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A cross-modal image retrieval that explicitly considers semantic relationships between images and texts is proposed. Most conventional cross-modal image retrieval methods retrieve the target images by directly measuring the similarities between the candidate images and query texts in a common semantic embedding space. However, such methods tend to focus on a one-to-one correspondence between a predefined image-text pair during the training phase, and other semantically similar images and texts are ignored. By considering the many-to-many correspondences between semantically similar images and texts, a common embedding space is constructed to assure semantic relationships, which allows users to accurately find more images that are related to the input query texts. Thus, in this paper, we propose a cross-modal image retrieval method that considers semantic relationships between images and texts. The proposed method calculates the similarities between texts as semantic similarities to acquire the relationships. Then, we introduce a loss function that explicitly constructs the many-to-many correspondences between semantically similar images and texts from their semantic relationships. We also propose an evaluation metric to assess whether each method can construct an embedding space considering the semantic relationships. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms conventional methods in terms of this newly proposed metric.

A common belief in designing deep autoencoders (AEs), a type of unsupervised neural network, is that a bottleneck is required to prevent learning the identity function. Learning the identity function renders the AEs useless for anomaly detection. In this work, we challenge this limiting belief and investigate the value of non-bottlenecked AEs. The bottleneck can be removed in two ways: (1) overparameterising the latent layer, and (2) introducing skip connections. However, limited works have reported on the use of one of the ways. For the first time, we carry out extensive experiments covering various combinations of bottleneck removal schemes and datasets using variants of Bayesian AEs. In addition, we propose the infinitely-wide AEs as an extreme example of non-bottlenecked AEs. Their improvement over the baseline implies learning the identity function is not trivial as previously assumed. Moreover, we find that non-bottlenecked architectures (highest AUROC=0.905) can outperform their bottlenecked counterparts (highest AUROC=0.714) on a recent benchmark of CIFAR (inliers) vs SVHN (anomalies), among other tasks, shedding light on the potential of developing non-bottlenecked AEs for improving anomaly detection.

Distress image retrieval for infrastructure maintenance via self-trained deep metric learning using experts’ knowledge is proposed in this paper. Since engineers take multiple images of a single distress part for inspection of road structures, it is necessary to construct a similar distress image retrieval method considering the input of multiple images to support determination of the level of deterioration. Thus, the construction of an image retrieval method while selecting an effective input from multiple images is described in this paper. The proposed method performs deep metric learning by using a small number of effective images labeled by experts’ knowledge with information about their effectiveness and a large number of unlabeled images via a self-training approach. Specifically, an end-to-end learning approach that performs retraining of the model by assigning pseudo-labels to these unlabeled images according to the output confidence of the model is achieved. Thus, the proposed method can select an effective image from multiple images that are input at the retrieval as a query image. This is the main contribution of this paper. As a result, the proposed method realizes highly accurate retrieval of similar distress images considering the actual situation of inspection in which multiple images of a distress part are input.

Artificial intelligence shows promise for solving many practical societal problems in areas such as healthcare and transportation. However, the current mechanisms for AI model diffusion such as Github code repositories, academic project webpages, and commercial AI marketplaces have some limitations; for example, a lack of monetization methods, model traceability, and model auditabilty. In this work, we sketch guidelines for a new AI diffusion method based on a decentralized online marketplace. We consider the technical, economic, and regulatory aspects of such a marketplace including a discussion of solutions for problems in these areas. Finally, we include a comparative analysis of several current AI marketplaces that are already available or in development. We find that most of these marketplaces are centralized commercial marketplaces with relatively few models.

Machine learning methods have achieved good performance and been widely applied in various real-world applications. They can learn the model adaptively and be better fit for special requirements of different tasks. Generally, a good machine learning system is composed of plentiful training data, a good model training process, and an accurate inference. Many factors can affect the performance of the machine learning process, among which the diversity of the machine learning process is an important one. The diversity can help each procedure to guarantee a total good machine learning: diversity of the training data ensures that the training data can provide more discriminative information for the model, diversity of the learned model (diversity in parameters of each model or diversity among different base models) makes each parameter/model capture unique or complement information and the diversity in inference can provide multiple choices each of which corresponds to a specific plausible local optimal result. Even though the diversity plays an important role in machine learning process, there is no systematical analysis of the diversification in machine learning system. In this paper, we systematically summarize the methods to make data diversification, model diversification, and inference diversification in the machine learning process, respectively. In addition, the typical applications where the diversity technology improved the machine learning performance have been surveyed, including the remote sensing imaging tasks, machine translation, camera relocalization, image segmentation, object detection, topic modeling, and others. Finally, we discuss some challenges of the diversity technology in machine learning and point out some directions in future work., Comment: Accepted by IEEE Access

When a multi-sensor data fusion system is used to handle a classification problem, it is necessary to incorporate the reliability coefficients of all the sensors into the fusion process. Within the framework of evidence theory, this paper proposes a new method for evaluating the reliability coefficient of a sensor based on the training data. In this method, the distance between power-set-distribution betting commitments is used to quantify the dissimilarity between the sensor reading and the reality, which can be served as a one-sided discounting factor. Then, the optimization approach is put forward to obtain an all-sided discounting factor from plenty of one-sided discounting factors. The advantages of the proposed method are analyzed comparatively. Numerical examples are also presented to demonstrate its performance by comparing it with other supervised evaluation methods.