from k to i (D ki ). Triplets like this one form the basis of our learning algorithm.

Many problems in neural computation and statistical learning involve optimizations with nonnegativity constraints. In this article, we study convex problems in quadratic programming where the optimization is confined to an axis-aligned region in the nonnegative orthant. For these problems, we derive multiplicative updates that improve the value of the objective function at each iteration and converge monotonically to the global minimum. The updates have a simple closed form and do not involve any heuristics or free parameters that must be tuned to ensure convergence. Despite their simplicity, they differ strikingly in form from other multiplicative updates used in machine learning.We provide complete proofs of convergence for these updates and describe their application to problems in signal processing and pattern recognition. Many problems in neural computation and statistical learning involve optimizations with nonnegativity constraints. In this article, we study convex problems in quadratic programming where the optimization is confined to an axis-aligned region in the nonnegative orthant. For these problems, we derive multiplicative updates that improve the value of the objective function at each iteration and converge monotonically to the global minimum. The updates have a simple closed form and do not involve any heuristics or free parameters that must be tuned to ensure convergence. Despite their simplicity, they differ strikingly in form from other multiplicative updates used in machine learning. We provide complete proofs of convergence for these updates and describe their application to problems in signal processing and pattern recognition. Disciplines Medicine and Health Sciences