Multi-instance learning (MIL) has demonstrated its usefulness in many real-world image applications in recent years. However, two critical challenges prevent one from effectively using MIL in practice. First, existing MIL methods routinely model the predictive targets using the instances of input images, but rarely utilize an input image as a whole. As a result, the useful information conveyed by the holistic representation of an input image could be potentially lost. Second, the varied numbers of the instances of the input images in a data set make it infeasible to use traditional learning models that can only deal with single-vector inputs. To tackle these two challenges, in this paper we propose a novel image representation learning method that can integrate the local patches (the instances) of an input image (the bag) and its holistic representation into one single-vector representation. Our new method first learns a projection to preserve both global and local consistencies of the instances of an input image. It then projects the holistic representation of the same image into the learned subspace for information enrichment. Taking into account the content and characterization variations in natural scenes and photos, we develop an objective that maximizes the ratio of the summations of a number of L1 -norm distances, which is difficult to solve in general. To solve our objective, we derive a new efficient non-greedy iterative algorithm and rigorously prove its convergence. Promising results in extensive experiments have demonstrated improved performances of our new method that validate its effectiveness.
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Preserving Composition and Crystal Structures of Chemical Compounds in Atomic Embedding
Representation learning is popular for its power of learning latent feature vectors (i.e., embeddings) to represent data units from a complex type of data (e.g., languages, networks, behaviors). The embeddings preserve specific structure and thus improve the performance of predictive models. In this work, we develop a new representation learning method in the chemistry domain. Given a large set of compounds of inorganic crystals, the method learns the embeddings of atoms so that the predictive models can place them into the periodic table correctly. Our method preserves not only the compounds' compositions but also their structures such as crystal system, point group, and space group. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, compared to the state-of-the-art method (in PNAS 2018). One interesting result is that given 20 atoms with known positions in the periodic table, our method can achieve an accuracy of 0.70, while the baseline makes only 0.54, on filling the remaining 14 hidden atoms into the table. This shows that the atomic embeddings we generated preserve useful information and can be extended for scientific exploration.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1652492
- PAR ID:
- 10136393
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Conference on Big Data
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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