We use Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) for image segmentation problems. DCNNs can well extract the features from natural images. However, the classification functions in the existing network architecture of CNNs are simple and lack capabilities to handle important spatial information in a way that have been done for many well-known traditional variational models. Prior such as spatial regularity, volume prior and object shapes cannot be well handled by existing DCNNs. We propose a novel Soft Threshold Dynamics (STD) framework which can easily integrate many spatial priors of the classical variational models into the DCNNs for image segmentation. The novelty of our method is to interpret the softmax activation function as a dual variable in a variational problem, and thus many spatial priors can be imposed in the dual space. From this viewpoint, we can build a STD based framework which can enable the outputs of DCNNs to have many special priors such as spatial regularity, volume constraints and star-shape priori. The proposed method is a general mathematical framework and it can be applied to any semantic segmentation DCNNs. To show the efficiency and accuracy of our method, we applied it to the popular DeepLabV3+ image segmentation network, and the experiments results show that our method can work efficiently on data-driven image segmentation DCNNs.
Federal Institute of São Carlos - UFSCar（圣卡洛斯联邦学院）；São Paulo State University - UNESP（圣保罗州立大学）
Several image processing tasks, such as image classification and object detection, have been significantly improved using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). Like ResNet and EfficientNet, many architectures have achieved outstanding results in at least one dataset by the time of their creation. A critical factor in training concerns the network's regularization, which prevents the structure from overfitting. This work analyzes several regularization methods developed in the last few years, showing significant improvements for different CNN models. The works are classified into three main area…
University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；NTT Media Intelligence Laboratories, NTT Corporation（日本电报电话公司NTT媒体情报实验室）
Graph convolutional networks have been successfully applied in various graph-based tasks. In a typical graph convolutional layer, node features are updated by aggregating neighborhood information. Repeatedly applying graph convolutions can cause the oversmoothing issue, i.e., node features at deep layers converge to similar values. Previous studies have suggested that oversmoothing is one of the major issues that restrict the performance of graph convolutional networks. In this paper, we propose a stochastic regularization method to tackle the oversmoothing problem. In the proposed method, we …
Hong Kong Baptist University（香港浸会大学）；Beijing Normal University（北京师范大学）
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) show outstanding performance in many image processing problems, such as image recognition, object detection and image segmentation. Semantic segmentation is a very challenging task that requires recognizing, understanding what's in the image in pixel level. Though the state of the art has been greatly improved by CNNs, there is no explicit connections between prediction of neighbouring pixels. That is, spatial regularity of the segmented objects is still a problem for CNNs. In this paper, we propose a method to add spatial regularization to the segmented ob…
Incheon National University（仁川大学）；Dain Technology, Inc.
Modern convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have massive identical convolution blocks, and, hence, recursive sharing of parameters across these blocks has been proposed to reduce the amount of parameters. However, naive sharing of parameters poses many challenges such as limited representational power and the vanishing/exploding gradients problem of recursively shared parameters. In this paper, we present a recursive convolution block design and training method, in which a recursively shareable part, or a filter basis, is separated and learned while effectively avoiding the vanishing/exploding…
National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University（台湾阳明交通大学）
This work addresses weakly-supervised image semantic segmentation based on image-level class labels. One common approach to this task is to propagate the activation scores of Class Activation Maps (CAMs) using a random-walk mechanism in order to arrive at complete pseudo labels for training a semantic segmentation network in a fully-supervised manner. However, the feed-forward nature of the random walk imposes no regularization on the quality of the resulting complete pseudo labels. To overcome this issue, we propose a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN)-based feature propagation framework. We f…
Robust Convolution Neural ODEs via Contractivity-promoting regularization
Control & Automation Group, Inspire AG（控制与自动化组，Inspire AG）；Automatic Control Laboratory (IfA), ETH Zürich（自动控制实验室（IfA），ETH苏黎世）；School of Future Technology, Shanghai University（未来技术学院，上海大学）；Hangzhou International Innovation Institute, Beihang University（杭州国际创新院，北航）；Laboratoire d’Automatique, EPFL（自动化实验室，EPFL）
Swiss Data Science Center, ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院瑞士数据科学中心）；Wageningen University and Research（瓦赫宁根大学及研究中心）
When approaching the semantic segmentation of overhead imagery in the decimeter spatial resolution range, successful strategies usually combine powerful methods to learn the visual appearance of the semantic classes (e.g. convolutional neural networks) with strategies for spatial regularization (e.g. graphical models such as conditional random fields). In this paper, we propose a method to learn evidence in the form of semantic class likelihoods, semantic boundaries across classes and shallow-to-deep visual features, each one modeled by a multi-task convolutional neural network architecture. W…
We investigate the potential of stochastic neural networks for learning effective waveform-based acoustic models. The waveform-based setting, inherent to fully end-to-end speech recognition systems, is motivated by several comparative studies of automatic and human speech recognition that associate standard non-adaptive feature extraction techniques with information loss which can adversely affect robustness. Stochastic neural networks, on the other hand, are a class of models capable of incorporating rich regularization mechanisms into the learning process. We consider a deep convolutional ne…
Since the convolutional neural networks are often trained with redundant parameters, it is possible to reduce redundant kernels or filters to obtain a compact network without dropping the classification accuracy. In this paper, we propose a filter pruning method using the hierarchical group sparse regularization. It is shown in our previous work that the hierarchical group sparse regularization is effective in obtaining sparse networks in which filters connected to unnecessary channels are automatically close to zero. After training the convolutional neural network with the hierarchical group …
In a deep neural network (DNN), the number of the parameters is usually huge to get high learning performances. For that reason, it costs a lot of memory and substantial computational resources, and also causes overfitting. It is known that some parameters are redundant and can be removed from the network without decreasing performance. Many sparse regularization criteria have been proposed to solve this problem. In a convolutional neural network (CNN), group sparse regularizations are often used to remove unnecessary subsets of the weights, such as filters or channels. When we apply a group s…
Image animation generates a video of a source image following the motion of a driving video. State-of-the-art self-supervised image animation approaches warp the source image according to the motion of the driving video and recover the warping artifacts by inpainting. These approaches mostly use vanilla convolution for inpainting, and vanilla convolution does not distinguish between valid and invalid pixels. As a result, visual artifacts are still noticeable after inpainting. CutMix is a state-of-the-art regularization strategy that cuts and mixes patches of images and is widely studied in dif…
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Dropout regularization has been widely used in deep learning but performs less effective for convolutional neural networks since the spatially correlated features allow dropped information to still flow through the networks. Some structured forms of dropout have been proposed to address this but prone to result in over or under regularization as features are dropped randomly. In this paper, we propose a targeted regularization method named TargetDrop which incorporates the attention mechanism to drop the discriminative feature units. Specifically, it masks out the target regions of the feature…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；SUTD-ZJU IDEA（新加坡科技设计大学-浙江大学 信息与数据科学联合实验室）；Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）
Despite enjoying extensive applications in video analysis, three-dimensional convolutional neural networks (3D CNNs)are restricted by their massive computation and storage consumption. To solve this problem, we propose a threedimensional regularization-based neural network pruning method to assign different regularization parameters to different weight groups based on their importance to the network. Further we analyze the redundancy and computation cost for each layer to determine the different pruning ratios. Experiments show that pruning based on our method can lead to 2x theoretical speedu…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Singapore Telecommunications Limited（新加坡电信有限公司）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）
Regularization is commonly used for alleviating overfitting in machine learning. For convolutional neural networks (CNNs), regularization methods, such as DropBlock and Shake-Shake, have illustrated the improvement in the generalization performance. However, these methods lack a self-adaptive ability throughout training. That is, the regularization strength is fixed to a predefined schedule, and manual adjustments are required to adapt to various network architectures. In this paper, we propose a dynamic regularization method for CNNs. Specifically, we model the regularization strength as a fu…
National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；York University（约克大学）
The past few years have witnessed the fast development of different regularization methods for deep learning models such as fully-connected deep neural networks (DNNs) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Most of previous methods mainly consider to drop features from input data and hidden layers, such as Dropout, Cutout and DropBlocks. DropConnect select to drop connections between fully-connected layers. By randomly discard some features or connections, the above mentioned methods control the overfitting problem and improve the performance of neural networks. In this paper, we proposed t…
Deep neural networks often work well when they are over-parameterized and trained with a massive amount of noise and regularization, such as weight decay and dropout. Although dropout is widely used as a regularization technique for fully connected layers, it is often less effective for convolutional layers. This lack of success of dropout for convolutional layers is perhaps due to the fact that activation units in convolutional layers are spatially correlated so information can still flow through convolutional networks despite dropout. Thus a structured form of dropout is needed to regularize…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）
Convolutional Neural networks (CNNs) based applications have become ubiquitous, where proper regularization is greatly needed. To prevent large neural network models from overfitting, dropout has been widely used as an efficient regularization technique in practice. However, many recent works show that the standard dropout is ineffective or even detrimental to the training of CNNs. In this paper, we revisit this issue and examine various dropout variants in an attempt to improve existing dropout-based regularization techniques for CNNs. We attribute the failure of standard dropout to the confl…
We propose Absum, which is a regularization method for improving adversarial robustness of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Although CNNs can accurately recognize images, recent studies have shown that the convolution operations in CNNs commonly have structural sensitivity to specific noise composed of Fourier basis functions. By exploiting this sensitivity, they proposed a simple black-box adversarial attack: Single Fourier attack. To reduce structural sensitivity, we can use regularization of convolution filter weights since the sensitivity of linear transform can be assessed by the nor…
Recently, dropout has seen increasing use in deep learning. For deep convolutional neural networks, dropout is known to work well in fully-connected layers. However, its effect in pooling layers is still not clear. This paper demonstrates that max-pooling dropout is equivalent to randomly picking activation based on a multinomial distribution at training time. In light of this insight, we advocate employing our proposed probabilistic weighted pooling, instead of commonly used max-pooling, to act as model averaging at test time. Empirical evidence validates the superiority of probabilistic weig…
University of Guelph（圭尔夫大学）；Canadian Institute for Advanced Research（加拿大高等研究院）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）
Convolutional neural networks are capable of learning powerful representational spaces, which are necessary for tackling complex learning tasks. However, due to the model capacity required to capture such representations, they are often susceptible to overfitting and therefore require proper regularization in order to generalize well. In this paper, we show that the simple regularization technique of randomly masking out square regions of input during training, which we call cutout, can be used to improve the robustness and overall performance of convolutional neural networks. Not only is this…
Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrück（奥斯纳布吕克大学认知科学研究所）
Data augmentation is a popular technique largely used to enhance the training of convolutional neural networks. Although many of its benefits are well known by deep learning researchers and practitioners, its implicit regularization effects, as compared to popular explicit regularization techniques, such as weight decay and dropout, remain largely unstudied. As a matter of fact, convolutional neural networks for image object classification are typically trained with both data augmentation and explicit regularization, assuming the benefits of all techniques are complementary. In this paper, we …
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have emerged as highly successful tools for image generation, recovery, and restoration. A major contributing factor to this success is that convolutional networks impose strong prior assumptions about natural images. A surprising experiment that highlights this architectural bias towards natural images is that one can remove noise and corruptions from a natural image without using any training data, by simply fitting (via gradient descent) a randomly initialized, over-parameterized convolutional generator to the corrupted image. While this over-parameteriz…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Adobe Research（Adobe研究）；Alibaba AI Labs（阿里巴巴人工智能实验室）；NVIDIA（英伟达）
It is desirable to train convolutional networks (CNNs) to run more efficiently during inference. In many cases however, the computational budget that the system has for inference cannot be known beforehand during training, or the inference budget is dependent on the changing real-time resource availability. Thus, it is inadequate to train just inference-efficient CNNs, whose inference costs are not adjustable and cannot adapt to varied inference budgets. We propose a novel approach for cost-adjustable inference in CNNs - Stochastic Downsampling Point (SDPoint). During training, SDPoint applies…
Regularization in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is usually addressed with dropout layers. However, dropout is sometimes detrimental in the convolutional part of a CNN as it simply sets to zero a percentage of pixels in the feature maps, adding unrepresentative examples during training. Here, we propose a CNN layer that performs regularization by applying random rotations of reflections to a small percentage of feature maps after every convolutional layer. We prove how this concept is beneficial for images with orientational symmetries, such as in medical images, as it provides a certain…
Convolution Neural Networks, known as ConvNets exceptionally perform well in many complex machine learning tasks. The architecture of ConvNets demands the huge and rich amount of data and involves with a vast number of parameters that leads the learning takes to be computationally expensive, slow convergence towards the global minima, trap in local minima with poor predictions. In some cases, architecture overfits the data and make the architecture difficult to generalise for new samples that were not in the training set samples. To address these limitations, many regularization and optimizati…
Tensor decomposition is one of the fundamental technique for model compression of deep convolution neural networks owing to its ability to reveal the latent relations among complex structures. However, most existing methods compress the networks layer by layer, which cannot provide a satisfactory solution to achieve global optimization. In this paper, we proposed a model reduction method to compress the pre-trained networks using low-rank tensor decomposition of the convolution layers. Our method is based on the optimization techniques to select the proper ranks of decomposed network layers. A…
Street scene understanding is an essential task for autonomous driving. One important step towards this direction is scene labeling, which annotates each pixel in the images with a correct class label. Although many approaches have been developed, there are still some weak points. Firstly, many methods are based on the hand-crafted features whose image representation ability is limited. Secondly, they can not label foreground objects accurately due to the dataset bias. Thirdly, in the refinement stage, the traditional Markov Random Filed (MRF) inference is prone to over smoothness. For improvi…
Convolutional neural networks have been achieving the best possible accuracies in many visual pattern classification problems. However, due to the model capacity required to capture such representations, they are often oversensitive to overfitting and therefore require proper regularization to generalize well. In this paper, we present a combination of regularization techniques which work together to get better performance, we built plain CNNs, and then we used data augmentation, dropout and customized early stopping function, we tested and evaluated these techniques by applying models on five…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；National Engineering Research Center of Digital Life, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学国家数字生活工程技术研究中心）；Central China Normal University（华中师范大学）
Tensor data often suffer from missing value problem due to the complex high-dimensional structure while acquiring them. To complete the missing information, lots of Low-Rank Tensor Completion (LRTC) methods have been proposed, most of which depend on the low-rank property of tensor data. In this way, the low-rank component of the original data could be recovered roughly. However, the shortcoming is that the detail information can not be fully restored, no matter the Sum of the Nuclear Norm (SNN) nor the Tensor Nuclear Norm (TNN) based methods. On the contrary, in the field of signal processing…
We hypothesize that anatomical priors can be viable mediums to infuse domain-specific clinical knowledge into state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNN) based on the U-Net architecture. We introduce a probabilistic population prior which captures the spatial prevalence and zonal distinction of clinically significant prostate cancer (csPCa), in order to improve its computer-aided detection (CAD) in bi-parametric MR imaging (bpMRI). To evaluate performance, we train 3D adaptations of the U-Net, U-SEResNet, UNet++ and Attention U-Net using 800 institutional training-validation scans, pa…
Federal University of São Carlos（圣卡洛斯联邦大学）；São Paulo State University（圣保罗州立大学）；University of Wolverhampton（伍尔弗汉普顿大学）
In the last decade, exponential data growth supplied the machine learning-based algorithms' capacity and enabled their usage in daily life activities. Additionally, such an improvement is partially explained due to the advent of deep learning techniques, i.e., stacks of simple architectures that end up in more complex models. Although both factors produce outstanding results, they also pose drawbacks regarding the learning process since training complex models denotes an expensive task and results are prone to overfit the training data. A supervised regularization technique called MaxDropout w…
This paper proposes a novel Convolutional Neural Network model for contour data analysis (ContourCNN) and shape classification. A contour is a circular sequence of points representing a closed shape. For handling the cyclical property of the contour representation, we employ circular convolution layers. Contours are often represented sparsely. To address information sparsity, we introduce priority pooling layers that select features based on their magnitudes. Priority pooling layers pool features with low magnitudes while leaving the rest unchanged. We evaluated the proposed model using letter…
In spite of achieving revolutionary successes in machine learning, deep convolutional neural networks have been recently found to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks and difficult to generalize to novel test images with reasonably large geometric transformations. Inspired by a recent neuroscience discovery revealing that primate brain employs disentangled shape and appearance representations for object recognition, we propose a general disentangled deep autoencoding regularization framework that can be easily applied to any deep embedding based classification model for improving the robustnes…
Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；University of Michigan, Ann Arbor（密歇根大学安娜堡分校）
Large CNNs have delivered impressive performance in various computer vision applications. But the storage and computation requirements make it problematic for deploying these models on mobile devices. Recently, tensor decompositions have been used for speeding up CNNs. In this paper, we further develop the tensor decomposition technique. We propose a new algorithm for computing the low-rank tensor decomposition for removing the redundancy in the convolution kernels. The algorithm finds the exact global optimizer of the decomposition and is more effective than iterative methods. Based on the de…
We propose Attentive Regularization (AR), a method to constrain the activation maps of kernels in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to specific regions of interest (ROIs). Each kernel learns a location of specialization along with its weights through standard backpropagation. A differentiable attention mechanism requiring no additional supervision is used to optimize the ROIs. Traditional CNNs of different types and structures can be modified with this idea into equivalent Targeted Kernel Networks (TKNs), while keeping the network size nearly identical. By restricting kernel ROIs, we reduce…
Graz University of Technology（格拉茨工业大学）；German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心）
We propose a machine learning based approach for automatic regularization and polygonization of building segmentation masks. Taking an image as input, we first predict building segmentation maps exploiting generic fully convolutional network (FCN). A generative adversarial network (GAN) is then involved to perform a regularization of building boundaries to make them more realistic, i.e., having more rectilinear outlines which construct right angles if required. This is achieved through the interplay between the discriminator which gives a probability of input image being true and generator tha…
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Recent deep learning-based methods have shown promising results and runtime advantages in deformable image registration. However, analyzing the effects of hyperparameters and searching for optimal regularization parameters prove to be too prohibitive in deep learning-based methods. This is because it involves training a substantial number of separate models with distinct hyperparameter values. In this paper, we propose a conditional image registration method and a new self-supervised learning paradigm for deep deformable image registration. By learning the conditional features that are correla…
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Fine-grained visual classification can be addressed by deep representation learning under supervision of manually pre-defined targets (e.g., one-hot or the Hadamard codes). Such target coding schemes are less flexible to model inter-class correlation and are sensitive to sparse and imbalanced data distribution as well. In light of this, this paper introduces a novel target coding scheme -- dynamic target relation graphs (DTRG), which, as an auxiliary feature regularization, is a self-generated structural output to be mapped from input images. Specifically, online computation of class-level fea…
The Overfocusing Bias of Convolutional Neural Networks: A Saliency-Guided Regularization Approach
IRT Saint-Exupéry（圣埃克苏佩里技术研究院）；IMT（法国国家矿业电信研究院）；INSA Toulouse（图卢兹国立应用科学学院）；ANITI Toulouse（图卢兹人工智能与数字技术研究所）；Université Paul Sabatier（保罗萨巴蒂尔大学）；ISAE-SUPAERO（法国高等航空航天学院）；Université de Toulouse（图卢兹大学）
Training convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with back-propagation (BP) is time-consuming and resource-intensive particularly in view of the need to visit the dataset multiple times. In contrast, analytic learning attempts to obtain the weights in one epoch. However, existing attempts to analytic learning considered only the multilayer perceptron (MLP). In this article, we propose an analytic convolutional neural network learning (ACnnL). Theoretically we show that ACnnL builds a closed-form solution similar to its MLP counterpart, but differs in their regularization constraints. Consequently…
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki（塞萨洛尼基亚里士多德大学）
In this paper, regularized lightweight deep convolutional neural network models, capable of effectively operating in real-time on devices with restricted computational power for high-resolution video input are proposed. Furthermore, a novel regularization method motivated by the Quadratic Mutual Information, in order to improve the generalization ability of the utilized models is proposed. Extensive experiments on various binary classification problems involved in autonomous systems are performed, indicating the effectiveness of the proposed models as well as of the proposed regularizer.
State-of-the-art computer vision models are rapidly increasing in capacity, where the number of parameters far exceeds the number required to fit the training set. This results in better optimization and generalization performance. However, the huge size of contemporary models results in large inference costs and limits their use on resource-limited devices. In order to reduce inference costs, convolutional filters in trained neural networks could be pruned to reduce the run-time memory and computational requirements during inference. However, severe post-training pruning results in degraded p…
Effective convolutional neural networks are trained on large sets of labeled data. However, creating large labeled datasets is a very costly and time-consuming task. Semi-supervised learning uses unlabeled data to train a model with higher accuracy when there is a limited set of labeled data available. In this paper, we consider the problem of semi-supervised learning with convolutional neural networks. Techniques such as randomized data augmentation, dropout and random max-pooling provide better generalization and stability for classifiers that are trained using gradient descent. Multiple pas…
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学（KAUST））
Convolutional Sparse Coding (CSC) is a well-established image representation model especially suited for image restoration tasks. In this work, we extend the applicability of this model by proposing a supervised approach to convolutional sparse coding, which aims at learning discriminative dictionaries instead of purely reconstructive ones. We incorporate a supervised regularization term into the traditional unsupervised CSC objective to encourage the final dictionary elements to be discriminative. Experimental results show that using supervised convolutional learning results in two key advant…
Offenburg University（奥芬堡大学）；Fraunhofer ITWM（弗劳恩霍夫工业数学研究所）；Fraunhofer Research Center ML（弗劳恩霍夫机器学习研究中心）
Deep learning models are intrinsically sensitive to distribution shifts in the input data. In particular, small, barely perceivable perturbations to the input data can force models to make wrong predictions with high confidence. An common defense mechanism is regularization through adversarial training which injects worst-case perturbations back into training to strengthen the decision boundaries, and to reduce overfitting. In this context, we perform an investigation of 3x3 convolution filters that form in adversarially-trained models. Filters are extracted from 71 public models of the linf-R…
Institute of Mechatronic Systems, Leibniz Universität Hannover（汉诺威莱布尼茨大学机电系统研究所）
We present deformable unsupervised medical image registration using a randomly-initialized deep convolutional neural network (CNN) as regularization prior. Conventional registration methods predict a transformation by minimizing dissimilarities between an image pair. The minimization is usually regularized with manually engineered priors, which limits the potential of the registration. By learning transformation priors from a large dataset, CNNs have achieved great success in deformable registration. However, learned methods are restricted to domain-specific data and the required amounts of me…
In this paper we present a method for building boundary refinement and regularization in satellite images using a fully convolutional neural network trained with a combination of adversarial and regularized losses. Compared to a pure Mask R-CNN model, the overall algorithm can achieve equivalent performance in terms of accuracy and completeness. However, unlike Mask R-CNN that produces irregular footprints, our framework generates regularized and visually pleasing building boundaries which are beneficial in many applications.
