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Support vector machine (SVM) active learning is one popular and successful technique for relevance feedback in content-based image retrieval (CBIR). Despite the success, conventional SVM active learning has two main drawbacks. First, the performance of SVM is usually limited by the number of labeled examples. It often suffers a poor performance for the small-sized labeled examples, which is the case in relevance feedback. Second, conventional approaches do not take into account the redundancy among examples, and could select multiple examples that are similar (or even identical). In this work, we propose a novel scheme for explicitly addressing the drawbacks. It first learns a kernel function from a mixture of labeled and unlabeled data, and therefore alleviates the problem of small-sized training data. The kernel will then be used for a batch mode active learning method to identify the most informative and diverse examples via a min-max framework. Two novel algorithms are proposed to solve the related combinatorial optimization: the first approach approximates the problem into a quadratic program, and the second solves the combinatorial optimization approximately by a greedy algorithm that exploits the merits of submodular functions. Extensive experiments with image retrieval using both natural photo images and medical images show that the proposed algorithms are significantly more effective than the state-of-the-art approaches. A demo is available at http://msm.cais.ntu.edu.sg/LSCBIR/. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.3.3 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Information Search and Retrieval; H.4.0 [Information Systems Applications]: General; 1.2.6 [Artificial Intelligence] General Terms: Algorithms, Design, Experimentation, Performance Additional Key Words and Phrases: Content-based image retrieval, support vector machines, active learning, semisupervised learning, batch mode active learning, human-computer interaction ACM Reference Format: Hoi, S. C. H., Jin, R., Zhu, J., and Lyu, M. R. 2009. Semisupervised SVM batch mode active learning with applications to image retrieval. ACM Trans. Inform. Syst. 27, 3, Article 16 (May 2009), 29 pages. DOI = 10.1145/1508850.1508854 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1508850.1508854

Despite the success of stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) algorithms in solving large-scale problems, their stochastic gradient complexity often scales linearly with data size and is expensive for huge data. Accordingly, we propose a hybrid stochastic-deterministic minibatch proximal gradient (HSDMPG) algorithm for strongly convex problems with linear prediction structure, e.g., least squares and logistic/softmax regression. HSDMPG enjoys improved computational complexity that is data-size-independent for large-scale problems. It iteratively samples an evolving minibatch of individual losses to estimate the original problem, and can efficiently minimize the sampled subproblems. For strongly convex loss of $n$ n components, HSDMPG attains an $\epsilon$ ε -optimization-error within $\mathcal {O} \left(\kappa \log ^{\zeta +1}\left(\frac{1}{\epsilon }\right)\frac{1}{\epsilon }\bigwedge n\log ^{\zeta }\left(\frac{1}{\epsilon }\right)\right)$ O κ log ζ + 1 1 ε 1 ε ⋀ n log ζ 1 ε stochastic gradient evaluations, where $\kappa$ κ is condition number, $\zeta =1$ ζ = 1 for quadratic loss and $\zeta =2$ ζ = 2 for generic loss. For large-scale problems, our complexity outperforms those of SVRG-type algorithms with/without dependence on data size. Particularly, when $\epsilon =\mathcal {O}(1/\sqrt{n})$ ε = O (1 / n) which matches the intrinsic excess error of a learning model and is sufficient for generalization, our complexity for quadratic and generic losses is respectively $\mathcal {O} (n^{0.5}\log ^{2}(n))$ O (n 0. 5 log 2 (n)) and $\mathcal {O} (n^{0.5}\log ^{3}(n))$ O (n 0. 5 log 3 (n)) , which for the first time achieves optimal generalization in less than a single pass over data. Besides, we extend HSDMPG to online strongly convex problems and prove its higher efficiency over the prior algorithms. Numerical results demonstrate the computational advantages of HSDMPG. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robust regression techniques are critical to fitting data with noise in real-world applications. Most previous work of robust kernel regression is usually formulated into a dual form, which is then solved by some quadratic program solver consequently. In this correspondence, we propose a new formulation for robust regularized kernel regression under the theoretical framework of regularization networks and then tackle the optimization problem directly in the primal. We show that the primal and dual approaches are equivalent to achieving similar regression performance, but the primal formulation is more efficient and easier to be implemented than the dual one. Different from previous work, our approach also optimizes the bias term. In addition, we show that the proposed solution can be easily extended to other noise-reliable loss function, including the Huber-[member of] insensitive loss function. Finally, we conduct a set of experiments on both artificial and real data sets, in which promising results show that the proposed method is effective and more efficient than traditional approaches. Index Terms--Kernel regression, regularized least squares (RLS), robust estimator, support vector machine (SVM).

Relevance feedback has emerged as a powerful tool to boost the retrieval performance in content-based image retrieval (CBIR). In the past, most research efforts in this field have focused on designing effective algorithms for traditional relevance feedback. Given that a CBIR system can collect and store users' relevance feedback information in a history log, an image retrieval system should be able to take advantage of the log data of users' feedback to enhance its retrieval performance. In this paper, we propose a unified framework for log-based relevance feedback that integrates the Tog of feedback data into the traditional relevance feedback schemes to learn effectively the correlation between low-level image features and high-level concepts. Given the error-prone nature of log data, we present a novel learning technique, named Soft Label Support Vector Machine, to tackle the noisy data problem. Extensive experiments are designed and conducted to evaluate the proposed algorithms based on the COREL image data set. The promising experimental results validate the effectiveness of our log-based relevance feedback scheme empirically. Index Terms--Content-based image retrieval, relevance feedback, log-based relevance feedback, tog data, user issues, semantic gap, support vector machines.

The goal of online active learning is to learn predictive models from a sequence of unlabeled data given limited label query budget. Unlike conventional online learning tasks, online active learning is considerably more challenging because of two reasons. First, it is difficult to design an effective query strategy to decide when is appropriate to query the label of an incoming instance given limited query budget. Second, it is also challenging to decide how to update the predictive models effectively whenever the true label of an instance is queried. Most existing approaches for online active learning are often based on a family of first-order online learning algorithms, which are simple and efficient but fall short in the slow convergence and sub-optimal solution in exploiting the labeled training data. To solve these issues, this paper presents a novel framework of Second-order Online Active Learning (SOAL) by fully exploiting both the first-order and second-order information. The proposed algorithms are able to achieve effective online learning efficacy, maximize the predictive accuracy, and minimize the labeling cost. To make SOAL more practical for real-world applications, especially for class-imbalanced online classification tasks (e.g., malicious web detection), we extend the SOAL framework by proposing the Cost-sensitive Second-order Online Active Learning algorithm named “SOAL [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fast approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search technique for high-dimensional feature indexing and retrieval is the crux of large-scale image retrieval. A recent promising technique is product quantization, which attempts to index high-dimensional image features by decomposing the feature space into a Cartesian product of low-dimensional subspaces and quantizing each of them separately. Despite the promising results reported, their quantization approach follows the typical hard assignment of traditional quantization methods, which may result in large quantization errors, and thus, inferior search performance. Unlike the existing approaches, in this paper, we propose a novel approach called sparse product quantization (SPQ) to encoding the high-dimensional feature vectors into sparse representation. We optimize the sparse representations of the feature vectors by minimizing their quantization errors, making the resulting representation is essentially close to the original data in practice. Experiments show that the proposed SPQ technique is not only able to compress data, but also an effective encoding technique. We obtain state-of-the-art results for ANN search on four public image datasets and the promising results of content-based image retrieval further validate the efficacy of our proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent years have witnessed a number of studies on distance metric learning to improve visual similarity search in content-based image retrieval (CBIR). Despite their successes, most existing methods on distance metric learning are limited in two aspects. First, they usually assume the target proximity function follows the family of Mahalanobis distances, which limits their capacity of measuring similarity of complex patterns in real applications. Second, they often cannot effectively handle the similarity measure of multimodal data that may originate from multiple resources. To overcome these limitations, this paper investigates an online kernel similarity learning framework for learning kernel-based proximity functions which goes beyond the conventional linear distance metric learning approaches. Based on the framework, we propose a novel online multiple kernel similarity (OMKS) learning method which learns a flexible nonlinear proximity function with multiple kernels to improve visual similarity search in CBIR. We evaluate the proposed technique for CBIR on a variety of image data sets in which encouraging results show that OMKS outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Auto face annotation, which aims to detect human faces from a facial image and assign them proper human names, is a fundamental research problem and beneficial to many real-world applications. In this work, we address this problem by investigating a retrieval-based annotation scheme of mining massive web facial images that are freely available over the Internet. In particular, given a facial image, we first retrieve the top $(n)$ similar instances from a large-scale web facial image database using content-based image retrieval techniques, and then use their labels for auto annotation. Such a scheme has two major challenges: 1) how to retrieve the similar facial images that truly match the query, and 2) how to exploit the noisy labels of the top similar facial images, which may be incorrect or incomplete due to the nature of web images. In this paper, we propose an effective Weak Label Regularized Local Coordinate Coding (WLRLCC) technique, which exploits the principle of local coordinate coding by learning sparse features, and employs the idea of graph-based weak label regularization to enhance the weak labels of the similar facial images. An efficient optimization algorithm is proposed to solve the WLRLCC problem. Moreover, an effective sparse reconstruction scheme is developed to perform the face annotation task. We conduct extensive empirical studies on several web facial image databases to evaluate the proposed WLRLCC algorithm from different aspects. The experimental results validate its efficacy. We share the two constructed databases "WDB" (714,454 images of 6,025 people) and "ADB" (126,070 images of 1,200 people) with the public. To further improve the efficiency and scalability, we also propose an offline approximation scheme (AWLRLCC) which generally maintains comparable results but significantly reduces the annotation time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feature selection is an important technique for data mining. Despite its importance, most studies of feature selection are restricted to batch learning. Unlike traditional batch learning methods, online learning represents a promising family of efficient and scalable machine learning algorithms for large-scale applications. Most existing studies of online learning require accessing all the attributes/features of training instances. Such a classical setting is not always appropriate for real-world applications when data instances are of high dimensionality or it is expensive to acquire the full set of attributes/features. To address this limitation, we investigate the problem of online feature selection (OFS) in which an online learner is only allowed to maintain a classifier involved only a small and fixed number of features. The key challenge of online feature selection is how to make accurate prediction for an instance using a small number of active features. This is in contrast to the classical setup of online learning where all the features can be used for prediction. We attempt to tackle this challenge by studying sparsity regularization and truncation techniques. Specifically, this article addresses two different tasks of online feature selection: 1) learning with full input, where an learner is allowed to access all the features to decide the subset of active features, and 2) learning with partial input, where only a limited number of features is allowed to be accessed for each instance by the learner. We present novel algorithms to solve each of the two problems and give their performance analysis. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms for online feature selection on several public data sets, and demonstrate their applications to real-world problems including image classification in computer vision and microarray gene expression analysis in bioinformatics. The encouraging results of our experiments validate the efficacy and efficiency of the proposed techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates a framework of search-based face annotation (SBFA) by mining weakly labeled facial images that are freely available on the World Wide Web (WWW). One challenging problem for search-based face annotation scheme is how to effectively perform annotation by exploiting the list of most similar facial images and their weak labels that are often noisy and incomplete. To tackle this problem, we propose an effective unsupervised label refinement (ULR) approach for refining the labels of web facial images using machine learning techniques. We formulate the learning problem as a convex optimization and develop effective optimization algorithms to solve the large-scale learning task efficiently. To further speed up the proposed scheme, we also propose a clustering-based approximation algorithm which can improve the scalability considerably. We have conducted an extensive set of empirical studies on a large-scale web facial image testbed, in which encouraging results showed that the proposed ULR algorithms can significantly boost the performance of the promising SBFA scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coupling graphs are newly introduced in this paper to meet many application needs particularly in the field of bioinformatics. A coupling graph is a two-layer graph complex, in which each node from one layer of the graph complex has at least one connection with the nodes in the other layer, and vice versa. The coupling graph model is sufficiently powerful to capture strong and inherent associations between subgraph pairs in complicated applications. The focus of this paper is on mining algorithms of frequent coupling subgraphs and bioinformatics application. Although existing frequent subgraph mining algorithms are competent to identify frequent subgraphs from a graph database, they perform poorly on frequent coupling subgraph mining because they generate many irrelevant subgraphs. We propose a novel graph transformation technique to transform a coupling graph into a generic graph. Based on the transformed coupling graphs, existing graph mining methods are then utilized to discover frequent coupling subgraphs. We prove that the transformation is precise and complete and that the restoration is reversible. Experiments carried out on a database containing 10,511 coupling graphs show that our proposed algorithm reduces the mining time very much in comparison with the existing subgraph mining algorithms. Moreover, we demonstrate the usefulness of frequent coupling subgraphs by applying our algorithm to make accurate predictions of epitopes in antibody-antigen binding. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In a distributed computing environment, peers collaboratively learn to classify concepts of interest from each other. When external changes happen and their concepts drift, the peers should adapt to avoid increase in misclassification errors. The problem of adaptation becomes more difficult when the changes are asynchronous, i.e., when peers experience drifts at different times. We address this problem by developing an ensemble approach, PINE, that combines reactive adaptation via drift detection, and proactive handling of upcoming changes via early warning and adaptation across the peers. With empirical study on simulated and real-world data sets, we show that PINE handles asynchronous concept drifts better and faster than current state-of-the-art approaches, which have been designed to work in less challenging environments. In addition, PINE is parameter insensitive and incurs less communication cost while achieving better accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Obtaining high-quality and up-to-date labeled data can be difficult in many real-world machine learning applications. Semi-supervised learning aims to improve the performance of a classifier trained with limited number of labeled data by utilizing the unlabeled ones. This paper demonstrates a way to improve the transductive SVM, which is an existing semi-supervised learning algorithm, by employing a multiview learning paradigm. Multiview learning is based on the fact that for some problems, there may exist multiple perspectives, so called views, of each data sample. For example, in text classification, the typical view contains a large number of raw content features such as term frequency, while a second view may contain a small but highly informative number of domain specific features. We propose a novel two-view transductive SVM that takes advantage of both the abundant amount of unlabeled data and their multiple representations to improve classification result. The idea is straightforward: train a classifier on each of the two views of both labeled and unlabeled data, and impose a global constraint requiring each classifier to assign the same class label to each labeled and unlabeled sample. We also incorporate manifold regularization, a kind of graph-based semi-supervised learning method into our framework. The proposed two-view transductive SVM was evaluated on both synthetic and real-life data sets. Experimental results show that our algorithm performs up to 10 percent better than a single-view learning approach, especially when the amount of labeled data is small. The other advantage of our two-view semi-supervised learning approach is its significantly improved stability, which is especially useful when dealing with noisy data in real-world applications. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Background: Prediction of B-cell epitopes from antigens is useful to understand the immune basis of antibodyantigen recognition, and is helpful in vaccine design and drug development. Tremendous efforts have been devoted to this long-studied problem, however, existing methods have at least two common limitations. One is that they only favor prediction of those epitopes with protrusive conformations, but show poor performance in dealing with planar epitopes. The other limit is that they predict all of the antigenic residues of an antigen as belonging to one single epitope even when multiple non-overlapping epitopes of an antigen exist. Results: In this paper, we propose to divide an antigen surface graph into subgraphs by using a Markov Clustering algorithm, and then we construct a classifier to distinguish these subgraphs as epitope or non-epitope subgraphs. This classifier is then taken to predict epitopes for a test antigen. On a big data set comprising 92 antigen-antibody PDB complexes, our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art epitope prediction methods, achieving 24.7% higher averaged f-score than the best existing models. In particular, our method can successfully identify those epitopes with a non-planarity which is too small to be addressed by the other models. Our method can also detect multiple epitopes whenever they exist. Conclusions: Various protrusive and planar patches at the surface of antigens can be distinguishable by using graphical models combined with unsupervised clustering and supervised learning ideas. The difficult problem of identifying multiple epitopes from an antigen can be made easied by using our subgraph approach. The outstanding residue combinations found in the supervised learning will be useful for us to form new hypothesis in future studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]