With the maturing of deep learning systems, trustworthiness is becoming increasingly important for model assessment. We understand trustworthiness as the combination of explainability and robustness. Generative classifiers (GCs) are a promising class of models that are said to naturally accomplish these qualities. However, this has mostly been demonstrated on simple datasets such as MNIST and CIFAR in the past. In this work, we firstly develop an architecture and training scheme that allows GCs to operate on a more relevant level of complexity for practical computer vision, namely the ImageNet challenge. Secondly, we demonstrate the immense potential of GCs for trustworthy image classification. Explainability and some aspects of robustness are vastly improved compared to feed-forward models, even when the GCs are just applied naively. While not all trustworthiness problems are solved completely, we observe that GCs are a highly promising basis for further algorithms and modifications. We release our trained model for download in the hope that it serves as a starting point for other generative classification tasks, in much the same way as pretrained ResNet architectures do for discriminative classification.
Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；Institute for Infocomm Research（资讯通信研究院）；Australia National University（澳大利亚国立大学）
Most classifiers rely on discriminative boundaries that separate instances of each class from everything else. We argue that discriminative boundaries are counter-intuitive as they define semantics by what-they-are-not; and should be replaced by generative classifiers which define semantics by what-they-are. Unfortunately, generative classifiers are significantly less accurate. This may be caused by the tendency of generative models to focus on easy to model semantic generative factors and ignore non-semantic factors that are important but difficult to model. We propose a new generative model …
Measurement Geometry and Design for Trustworthy Generative Inverse Problems
Center for Advanced Medical Computing and Analysis, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School（先进医学计算与分析中心，麻省总医院和哈佛医学院）；School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University（工程与应用科学学院，哈佛大学）
Joint Energy-based Model (JEM) of Grathwohl et al. shows that a standard softmax classifier can be reinterpreted as an energy-based model (EBM) for the joint distribution p(x,y); the resulting model can be optimized to improve calibration, robustness, and out-of-distribution detection, while generating samples rivaling the quality of recent GAN-based approaches. However, the softmax classifier that JEM exploits is inherently discriminative and its latent feature space is not well formulated as probabilistic distributions, which may hinder its potential for image generation and incur training i…
Training adversarially robust discriminative (i.e., softmax) classifier has been the dominant approach to robust classification. Building on recent work on adversarial training (AT)-based generative models, we investigate using AT to learn unnormalized class-conditional density models and then performing generative robust classification. Our result shows that, under the condition of similar model capacities, the generative robust classifier achieves comparable performance to a baseline softmax robust classifier when the test data is clean or when the test perturbation is of limited size, and m…
Recently, some works found an interesting phenomenon that adversarially robust classifiers can generate good images comparable to generative models. We investigate this phenomenon from an energy perspective and provide a novel explanation. We reformulate adversarial example generation, adversarial training, and image generation in terms of an energy function. We find that adversarial training contributes to obtaining an energy function that is flat and has low energy around the real data, which is the key for generative capability. Based on our new understanding, we further propose a better ad…
Providing a human-understandable explanation of classifiers' decisions has become imperative to generate trust in their use for day-to-day tasks. Although many works have addressed this problem by generating visual explanation maps, they often provide noisy and inaccurate results forcing the use of heuristic regularization unrelated to the classifier in question. In this paper, we propose a new general perspective of the visual explanation problem overcoming these limitations. We show that visual explanation can be produced as the difference between two generated images obtained via two specif…
Thoracic diseases are very serious health problems that plague a large number of people. Chest X-ray is currently one of the most popular methods to diagnose thoracic diseases, playing an important role in the healthcare workflow. However, reading the chest X-ray images and giving an accurate diagnosis remain challenging tasks for expert radiologists. With the success of deep learning in computer vision, a growing number of deep neural network architectures were applied to chest X-ray image classification. However, most of the previous deep neural network classifiers were based on deterministi…
National University of Ireland Galway（爱尔兰国立大学戈尔韦分校）
One of the most interesting challenges in Artificial Intelligence is to train conditional generators which are able to provide labeled adversarial samples drawn from a specific distribution. In this work, a new framework is presented to train a deep conditional generator by placing a classifier in parallel with the discriminator and back propagate the classification error through the generator network. The method is versatile and is applicable to any variations of Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) implementation, and also gives superior results compared to similar methods.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) receive great attentions recently due to its excellent performance in image generation, transformation, and super-resolution. However, GAN has rarely been studied and trained for classification, leading that the generated images may not be appropriate for classification. In this paper, we propose a novel Generative Adversarial Classifier (GAC) particularly for low-resolution Handwriting Character Recognition. Specifically, involving additionally a classifier in the training process of normal GANs, GAC is calibrated for learning suitable structures and rest…
Perturbation-based explanation methods often measure the contribution of an input feature to an image classifier's outputs by heuristically removing it via e.g. blurring, adding noise, or graying out, which often produce unrealistic, out-of-samples. Instead, we propose to integrate a generative inpainter into three representative attribution methods to remove an input feature. Our proposed change improved all three methods in (1) generating more plausible counterfactual samples under the true data distribution; (2) being more accurate according to three metrics: object localization, deletion, …
AZAD Research Lab（AZAD研究实验室）；Sweden（瑞典（注：此处Sweden为国家，非机构，根据要求应忽略。但原HTML中“Affiliation: Sweden”可能是笔误或格式错误，若仅保留明确的机构名“AZAD Research Lab”）。修正后应为：{）
Facial expressions are a form of non-verbal communication that humans perform seamlessly for meaningful transfer of information. Most of the literature addresses the facial expression recognition aspect however, with the advent of Generative Models, it has become possible to explore the affect space in addition to mere classification of a set of expressions. In this article, we propose a generative model architecture which robustly generates a set of facial expressions for multiple character identities and explores the possibilities of generating complex expressions by combining the simple one…
We present an analysis of predictive uncertainty based out-of-distribution detection for different approaches to estimate various models' epistemic uncertainty and contrast it with extreme value theory based open set recognition. While the former alone does not seem to be enough to overcome this challenge, we demonstrate that uncertainty goes hand in hand with the latter method. This seems to be particularly reflected in a generative model approach, where we show that posterior based open set recognition outperforms discriminative models and predictive uncertainty based outlier rejection, rais…
Denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) are a recent family of generative models that achieve state-of-the-art results. In order to obtain class-conditional generation, it was suggested to guide the diffusion process by gradients from a time-dependent classifier. While the idea is theoretically sound, deep learning-based classifiers are infamously susceptible to gradient-based adversarial attacks. Therefore, while traditional classifiers may achieve good accuracy scores, their gradients are possibly unreliable and might hinder the improvement of the generation results. Recent work dis…
University of Tübingen（蒂宾根大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Norwegian University of Science and Technology（挪威科技大学）
The tremendous success of generative models in recent years raises the question whether they can also be used to perform classification. Generative models have been used as adversarially robust classifiers on simple datasets such as MNIST, but this robustness has not been observed on more complex datasets like CIFAR-10. Additionally, on natural image datasets, previous results have suggested a trade-off between the likelihood of the data and classification accuracy. In this work, we investigate score-based generative models as classifiers for natural images. We show that these models not only …
Models that are learned from real-world data are often biased because the data used to train them is biased. This can propagate systemic human biases that exist and ultimately lead to inequitable treatment of people, especially minorities. To characterize bias in learned classifiers, existing approaches rely on human oracles labeling real-world examples to identify the "blind spots" of the classifiers; these are ultimately limited due to the human labor required and the finite nature of existing image examples. We propose a simulation-based approach for interrogating classifiers using generati…
University of Georgia（佐治亚大学）；Clemson University（克莱姆森大学）
Classification using supervised learning requires annotating a large amount of classes-balanced data for model training and testing. This has practically limited the scope of applications with supervised learning, in particular deep learning. To address the issues associated with limited and imbalanced data, this paper introduces a sample-efficient co-supervised learning paradigm (SEC-CGAN), in which a conditional generative adversarial network (CGAN) is trained alongside the classifier and supplements semantics-conditioned, confidence-aware synthesized examples to the annotated data during th…
Generative Adversarial Nets (GANs) have shown promise in image generation and semi-supervised learning (SSL). However, existing GANs in SSL have two problems: (1) the generator and the discriminator (i.e. the classifier) may not be optimal at the same time; and (2) the generator cannot control the semantics of the generated samples. The problems essentially arise from the two-player formulation, where a single discriminator shares incompatible roles of identifying fake samples and predicting labels and it only estimates the data without considering the labels. To address the problems, we prese…
Deep learning is a popular and powerful tool in computed tomography (CT) image processing such as organ segmentation, but its requirement of large training datasets remains a challenge. Even though there is a large anatomical variability for children during their growth, the training datasets for pediatric CT scans are especially hard to obtain due to risks of radiation to children. In this paper, we propose a method to conditionally synthesize realistic pediatric CT images using a new auxiliary classifier generative adversarial network (ACGAN) architecture by taking age information into accou…
UC San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
Despite their high accuracies, modern complex image classifiers cannot be trusted for sensitive tasks due to their unknown decision-making process and potential biases. Counterfactual explanations are very effective in providing transparency for these black-box algorithms. Nevertheless, generating counterfactuals that can have a consistent impact on classifier outputs and yet expose interpretable feature changes is a very challenging task. We introduce a novel method to generate causal and yet interpretable counterfactual explanations for image classifiers using pretrained generative models wi…
School of Information Technology, Monash University Malaysia（马来西亚莫纳什大学信息技术学院）
In this work, we show the generative capability of an image classifier network by synthesizing high-resolution, photo-realistic, and diverse images at scale. The overall methodology, called Synthesize-It-Classifier (STIC), does not require an explicit generator network to estimate the density of the data distribution and sample images from that, but instead uses the classifier's knowledge of the boundary to perform gradient ascent w.r.t. class logits and then synthesizes images using Gram Matrix Metropolis Adjusted Langevin Algorithm (GRMALA) by drawing on a blank canvas. During training, the …
Mixture of Gaussian-distributed Prototypes with Generative Modelling for Interpretable and Trustworthy Image Recognition
Australian Institute for Machine Learning (AIML), University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学澳大利亚机器学习研究所）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；Cornell Tech（康奈尔理工学院）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；St. Vincent’s Institute of Medical Research（圣文森特医学研究所）；Melbourne Integrative Genomics, The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学墨尔本整合基因组学中心）；St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne（墨尔本圣文森特医院）；Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP), University of Surrey（萨里大学视觉、语音与信号处理中心）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
Toshiba Corporation（东芝公司）；University of Bern（伯尔尼大学）
We propose a novel GAN training scheme that can handle any level of labeling in a unified manner. Our scheme introduces a form of artificial labeling that can incorporate manually defined labels, when available, and induce an alignment between them. To define the artificial labels, we exploit the assumption that neural network generators can be trained more easily to map nearby latent vectors to data with semantic similarities, than across separate categories. We use generated data samples and their corresponding artificial conditioning labels to train a classifier. The classifier is then used…
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）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
Conditional generative models aim to learn the underlying joint distribution of data and labels to achieve conditional data generation. Among them, the auxiliary classifier generative adversarial network (AC-GAN) has been widely used, but suffers from the problem of low intra-class diversity of the generated samples. The fundamental reason pointed out in this paper is that the classifier of AC-GAN is generator-agnostic, which therefore cannot provide informative guidance for the generator to approach the joint distribution, resulting in a minimization of the conditional entropy that decreases …
Charles River Analytics（查尔斯河分析公司）；U.S. Army CCDC C5ISR Center（美国陆军作战能力发展司令部C5ISR中心）
Recent advances in machine learning (ML) and computer vision tools have enabled applications in a wide variety of arenas such as financial analytics, medical diagnostics, and even within the Department of Defense. However, their widespread implementation in real-world use cases poses several challenges: (1) many applications are highly specialized, and hence operate in a \emph{sparse data} domain; (2) ML tools are sensitive to their training sets and typically require cumbersome, labor-intensive data collection and data labelling processes; and (3) ML tools can be extremely "black box," offeri…
University of Surrey（萨里大学）；iFlyTek-Surrey Joint Research Center on Artificial Intelligence（讯飞-萨里人工智能联合研究中心）；Samsung AI Center（三星人工智能中心）；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
Target domain pseudo-labelling has shown effectiveness in unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). However, pseudo-labels of unlabeled target domain data are inevitably noisy due to the distribution shift between source and target domains. This paper proposes a Generative model-based Noise-Robust Training method (GeNRT), which eliminates domain shift while mitigating label noise. GeNRT incorporates a Distribution-based Class-wise Feature Augmentation (D-CFA) and a Generative-Discriminative classifier Consistency (GDC), both based on the class-wise target distributions modelled by generative model…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）；University of Seoul（首尔大学）
Noisy labels are inevitable yet problematic in machine learning society. It ruins the generalization of a classifier by making the classifier over-fitted to noisy labels. Existing methods on noisy label have focused on modifying the classifier during the training procedure. It has two potential problems. First, these methods are not applicable to a pre-trained classifier without further access to training. Second, it is not easy to train a classifier and regularize all negative effects from noisy labels, simultaneously. We suggest a new branch of method, Noisy Prediction Calibration (NPC) in l…
University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies（马里兰大学高级计算机研究所）
In recent years, deep neural network approaches have been widely adopted for machine learning tasks, including classification. However, they were shown to be vulnerable to adversarial perturbations: carefully crafted small perturbations can cause misclassification of legitimate images. We propose Defense-GAN, a new framework leveraging the expressive capability of generative models to defend deep neural networks against such attacks. Defense-GAN is trained to model the distribution of unperturbed images. At inference time, it finds a close output to a given image which does not contain the adv…
Okayama University（冈山大学）；Japan Science and Technology Agency（日本科学技术振兴机构）；Rikkyo University（立教大学）；National Institute for Physiological Sciences（生理学研究所）；Araya Inc.（Araya 公司）；Keio University（庆应义塾大学）
Deep neural networks (DNNs) can accurately decode task-related information from brain activations. However, because of the nonlinearity of the DNN, the decisions made by DNNs are hardly interpretable. One of the promising approaches for explaining such a black-box system is counterfactual explanation. In this framework, the behavior of a black-box system is explained by comparing real data and realistic synthetic data that are specifically generated such that the black-box system outputs an unreal outcome. Here we introduce a novel generative DNN (counterfactual activation generator, CAG) that…
We propose a unified game-theoretical framework to perform classification and conditional image generation given limited supervision. It is formulated as a three-player minimax game consisting of a generator, a classifier and a discriminator, and therefore is referred to as Triple Generative Adversarial Network (Triple-GAN). The generator and the classifier characterize the conditional distributions between images and labels to perform conditional generation and classification, respectively. The discriminator solely focuses on identifying fake image-label pairs. Under a nonparametric assumptio…
Generative models have achieved state-of-the-art performance for the zero-shot learning problem, but they require re-training the classifier every time a new object category is encountered. The traditional semantic embedding approaches, though very elegant, usually do not perform at par with their generative counterparts. In this work, we propose an unified framework termed GenClass, which integrates the generator with the classifier for efficient zero-shot learning, thus combining the representative power of the generative approaches and the elegance of the embedding approaches. End-to-end tr…
Despite the surge of deep learning in the past decade, some users are skeptical to deploy these models in practice due to their black-box nature. Specifically, in the medical space where there are severe potential repercussions, we need to develop methods to gain confidence in the models' decisions. To this end, we propose a novel medical imaging generative adversarial framework, medXGAN (medical eXplanation GAN), to visually explain what a medical classifier focuses on in its binary predictions. By encoding domain knowledge of medical images, we are able to disentangle anatomical structure an…
University of Kaiserslautern（凯泽斯劳滕大学）；German Research Center for AI (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心 (DFKI)）；Insiders Technologies GmbH（Insiders Technologies有限公司）；University of Fribourg（弗里堡大学）
In this work, we present the Text Conditioned Auxiliary Classifier Generative Adversarial Network, (TAC-GAN) a text to image Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) for synthesizing images from their text descriptions. Former approaches have tried to condition the generative process on the textual data; but allying it to the usage of class information, known to diversify the generated samples and improve their structural coherence, has not been explored. We trained the presented TAC-GAN model on the Oxford-102 dataset of flowers, and evaluated the discriminability of the generated images with Inc…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术院）；Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology（三星综合技术院）；Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms（蒙特利尔学习算法研究所）
In this paper, we propose a Generative Translation Classification Network (GTCN) for improving visual classification accuracy in settings where classes are visually similar and data is scarce. For this purpose, we propose joint learning from a scratch to train a classifier and a generative stochastic translation network end-to-end. The translation network is used to perform on-line data augmentation across classes, whereas previous works have mostly involved domain adaptation. To help the model further benefit from this data-augmentation, we introduce an adaptive fade-in loss and a quadruplet …
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are often criticized for being susceptible to adversarial attacks. Most successful defense strategies adopt adversarial training or random input transformations that typically require retraining or fine-tuning the model to achieve reasonable performance. In this work, our investigations of intermediate representations of a pre-trained DNN lead to an interesting discovery pointing to intrinsic robustness to adversarial attacks. We find that we can learn a generative classifier by statistically characterizing the neural response of an intermediate layer to clean train…
The use of Deep Learning hardware algorithms for embedded applications is characterized by challenges such as constraints on device power consumption, availability of labeled data, and limited internet bandwidth for frequent training on cloud servers. To enable low power implementations, we consider efficient bitwidth reduction and pruning for the class of Deep Learning algorithms known as Discriminative Deep Belief Networks (DDBNs) for embedded-device classification tasks. We train DDBNs with both generative and discriminative objectives under an approximate computing framework and analyze th…
Prompt Evolution for Generative AI: A Classifier-Guided Approach
School of Computer Science and Engineering (SCSE), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore（计算机科学与工程学院，南洋理工大学）；Centre for Frontier AI Research (CFAR), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore（前沿人工智能研究中心，科技研究局）；Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology (SIMTech), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore（新加坡制造技术研究所，科技研究局）
Due to the sparsity of features, noise has proven to be a great inhibitor in the classification of handwritten characters. To combat this, most techniques perform denoising of the data before classification. In this paper, we consolidate the approach by training an all-in-one model that is able to classify even noisy characters. For classification, we progressively train a classifier generative adversarial network on the characters from low to high resolution. We show that by learning the features at each resolution independently a trained model is able to accurately classify characters even i…
Building on top of the success of generative adversarial networks (GANs), conditional GANs attempt to better direct the data generation process by conditioning with certain additional information. Inspired by the most recent AC-GAN, in this paper we propose a fast-converging conditional GAN (FC-GAN). In addition to the real/fake classifier used in vanilla GANs, our discriminator has an advanced auxiliary classifier which distinguishes each real class from an extra `fake' class. The `fake' class avoids mixing generated data with real data, which can potentially confuse the classification of rea…
Scalable, Trustworthy Generative Model for Virtual Multi-Staining from H&E Whole Slide Images
Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Inserm（法国国家健康与医学研究院）；AP-HP（巴黎公共医疗集团）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；Paris Brain Institute-ICM（巴黎大脑研究所-脑研究所）；Paris Cité University（巴黎城市大学）；Necker-Enfants Malades University Hospitals（内克尔-儿童马尔代夫大学医院）；Centre de recherche sur l’inflammation（炎症研究中心）；Robert Debré University Hospitals（罗伯特德布雷大学医院）
Institute for Biomedical Informatics, University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学生物医学信息学研究所）；AGH University of Science and Technology（AGH科技大学）
Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of machine learning (ML) algorithms is crucial for determine their scope of application. Here, we introduce the DIverse and GENerative ML Benchmark (DIGEN) - a collection of synthetic datasets for comprehensive, reproducible, and interpretable benchmarking of machine learning algorithms for classification of binary outcomes. The DIGEN resource consists of 40 mathematical functions which map continuous features to discrete endpoints for creating synthetic datasets. These 40 functions were discovered using a heuristic algorithm designed to maximize the …
We study unsupervised learning by developing introspective generative modeling (IGM) that attains a generator using progressively learned deep convolutional neural networks. The generator is itself a discriminator, capable of introspection: being able to self-evaluate the difference between its generated samples and the given training data. When followed by repeated discriminative learning, desirable properties of modern discriminative classifiers are directly inherited by the generator. IGM learns a cascade of CNN classifiers using a synthesis-by-classification algorithm. In the experiments, …
